Halloween night will stir up some fright on the UA campus from left to right. It will crawl with students out in plain sight, but what they all fear can’t be seen in the light. Will haunted stories resurface? They might.
The UA is the home to learners, entrepreneurs, future leaders … and ghosts?
Madison Brodsky, a journalism junior, attests to this claim and hopes this spooky holiday won’t lure unwelcome, undead guests back to her home.
Brodsky lives in the Hub At Tucson apartment building located adjacent to campus. Last year, the 14-floor high-rise housed a spiteful ghost who terrorized Hub residents, according to Brodsky.
“It didn’t just happen to me — I know of many other students who were talking about it, too,” she said. “People living in the Hub would wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure above them. Everyone I asked described the ghost figure the same exact way. It was really creepy.”
The Hub apartment building, which has only been up and running for a year and a half, houses more than a couple hundred students and is one of the liveliest, busiest and most popular student-oriented apartment complexes in all of Tucson, according to Brodsky.
The equation just doesn’t add up; the basically brand new high-rise that never sleeps has a ghost? Brodsky said word of the Hub ghost caught the complex like wildfire last year, increasing the keenness of residents to the paranormal.
“I never saw the figure, but other things happen in this building that I can’t explain,” said Hub resident Vivian Causevic, a neuroscience junior. She confirms the apartment complex’s strange, Halloween ghost encounters as well.
“During this time, we had an electronic toy dog that would randomly make noise,” Causevic said. “I would walk past it and it would make noise, even when the toy was off without batteries.”
After such odd situations as a battery-less dog toy barking, residents really began to believe the ghost was real, according to Causevic.
“There was a fire evacuation one night where everyone in the building was forced to go outside around 2 a.m.,” Brodsky said. “That sound is already scary enough — ‘This is an emergency, this is not a drill.’”
Brodsky said there was actually no reported fire, but she and her roommates, as well as many other fifth-floor residents, were greeted with a thick cloud of black smoke upon opening the door into the hallway from the stairwell. This inexplicable occurrence was the last straw for Brodsky.
“My roommates and I had had enough — we went to Hippie Gypsy and bought sage,” she said.
They began burning sage and leaving salt in their doorways and hallways, and their anti-ghost efforts succeeded; their apartment was the only one on the fifth floor that proceeded to be unaffected by the Hub ghost’s night terrors.
“Call me crazy, but I really don’t think that was a coincidence,” she said. “We really were the only room in the hall that didn’t see the haunted figure anymore.”
The past is the past, but has the Hub’s Halloween ghost returned to stir up more trouble?
Mia Short, a family studies sophomore, said she has experienced odd occurrences in her apartment unit throughout the whole month of October.
“Our balcony door was closed when I left with all of my roommates [one time and] we locked our front door also,” Short said. “When we came back home, the balcony was open and Tupperware was on the floor.”
Short did not live at the complex last year, but said she fully believes that Hub’s haunted friend is back and it doesn’t plan to leave anytime soon.
“It was a ghost — it’s the only way it makes sense,” Short said.
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