Buried tales
Butterfield: Greek Secrets
By Dara McBride
Contributing Writer
At the Butterfield House, Syracuse University’s only all-female dorm, there is something scary living among the 36 freshmen girls in the house.
‘I think Butterfield is really haunted,’ freshman biology major Khalilah Hyde said. The Butterfield resident said weird dreams, sleepwalking and creaky doors are all common.
‘It’s an old house, so you could just chalk it up to that,’ Hyde said, although she herself refuses to believe it.
Butterfield House, located at 709 Comstock Ave., is the former house of the female fraternity Alpha Gamma Delta. The residence was the fourth AGD house on campus and was completed in 1928, according to a fall 2005 article in Alpha Gamma Delta Quarterly. AGD’s crest still appears on the front of the house and on the fireplace in the main lounge. A wood staircase, oriental rugs and a stone foyer set the house apart.
The house has been rented to SU since 2005, after AGD’s charter was removed due to a lack of membership in 2001, as reported by The Daily Orange on Oct. 3, 2007. Butterfield has been leased to SU until July 2011, according to the Housing Office.
Lindsey Lichtenstein, junior communication sciences and disorders major, lived in Butterfield during the 2007-2008 school year.
‘It’s a creepy building, there’s definitely something there,’ Lichtenstein said. She said doors would randomly open and close when she lived in Butterfield.
Lichtenstein remembered the resident advisors arranging for a ghost interpreter to come look in the basement of Butterfield around Halloween. Lichtenstein said the interpreter brought a machine that would beep when it encountered a high frequency area, which indicated paranormal activity. The machine beeped when it passed over stains on the house’s basement floor.
The basement is always kept locked and is a source of much speculation for Butterfield residents.
The basement, where AGD’s study lounge was located, is described as ‘set aside by itself’ where ‘no noise from above may penetrate,’ in a news release held by SU archives on the construction of the house. The chapter room is located in the basement and was used for AGD meetings and rituals. It is currently a storage area for old AGD belongings.
Chelsey Cleckner, a freshman communications and rhetorical studies major, is a current Butterfield resident. She noticed the basement was unlocked one night and decided to explore with her roommate.
‘It was really spooky,’ Cleckner said, even with all the lights on. ‘I heard loud noises, like someone was walking downstairs, but no one ever was.’
Cleckner said that since she has moved into Butterfield, she and her roommate have experienced strange dreams and sleepwalked into the main lounge. Cleckner said neither has ever sleepwalked before.
Freshman marketing major Danni D’Angio said she and other girls were in the main lounge one evening when the lights in the entire house shut off for five or 10 minutes for no apparent reason. D’Angio said the house ‘definitely had a creepy past.’ She has heard ghost stories about former AGD occupants who went missing or died. None of the stories have been proven true.
Jessica Afriyie, freshman marketing major, said the house is not scary to her because it has a ‘homey feel.’ She said the squeaky floors are the only bother.
‘Sometimes when I know I’m the only one walking, and I stop, I still hear the squeaks,’ Afriyie said.
Lawrinson: Heightened fears
By Amity Paye
Asst. Feature Editor
John Rockwell heard a scream in the night.
‘It was more of a shriek, like no one was playing around, this was serious,’ said Rockwell, a sophomore philosophy major who lives on the 18th floor of Lawrinson Hall. ‘I was all alone and checked but saw nothing. It was the Lawrinson ghost.’
Students on the 18th, 19th and 20th floors of Syracuse University’s Lawrinson Hall have heard noises on their floors for years. Last year, three students in Peter Moller’s COM 200 class created a movie about the ghost, in which students like Rockwell said they heard horrific screams in the night and heard people moving through the floors when no one was there. Students who live on the floors now recount similar experiences.
‘My roommate had some weird experiences,’ said Salena Moore, a freshman philosophy major who lives on the 19th floor of Lawrinson. ‘She thinks I’m in the room when I’m not. She hears noises like I’m moving around, but I’m not there. She gets pretty creeped out.’
Kevin Chik, a freshman chemistry major who lives on the 19th floor of Lawrinson, hears something a little different.
‘There are some noises … around 5 a.m. when everyone is sleeping. I do hear talking in the night, but I go look and no one is there,’ Chik said.
Ashley Lawton, a freshman psychology major who lives on the 20th floor, hears yet another sound.
‘There are clicks (coming from) the walls in the middle of the night,’ she said. ‘It’s inside the walls, from the ceiling and lasts through the night, but I can only hear it when it gets late. It’s a constant clicking noise.’
Lawton plans to make her own movie about the Lawrinson ghost.
Biology and chemistry major Stephanie Gomez lived in Lawrinson last year and remembers hearing rumors of a ghost. ‘They had a ghost hunt, or something like it, on the top three floors last year,’ she said. The hunt was technically called a ghost walk and Gomez said it was inconclusive.
While the origin of the ghost remains unknown, some students who live on the top floors didn’t know of the ghost at all.
‘I haven’t heard anything,’ said College of Arts and Sciences freshman Meg Hourihan, a resident of the 18th floor of Lawrinson. ‘Now I’m going to be scared every night.’
Molly Tolbert, a freshman entrepreneurship and emerging studies major who lives on the 20th floor, laughed and said, ‘Some people hear it and others don’t. It’s funny, but actually it’s not funny, it’s really creepy … I think something is really going on here.’
BBB: Rising the Dead
By Amity Paye
Asst. Feature Editor
Brewster, Boland and Brockway all have a secret. The three dorms are located on the site of a cemetery, according to the Syracuse University Archives Web site. This is not a scene out of the movie ‘Poltergeist,’ it’s real SU history.
In 1845, ‘St. Mary’s Church established a hillside cemetery on the village outskirts …Catholics from all over the county were buried there, however, it was used primarily by those of Irish origin from Syracuse, Geddes and Onondaga Hill,’ according to Onondaga Historical Association’s 1994 brochure, ‘Echoes of Our Past: The Historic Landscapes of Syracuse’s Cemeteries.’
The land that Old St. Mary’s was located on from 1845-1919 was highly sought after, and the city of Syracuse tried to obtain the land to turn it into a park as early as 1911. The city did not get permission, but the cemetery was still neglected when SU began work on the dorms in 1966. Before construction began, the university was rewarded a permit in 1959 from the city clerks office to move the bodies in the Old St. Mary’s cemetery to the new St. Mary’s Cemetery, located on East Genesee Street in De Witt.
While the bodies are gone, Philip Owusu, a resident student advisor at Brockway and an anthropology graduate student said, ‘The dead are dead. But I think there are spirits… I have a strong belief that I’m never alone… it depends on your sense of protection… overall we see cemeteries very close by, so what’s the big deal.’
Some students in the dorms think the possibility that bodies could have been forgotten is something to worry about.
‘It’s pretty creepy and weird,’ said Sarah Turney, a junior finance and political science major who lived in BBB during her sophomore year. ‘I would have been really creeped out last year walking home at all times of the night.’
While paranormal experiences, seen in other locations on campus, are not common in BBB, some students have experienced weird happenings. Alex Carrieri, a freshman in The College of Visual and Performing Arts who lives in Boland Hall, said she wasn’t surprised to find that she was living on the grounds of a former cemetery.
‘I was in the lounge a few nights ago doing voice recordings late at night, and me and my roommate kept picking up classical music.’
Carrieri said the music was loud in her recordings but that she and her roommate couldn’t hear any music while actually recording.
‘It was pretty creepy,’ she said.
Published on October 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Contact Dara: dkmcbrid@syr.edu | @daramcbride
