In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, join our host Noah and guest Evelyn Mendlowitz, Resident Director at Miami University of Ohio, to talk about ghost stories. What do ghost stories have to do with Residence Life, you ask? Well, let us tell you. Most, if not all college campuses have at least one ghost story, and oftentimes, these stories are clung to and repeatedly told and known. These stories, while often dark, provided important history into college campuses and can even invite students and staff alike to learn, lead, and build community together Noah and Evelyn discuss this topic, tell stories themselves, and provide advice rooted in trauma informed care and emotionally intelligent leadership for Residence Life staff to further incorporate storytelling into their regular practice.
Guest: Evelyn Mendlowitz, M.A., (she/her), Resident Director, Miami University of Ohio
Host: Noah Montague
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About ResEdChat
Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Noah Montague:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast, a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. My name is Noah Montague, and today I am your host and I use he/him/his pronouns. As you all know by now in these videos, I like to say that I’m a storyteller by trade, and that is particularly important in today’s topic, because we’re going to be talking very heavily about stories, particularly those that center the college student experience. Which again, just makes me so excited to have our guest here today.
So, today with that we’re going to be getting maybe a little bit spooky with it actually, and talk about ghost stories and campus community. Most, if not all college campuses have at least one known ghost story, and oftentimes these stories are clung to and repeatedly told and known by students and staff alike. But what do these stories maybe really mean within the campus community? How do these stories, while they’re often dark in nature, provide important history to college campuses? And when you really dive into them, how can they even invite students and staff alike to learn, lead, and build community together? Today’s guest has done a great deal of research into this topic actually, and I am thrilled to have her here with us today. I first met this individual a few years ago, and now I’m privileged to call her a friend and a colleague and just a cool human in my life. So, I’m excited to introduce her all to you today, and I’m going to let her do just that. So, if you want to take it away and introduce yourself.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, thanks, Noah. Hello, my name is Evelyn Mendlowitz. I use she/her pronouns. I am a resident director with Noah, so I have also gotten to know Noah for the past few years and also very happy to call him a friend. We kind of approached doing this podcast, this conversation together, and I thought it was a really, really cool thing and I was like, “I’ve got things to talk about. This could be a lot of fun.” So, I’m really excited to do this. Noah mentioned that I do a lot of research in terms of the macabre, the spooky, things like that and how it ties into student leadership, trauma informed care, things like that.
And the way I got involved with this is actually kind of silly. I went to ACPA in New Orleans, which is a conference in 2023, and while I was there, there was a presentation called Stories Told in the Dark, and it was an in-depth look at ghost stories. It was presented by Andrew Skelly, Sarah Weiberg, and Brittany Connor. And their presentation had me wrapped. I remember I was incredibly sick while at this conference, but I was so engaged in this presentation, because I thought it was so cool and so unique and such a fascinating topic to begin thinking about. What they had talked about really was talking about ghost stories on college campuses and why they were told. And then I wanted to run with that idea and take a further look about ghost stories being told on college campuses. Plus I’m a bit of a fan of the macabre and the silly interesting ghost story ask spooky type of conversation. So I was like, “Yes, this is really cool. I love it.”
Noah Montague:
And as we were just talking about what we could discuss together, just this immediately came to mind to get to share your thoughts and your experience and their research as well a little bit further in this space. I guess then to get us going and start talking about these ghost stories, why, Evelyn, why do you think that ghost stories are so common on college campuses, and what maybe is a well-known ghost story from an institution that you have worked at to get us going?
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Ghost stories on college campuses are so, so, so common, and I think it’s just because people want to learn about where they’re living, where they’re spending a lot of their time. And I think it’s very natural that people are curious about the place that they are, especially because most colleges are hundreds of years old, whether it be the institution as an idea, or the institution itself being there for so long. I think people look and want to find out more. And a way that that’s just naturally come up is ghost stories. I think a lot of people definitely lean towards ghost stories as a way to learn about the history about wherever they are. Whether that history is true or maybe warped a little bit within that story is really going to depend on the ghost story in general.
I’m working currently at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and there are several well-known ghost stories here on campus. One of the most discussed ghost stories here is about Helen Peabody. And Helen was the, there’s been discussion about whether she was a principal of seminary, exactly who she was, but she worked at the women’s college when part of this campus was separated. This campus used to be a women’s college on one side, so on our western side of campus, and the other side is Miami University, and then there was a women’s college. When there was that separation, it was back in the 1800s, Helen was often frustrated with men from Miami University coming onto the women’s campus and being in the residence hall rooms in the buildings, things like that. It’s been said that when she died she is haunting Peabody Hall, which is the hall that was named after her on that western side of campus.
When men are said to be in that building now they hear scratching, they see her, they get just cold feelings, never wanting to be near her and trying to avoid Peabody at all costs. I think that’s probably one of the most well-known ones that we have here. And then further into this discussion I can talk more about the implications of what that story does, but that’s probably the most well-known one.
Noah Montague:
Definitely. In my experience too Helen is definitely the most well-known present story that I have seen in the schools that I’ve worked at. That said, I am aware, at one of the buildings on my campus currently students do claim to hear things and claim to see things. I run through residence halls, and one of them is from 1825 is when that building was built. And students will often say that they had something change in that something might be moved when they weren’t noticing it. Or maybe their clock was set for them and something of that nature, and that comes up a good amount. I actually had students think that I lived in the attic of that building for a very long time and I had to walk them through the fact that I didn’t. And that was a whole conversation, because I think I had three students in my office insisting that I lived in the building that I did not even live in.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
It has gone to such lengths where people requested to move out of buildings that they believe have been-
Noah Montague:
Definitely.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
… haunted by some type of presence, for sure. There’s been cases of people wanting to be moved because of, like you said, things moving, timers going off. I know somebody said that they woke up with scratches on their arms and they were like, “It was not from me. I don’t know what happened.” So, it is very, very common for that kind of question to be brought up by residents.
Noah Montague:
And whether you believe in ghosts or not, students have come to me to talk about these things and have these conversations. I know in my own undergrad we didn’t have ghost stories public in the same way that we have here at Miami currently, but it was very well known that our residence halls that I lived in and I was an RA and were built by a prison designer and the overlap between that. There’s a photo, a painting of a woman on the wall in my residence hall that I was an RA in in undergrad, almost all the way up on the ceiling. You couldn’t read it. You could see that it was a plaque, but we often would talk about that woman being the spirit of the building. And that was an ongoing almost space that people connected over, which I think is part of going into my next question a little bit as well with that students are having experiences that they then come to talk about and talk about with each other. What do you think that ghost stories tell us about campus culture, if anything?
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
I think they tell us a lot about campus culture, about what the campus really values and how it can use the campus history to involve students if it’s being used to involve students at all. I’m going to bring back Helen Peabody. Something done on this campus is the fact that they’ll create Helen’s Haunted Hall and using the story of Helen to create an engaging kind of haunted house for students to walk around in. And I think that is really telling about what’s being valued and how ghost stories can be used on a college campus to engage people, bring people in, create something more interactive. But I think it’s also tricky, because one of the big parts of the research that I really enjoy doing and talking about is how ghost stories, yes, they’re interesting, and yes, they’re great to listen to, but they can also bring up a lot of trauma. They can also bring up a lot of really difficult conversations, can create some negative light on some different things.
So, I think it’s kind of a double-edged sword in fact, because yes, we want to include people and we’re going to use these stories to bring people in and have conversations, but what are those conversations actually talking about? In terms of Helen, those conversations are like, “Oh yes, let’s go walk through this haunted house, because she was this person that haunted and is really mean and things like that.” But that’s if the story is told in a certain perspective. If the story is told in a different perspective it could be that she was protecting her students because she was wary of these men coming onto the campus and she was really worried about her women-identifying students. And I think it’s really important that when we think about ghost stories on campuses, the way that they’re being told in order to create that engagement is very important, and a lot of the times not really discussed.
Noah Montague:
And I think that is huge, and I love that you’re bringing that up here, because how we talk about any story, especially in the residence halls with students who are living here is so crucial in how they experience these things is massive to think about in that space. Because it is how are these stories being told then determines how students are going to retell them and interact with them and how they are going to build community or not. You brought up students wanting to leave a residence hall due to something that they experienced or that they believed in or didn’t, and what that looks like when that trauma is not considered in that conversation I think is so huge, and I’m grateful for you bringing that in. I think that you kind of touched on this idea a little bit already and how ghost stories or campus legends can actually build community in residence halls, but I wanted to see if you had anything else that you wanted to share there that you’ve seen?
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
I think one of my favorite memories from when I was an undergrad is I went to Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania for undergrad and one of the residence halls that I lived in, I lived in Montour Hall my sophomore year, and we firmly believed there was a ghost. There wasn’t any ghost stories for that hall, but as a group of people we kind of made one up to explain some of the things that were going on. I mean, that building was older, there was some crickety-
Noah Montague:
Older is a great way to put it.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, it had character, but there were some just creepy things in the basement, which is where our laundry was. I remember the elevator doors would open and shut with no explanation, things like that. And because there wasn’t an actual ghost story, we made one up to fit and answer the things that we were scared of.
I remember my friend and I, or my roommate and I would go into the basement to do our laundry, and in order to feel more safe we would have a conversation with this ghost that we fully made up. Because there wasn’t an actual story there, but we were scared. So, we made up a ghost, his name was Reggie, and we would talk to Reggie when we would go do laundry, if something in our room just mysteriously made sounds, something like that. But in order to explain our anxiety and our fears we created a friendly ghost to kind of make us feel better about the place that we are in. So, whether a ghost story was already there and community develops around it, ghost stories can also be created by the community to make them feel more comfortable and make them feel more safe, secure, happy, whatever you want to say, but it makes them feel better and it can explain something that might not be there or whether it’s there.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I think that is so, so, so cool, because something that I think about a lot is the nature of people and creating stories to create understanding and what that looks like, especially in college spaces as students are coming in and they’re figuring themselves out in so many ways, especially in the residence halls and having that space to be like, “Okay, this is something we’re all experiencing. Let’s name it Reggie. Let’s figure out what we’re dealing with and what we’re looking like.”
I know that I’ve had a few students, not exactly the same type of situation and that they did not, they didn’t name the ghost or the like-minded experience or story in that capacity. But again, those several different students coming into my office to ask me that question of, “You live in the attic, because we hear people moving around, we hear this.” And it is a little bit comical, but it also is students talking and building this idea of what they’re experiencing in their living space and being like, “Okay, that makes sense that this is the case. Let’s work with that and create that space.” Especially in that time of transition where things kind of need to make sense as they’re figuring out college and figuring out living in a new place, having a roommate exploring that different experience. And if something doesn’t make sense, maybe having those stories can be helpful for students.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the biggest reasons that ghost stories started becoming so common throughout all of time. We were experiencing and contextualizing ghost stories and getting all of that information starting way, way early on first century AD we’re getting ghost stories to try and explain what’s going on, whether that’s meaning of life, whether it’s just there’s some weird occurrence that we need an answer for, things like that. We see ghosts and ghost stories and those kind of creative minds throughout all of time. Whether we see that in actual ghost stories, maybe like Gothic fiction, things like that is we see people looking for a way to explain things and to portray lessons to get us answers about the afterlife. Anything along those lines, we’re seeing ghost stories create that.
Noah Montague:
I think that brings me pretty perfectly into another question. So, thank you for setting up my transition pretty well.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, you.
Noah Montague:
Thinking about that and the history piece of it all. And part of our role in residence life, as you know and as those listening know, is education and being educators and providing that space for students to kind of build that understanding of things that maybe previously they didn’t understand. And college is such a heavy, heavy time of transition and new experiences and confusion and learning who people are. So, it’s almost natural that students would cling to stories to figure out ways to make sense of it all. But what skills maybe would you offer to staff that they can build to help facilitate that programming and that education around legend history and storytelling in and of itself?
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
When students come into college, I think something that they’re looking for is for like-minded folks to share their passion with. I think if you’re looking to do programming, if you’re looking to have conversations about this, whether you’re skilled at storytelling, or maybe it’s something that you’re working on, or even if you are really nervous about speaking to large groups, having a passion and an interest in this type or of really any type of anything. Anything that you are passionate about, excited about, anything like that I think is going to bring people in, and those people are going to be interested in the things that you are interested in.
When I presented, so this presentation is really what we’re talking about today is I developed a presentation called Miami and the Macabre and it talks about ghost stories and campus culture. And I knew that this is something that I was passionate about and I was like, “I really hope people are going to find this interesting, but I have no idea.”
I presented it at a summit just to kind of see if there was going to be any interest, any interest in it, and the people that were like, “Yes, this kind of topic is what I want to learn about,” they’re the ones that came to me. And I think it’s really important that if people are looking to program about storytelling, program about ghost stories or even just share in an open conversation about it, as long as you are passionate and excited and willing to have the conversations, I think the people that are like-minded in wanting those conversations are going to come to you. And sometimes it’s just about finding the right place to have the conversations, and then when you do things start to fall into place of, “Okay, these are the people I can talk to about maybe this more obscure thing that not everybody is going to be interested in, but I’m interested, and there’s at least one other person that’s all interested in it.”
Noah Montague:
Definitely. For me, I like you, I do a lot of research in storytelling and leadership development and student belonging and what that looks like in different spaces that students are engaging with. And how storytelling is a function of research in our field as well and what that can look like when we’re utilizing stories as a baseline to create an understanding of an experience, which is research in and of itself. And I do a lot of presentations and talks around what storytelling looks like as that function of research, but also how it helps students develop as leaders and what that can look like in that capacity. And in my own research I’ve read a lot into ideas of counter-story and what is actually being talked about versus what stories have not had the space to be told, which I’ve been thinking a lot about in even in this conversation, particularly when you mentioned how the story is told is so crucial with Helen Peabody.
And if we are telling it through a lens of Helen hated men versus Helen protected the women in her halls is a completely different story. And it highlights a marginalized community that maybe was not being talked about and did not have stories being told about at the time. And that space of, where are we in this story? What is the history around it? Who is not included in this space, plays such a huge role in what we are doing, in what stories in our halls are we not hearing? What identities do we need to be paying attention to? What students aren’t feeling heard in the way that we should be listening? And I’m thinking about that a lot right now. I don’t know if you have anything to add there.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, absolutely. Something you said really kind of piqued my interest, and you had mentioned that we have to look at stories through different lenses. Even when we’re just reading books, whether it’s fantasy, sci-fi, whatever it’s going to be, there’s different points of view. And I think it’s really important that when we’re telling stories, we have to look and explain the various points of view when we’re telling them too. So, you had mentioned with Helen how I had mentioned she could be in the lens of wanting to protect her students.
I think it’s really important that we look at all ghost stories when we’re telling them through these different lenses and through these different ways of saying, “How are we actually explaining the stories? What are we actually saying when we’re telling these ghost stories?” Yes, we’re saying that she was haunting these spaces, but we’re actually saying, “This is why she was doing it. Here’s her specifics deep down.” And I think that gets more into the specifics of why I like talking about this, which is what actually happens when we’re hearing ghost stories over and over again, because ghost stories can be really harmful in a way, because they can enforce stereotypes, they can really form unconscious biases that we’re not thinking about when we’re just hearing something fun and exciting, or what we think is fun and exciting as a ghost story.
Something that I talk about a lot with this is unconscious biases. So with Helen, the way that people are talking about her makes them think that, “Oh, she hated men.” When in reality she wanted to protect women. But it’s not only ghost stories we hear that with. Even like myth and legend and lore we hear that too. And that makes me think of Medusa off the top of my head is stories that we tend to hear about Medusa is that she was this evil woman with snake for hair and that she could turn anything she wanted to touch into stone. Whereas other people that tell that story, other ways that story is told is she was granted the gift of turning people into stone to protect her from a really traumatic experience that had happened to her. And that being able to turn people into stone was a gift, so she was able to protect herself.
I think it’s really important that when we’re telling these stories we have the conversations of who were these people in the stories and how can we make sure their experiences are being shared and explained in a way that actually puts them in the light of who they were, rather than something to entertain. So, it should be more of an education rather than an entertainment, or a typo.
Noah Montague:
Definitely. And I think that that really connects us back to the beginning with this whole thing too. And you’re talking about this idea of trauma-informed care within these stories, and I’d love to give you the space to just talk a little bit more about that.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yes, please. I love talking about trauma-informed care, especially with ghost stories and how important it is. And I want to make sure I’m giving credit where credit is due. The articles that I was reading, one of the most kind of forefront researchers and somebody that I had been reading about a lot was Laura Diaz de Arce or RJ, I’m not actually sure how to pronounce her name, but credit where credit is due. Her article is talking about the spectrum of trauma were really interesting to read about because she compared trauma and ghost stories really kind of side by side in how ghost stories is trauma expressed in a different way. So, she talked about the kind of movement that we see through ghost stories and that same movement through trauma.
At the beginning of when you’re going through a trauma/talking about a trauma, it’s very similar in the way ghost stories are told. So, that trauma took place or the haunting has been acknowledged, moves into trying to figure out how to address that trauma or how to talk to that ghost or how to help that ghost move through something. And then the task is completed through a ghost story. And I’m making this very short, and it’s so much more interesting abroad, but for the interest of time kind of shortening this. But the task is being completed, the ghost is moving on in the same vein that yes, we’re able to accept and move on from trauma.
So, being able to see that correlation is really, really important when talking about ghost stories, because like I said, sometimes ghost stories make us relive trauma, whether that’s the intention or not. And as I go into talking about this, I do also want to let listeners know that some of the things I might be bringing up can be really traumatic to hear, so please take caution and continuing to listen in on this point if it’s something that might bring you unwanted memories or things to bring back from. So, please take space if you need it.
But one of the most common things we see are reliving trauma within ghost stories. And I think about people in different stories such as The Haunting of Hill House with the Bent-Neck Lady, which talks about suicide, specifically talking about hanging and how really upsetting that is to not only see on a TV screen, because this is one of the, I think it was a Netflix special or something like that. But seeing that and being not necessarily forced to relive it, because yes, you can choose to watch this, but it’s something very jarring to see on the screen in front of you. So, you can be reliving a traumatic experience, whether it’s something that you’ve had happen to yourself in your life, knowing somebody that has gone through the spectrum of suicide, whether it’s ideations, follow through, whatever that might be.
But you’re seeing that happen again within a movie or a TV show. There’s other times where we see trauma being reinforced as well with different vehicular accidents. There’s a story again here in Oxford about a ghost biker, and that was somebody that was running or motorcycling to see a lost love, took a turn much too quickly and wound up decapitating himself. And people now talk about this ghost as like, “Be careful on the roads, because this could happen to you,” type thing. And that’s not only reliving trauma for a particularly terrible incident, but also can reinforce just stereotypes of terrible things like, “This ghost biker was running and going forward to find his love.” And I think that that can reinforce harmful stereotypes of needing to get to these people really, really soon and not being safe and careful and things like that.
But in terms of using traumatic trauma-informed care when talking about these different stories, it’s also so important to make sure that when we are having these discussions we are using TIC, so that trauma-informed care to make sure that these stories are not creating more harm than what’s already been established. I like to talk about creating space for these stories as an educational way to entertain, rather than entertaining to entertain. If we are utilizing a haunted house, maybe also talking about, “Here’s how this haunted house can affect other people and can really change the way that people are thinking about the various situations that happened.”
Noah Montague:
And that, thank you so much for sharing all that. And that all makes so much sense, and especially the pieces about trauma-informed care and making sure that we’re being aware of different students will experience and listen and hear these things differently and they’ll have different reactions to the different people will have different reactions to them. And I often like to say that anything that can happen to a person can of course then happen in a residence hall and can have happened to a student that is living in a residence hall. If we’re thinking about how we’re going to be including conversations around storytelling and around ghost stores if they happen on a campus, or if in our case we’re quite literally programming around these ideas, how do we make sure we’re trauma informed in that approach, I think is huge.
For me and my work, I actually got to have Evelyn come in and talk to my students very directly about this topic. And we delved into storytelling and ghost stories in particular through a lens of emotionally intelligent leadership, as well as one of the theories that I work with the students and my leadership community about. And emotionally intelligent leadership for folks that don’t know really just centers on this idea of in order to be a leader. As a student leader in general you have to be paying attention to the emotions, the experiences, the trauma of the people that you are leading and that you are leading with. And in order to properly lead, you have to practice that awareness and empathy for the folks in your groups.
And I think that relates so heavily to this conversation and to student leadership in general in training RAs and working with our students is, how are we being empathetic? How are we ensuring that the thing that we are trying to do in our residence halls to educate? Because that would be the purpose of doing something like this isn’t going to cause harm. And I think that was the biggest thing that we wanted to get at in this conversation as well.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s so important to make sure that we are not only acknowledging, yes, these stories that we’re telling can cause harm, but also, how can we negate some of that harm and make sure that we are supporting work that minimizes harm, whether it’s attending different campus events so students can see you showing up for the things that are important to them. Like I mentioned a little bit ago, it’s so, so helpful for students to see the people that are engaged and interested in the things that they’re interested in. So, showing up for things like that and being there where students can see you at different events, whether those are events talking about ghost stories. Or maybe they’re even events talking about mental health awareness, domestic violence, things like that. Those are where you can show up and support your students rather than just by saying, “I acknowledge that you’re going through this, but what are ways that you can show that acknowledgement?”
So, making sure that you’re saying, “Yes, I am here to listen to you. I’m using trauma-informed care.” But taking that step further of saying, “I’m using that trauma-informed care and showing you how I am being attentive to your needs and to your stories and your experiences that you’ve gone through.
Noah Montague:
Definitely. Which I think gets me to my last question for you, Evelyn to wrap us up today, if you could maybe give maybe one piece of practical advice to residence life staff to ethically and effectively incorporate storytelling in general into their practice.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
I think listen to what your people, to what your humans are looking for. And your people can either mean your residents, it could be your student staff, it could be your paraprofessional staff, whoever it might be, listen to what they’re looking for and what they want to engage with. I think the most valuable stories that we tell are the ones that people want to hear, or the things that people need to hear. Whether we are trying to talk about trauma-informed care, whether it’s leadership on campus, no matter what it is, figure out and have those conversations of like, “Okay, what do these people need to know, and what is a entertaining and educational way that I can talk about it?” And if it’s through ghost stories, through mythology and folklore in different tales, in that sense make sure that you’re bringing in the deeper conversations of how these people, these beings, this energy, whatever it might be came to be and why it is the way that it is.
But making sure that you’re doing the research into the things that you’re telling people. Make sure that what you’re saying isn’t made up and or harmful. Just do your research, educate yourself so therefore you can help to educate others.
Noah Montague:
Thank you. And thank you so much for being here with us today. That just about wraps up our time. I hope you had fun and that you got to engage and talk in a way that you enjoyed.
Evelyn Mendlowitz:
Yes, this is so cool, thank you.
Noah Montague:
Thank you for coming, and thank you all for joining us on this episode or ResEdChat. If you have an idea or a topic or a person that you’d like us to have on the show, please reach out and let us know by contacting Roompact. But until next time, have a great rest of your day. See you later. Bye-bye.
