Ghosts of WKU
Spooky sightings and haunted happenings
LEGENDS OF THE UNEXPLAINED have, for decades, haunted several buildings on the campus of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.
Tamela Williams Smith, a retired staff member and former staff regent at Western, first heard accounts of paranormal happenings as a freshman at WKU in the mid-1980s, but later experienced her own close encounter.
On her way to earning a doctorate in education, she served for a time with the campus police on the midnight shift. One night while showing a new officer around Potter Hall, a dormitory that was empty at the time, the two heard a loud banging noise from a room on the first floor, and went to investigate. As Smith reached for her key to unlock the door, the other officer said the doorknob was moving.
“We stood there with a flashlight shining on it and saw it rattle again—like someone was on the other side moving it,” Smith recalls. “We went in, certain there was someone in the room. But the room was empty; nothing to account for the doorknob moving, or the banging noise. We decided to leave!”
Another employee told of hearing approaching footsteps and what sounded like keys jingling in a hallway about 1 a.m. in the same building. He called out twice, assuming it might be a campus police officer, but got no answer. The hallway was empty. A female voice has been clearly heard in the building when no one was there. And pennies have mysteriously appeared as though from nowhere.
Over the years, numerous witnesses have told of ghost-like figures sitting or walking in Van Meter Auditorium, Smith says, “and they don’t realize it isn’t a person until it vanishes.” A student worker saw a shadowy male figure by the window well in the basement of the Craig Administrative Center, and there are tales of ghostly visitors in Raymond Cravens Library and McCormack Hall.
Since 2018, Smith, a consumer-member of Warren RECC, has been collecting firsthand stories of eerie phenomena from more than 100 alumni, faculty and staff.
Among the recent mysteries, one was shared by a young staffer in Potter Hall who stopped by her office with her 3-year-old son after office hours one evening to take care of some unfinished paper work. When she had difficulty opening an interior door, the child suggested that she ask for help from the woman with the ponytail he’d seen in her office. The mother, knowing that she and her son were alone, left the building.
Students and hall directors in some dorms have reported elevators moving and their doors opening when the buildings were empty. And one summer evening, while investigating a series of 911 calls from an unoccupied dorm, police received a 911 call from the room in which they were standing!
These are among the many stories in Smith’s upcoming book, which has inspired a new Hilltopper History and Haunts Tour on the WKU campus. Learn more at spookysmith.com.
