Message #107683

[Keira Kensington]

Whipple Hall

Another reportedly ghostly location is Whipple Hall, which was constructed in 1882. The spectral occupant of this place is known only as the “Gray Ghost”. The upper part of the building serves as a meeting hall for the Alpha Phi Omega society, for the Eta Sigma chapter, which is a national service fraternity, and as the location of the security office. The lower part of Whipple is the meeting hall of the Pi Pi Rho Literary Society. The basement of the building is only accessible from the outside and is divided in half. One side of it was once a classroom when this was Whipple Academy, a college prep school. Strangely out of place chalkboards still remain on the walls.
 

Perhaps the most famous sighting on campus of the “Gray Ghost” occurred to a girl who was leaving a Pi Pi Rho party one night and had to retrieve something from the Alpha Phi Omega hall. She had been drinking (but later insisted that she was not drunk) before she started climbing the curved staircase. As she reached the middle of the curve of the stairs, she looked up to the top landing and saw a man standing there. He was all dressed in gray and she quickly realized that he was not a security officer. As she peered a little closer into the shadows, she also realized something else... that he had no face! She began screaming and ran back down the staircase and out of the building. Due to the noise of the party, no one heard her though and the revelers wouldn’t learn of the strange experience until later.

A room that is located on the third floor of Illinois College’s Ellis Hall is also rumored to be infested with ghosts. According to reports, no one lives there is they don’t have to. Rumor has it that a girl hanged herself in the closet there around 1986 after not getting a bid from a Literary Society. It is said that doors open and close on there own here, appliances and radios turn on and off and that windows have a habit of going up and down under their own power. Or at least that's one version of the story....

Other students and alumni of Illinois College have contacted me to say that the girl who haunts room 303 was actually a young woman named "Gail", who died of natural causes in this room. Apparently, her parents were aware that she was terminally ill when she went to school but as attending college had always been her dream, they allowed her to go anyway. She died while living in Ellis Hall and a small plaque is mounted on the door of the room in her memory. It is said that her ghost is a mischievous one, opening doors and hiding things. Local legend has it that third floor residents have often said that if they lose anything, they will ask Gail aloud to return it. The missing item is usually found a short time later.

A former student of the college, who lived for two years in Ellis Hall, wrote to tell me of experiences that she had while living below the "haunted room". She said that she often heard knocking sounds coming from the other side of the wall, even though there was nothing there. It was the outer wall of the building and there were no trees nearby.