School or campus
A black mass invitation, a stalled dorm elevator, and a body in the college lake
A caller who gives their location as Gainesville, Georgia (WDUN), tells of their freshman year at a small southern college. A man in the student center claimed to be a black witch and invited their group to a black mass. The caller did not go. That night a fire alarm sent them outside, where they saw their returning friends looking [quote withheld] before the dorm elevator they boarded stalled between floors. The caller says they later learned that one man had disappeared and that his body was found in the college lake about three weeks afterward, with his throat cut. The host cuts the caller off for time.
Sounds, a voice, and a horned face in a school dormitory room at night
[name withheld], calling from Brighton, Colorado, says that as a 16- or 17-year-old student at a School for the Visually Impaired in Louisiana, they heard kicking and scratching outside their dormitory window. Then they heard a voice telling them to sleep. Then they woke to their bed shaking and an orange-red, horned face at their closet door. They say they felt frozen, prayed, and were carried out of the room, their feet not touching the floor, to their best friend’s room, where they stayed the rest of the night. Asked for their present view, they say they never figured out what it was. They agreed with the host’s suggestion that they may have a guardian angel.
Students re-enact a Civil War battle in a campus auditorium said to be haunted
A caller who gives the pseudonym “John” and says they are in Tennessee describes a night in a campus auditorium during their college days, with a fellow student the caller does not name. The caller had been told the auditorium was once a Civil War fort and the site of battles. They report a hostile atmosphere, dark figures in the balcony, and a battlefield trench that gave them dark feelings. The two then staged a North-versus-South re-enactment on the auditorium stage to help the spirits. The caller says that during the acting they believed they were a dying soldier. Afterward their friend denied making a shout that the caller had clearly heard.
Shadow figure at a bedroom window and a child found on the roof
A caller who gives their name as [name withheld], from Sarasota, Florida, tells Art Bell that at about age five, which they place around 1966, they saw a shadow figure in a hat and long coat at their bedroom window one winter night. Their parents reportedly saw the same figure crossing the schoolyard outside and found no footprints. The caller also relays, secondhand through their wife, that about a week earlier their parents had found them missing from bed and finally discovered them sitting on the roof with no apparent way up. Asked what they think happened, they say they have no idea. The call ends with a discussion of streetlights going out around them, which the story leaves unresolved.
Woman in white and vandalized cemetery at Indiana University
A caller who gives the name [name withheld], a cab driver from Portland, tells Art Bell about an event on June 11, 1970, while they were attending a drama conference at Indiana University in Bloomington. They say they saw a woman in white, dressed in 1930s style, in woods near campus. She vanished, and after following a hedge they found an old cemetery with a shattered headstone for a woman named Mary who died in 1936. They report seeing the woman again before she faded away, and then running from the vandalized cemetery. They believe she wanted someone to see the damage.
Ghost of a woman passing through a university sleep laboratory
A caller named [name withheld] tells Art Bell that they were working toward a degree in parapsychology and running an overnight sleep-mapping experiment with Kirlian photography at a Sacramento State sleep lab. [name withheld] reports that their assistant [name withheld], inside the anechoic chamber, said a woman walked through him. Both then watched a misty form turn solid as an older woman in a flower-print dress. She floated through walls and shelving and disappeared out an outside wall. [name withheld] says she showed herself a second time. [name withheld] half agrees with Art’s suggestion that the experiment itself may have opened a door.
Repeated waking dreams of a school bus and the caller's sister
A caller reached in Pahrump, Nevada, describes a night as a high-school junior when they waited in their car at the school for their sister's junior-varsity bus. They report falling asleep and dreaming three times that the bus arrived, and they say their sister was at the car in the third dream, asking to be let in. They say they had more and more trouble waking, finally screamed themselves awake, drove home, and waited for a phone call.
House lights, pounding, and a whispered encouragement in a junior high theater
A 15-year-old caller who gives their name as [name withheld], from Redding, California, describes an eighth-grade school play staged in an old junior high theater said to date from 1911. They report house lights switching on and off by themselves, pounding like footsteps on the catwalk, curtains moving, and a girl’s whisper in their head urging them on. The play went ahead, and the audience took the disturbances as part of the act.
Law student reports basketball-sized presence of dying mother during class
[name withheld], a second-year law student in Madison, Wisconsin, says that on October 24, 1995, he was drowsy in a first-year civil procedure class. He felt or saw a basketball-sized presence at arm’s length that seemed to be his mother saying hello and goodbye. He says his mother was then in the terminal stage of cancer. After class his wife relayed a call from his sister. When he called back, he learned his mother had died about an hour and 15 minutes earlier. He takes the classroom experience as his mother’s visit at the time of her death.
Transcendental meditation group at a public high school career day (story cut off)
A caller who gives the name [name withheld], calling from Rancho Santa Fe, California, begins a story about a transcendental meditation group that came to their public high school on career day when the caller was a junior in the 1970s. The caller says the group told school officials that meditation would improve students’ grades and called the program [quote withheld] The caller says their mother and nearly everyone at the school took it up. A station break interrupts the story before any strange event is described.
Haunted house fundraiser in an old Vermont school building
A caller who gives their name as [name withheld], calling from Florida on station WSKY, tells Art Bell that around 1979 they were recruited as a makeup artist for a yearly theatrical haunted-house fundraiser in their Vermont hometown. The caller describes the venue as an old, partly disused school building, Victorian and redstone. The caller says they [quote withheld] which implies it was genuinely haunted. The story breaks off when Art puts the rest off until after a commercial break. No strange event is described in this part of the broadcast.