CJ Day
One of the University of Wyoming’s oldest halls, Knight Hall, seems to be the epicenter for the campus’s alleged paranormal activity.
“You don’t work here for long without getting the feeling that there’s something weird going on here,” says Eleanor Koehn, a student who works in the building. “I’ve seen and heard a lot of things that I can’t really explain.”
The nature of Koehn’s job means she spends a lot of time in the building at night. She says the haunting of Knight Hall has everything one would expect out of a properly haunted building; ghostly footsteps, doors opening and closing on their own, and small objects seemingly moving when no one looks at them.
Koehn also claims to have seen a black mist moving in the basement, a mist no light seemed to cut through. She was freaked out by this, and now refuses to go into the basement alone after dark.
“I’m not about to become the first murder in a horror movie,” she says. “It’s not that I think that whatever’s down there is evil, I just would rather be safe than sorry.”
An urban legend about the construction of Knight Hall traces its paranormal events to an unmarked cemetery that builders exhumed to put down Knight Hall’s foundations.
Like most urban legends, this one has a few roots. During Laramie’s early years, victims of frontier violence and vigilante justice alike often ended up in unmarked shallow graves somewhere on the lonesome prairie, which later became a part of Laramie.
When digging basements for various buildings in town, workmen in the 1930s and 40s would often come across bodies of Laramie pioneers. On April 18 1940, the Laramie Republican and Boomerang reported that workers excavating the basement of Knight Hall found a rotted casket filled with bones, clothing, and a poker chip. Over time, writers and journalists embellished the story, saying a whole cemetery had been exhumed to make way for Knight Hall.
In the same way, legends about Knight Hall’s haunting have been oversold a bit. No one in the building the Branding Iron talked to has seen the Native American woman said to roam the halls after night, or has seen a piano play without anyone touching it, or has heard war drums in the basement. Despite this, Koehn feels that the paranormal nature of Knight Hall hasn’t been completely oversold.
“There’s for sure some kind of presence or entity here,” says Koehn. “I don’t know how true these stories are, but I know I’ve seen things that no one could explain.”
