The Ghost of Sanford

    The Ghost of Sanford is a gruesome, chilling legend that has been passed down from class to class at GCSU.  A young woman hangs from the rafters, neck snapped by a self-tied rope around her neck. It’s a death so sudden, so tragic that her spirit could not bear to leave the scene, haunting the vacated third floor of Sanford Hall for a over half a decade.
     A fine story for windy October nights, but, according to history professor Dr. Robert “Bob” Wilson, an entirely inaccurate one.
    “There were all these vile stories that she had slit her wrist in the bathroom or that she hanged herself, but she took sleeping pills,” Wilson said.
    Instead of relying on hearsay and unreliable rumors, Wilson’s information comes straight from friends and classmates of the victim. In 2002, the class of 1952 gathered for their 50th class reunion. There, Wilson learned the victim was a biology senior nicknamed “Cookie.” She was also an active actress and the president of Alpha Psi Omega, the school’s theatre honor fraternity.
    During these conversations, Wilson also discovered one of Cookie’s disturbing personality traits.   
“People that knew her said she was prone to fits of depression, so I don’t wonder if she wasn’t what we would call bipolar today,” Wilson said. “In one of her depressed moods, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, or that seems to be the consensus among her classmates.”
    Wilson also learned the night of Cookie’s suicide should have been a festive one. As it was the senior dormitory at the time, Sanford was scheduled to house the senior dance. The event was unceremonially canceled after Cookie’s body was discovered lying in a bed on the empty third floor.
    “Ever sense that time, there have been people who have experienced things in Sanford,” Wilson said. “People would have these tales to tell. They would hear sounds or they’d run into cold spots. They’d say there’s something restless up there.”
    English senior Stephen Houser was one such student.
    “(My roomate and I) were trying to find a Nirvina CD, and then a big book and the Nirvina CD fell from a stack of stuff onto the ground, from arcoss the room,” Houser said. “I think it was the ghost.”
    Wilson said he used to just think that students would build up the stories and scared themselves into hearing things. That all changed when Wilson listened to what a young band member named Brandi had to say.
    “She would tell me that she could see ghosts,” Wilson said. “She would be driving to college and she would see ghosts of confederate soldiers walking along the road. I just thought that she was kind of wacky.”
    Brandi, however, was a little more gifted than Wilson gave her credit for. A short time after their first meeting, Brandi came back to Wilson and revealed she had clearly seen the Ghost of Sanford while visiting her boyfriend.
    “So a couple of weeks after that, she came to my office and I got out the 1952 yearbook and opened it up to the senior girls pictures,” Wilson said. “There are like 20 girls on each page. So I asked if she could recognize any of them because one of them was Cookie and she pointed her right out. There is just no way she could have known.”
    Wilson’s outlook on the Ghost of Sanford would further change with his own supernatural experience.
    “I didn’t see any shapes or anything, but I just felt a like there was something going through me,” Wilson said. “Of all these stories, that is the one I am most inclined to give credibility to. I don’t know that I believe in ghosts honestly, but that one, I’m just not sure what is going on there.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 20 2006. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry