Faculty, staff experience campus hauntings
Joseph Roman Flis
Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: Culture
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Author documents local ghosts
Some of these ghost tales have recently gained more fame as their stories have been depicted in a popular book about local hauntings that even includes some revenant residents apparently on campus.
Georgiana Kotarski of Dunlap, Tenn., is the author of "Ghosts of the Southern Tennessee Valley." Kotarski spoke at UTC last March about her findings, which, during the search for unexplained phenomena around the Chattanooga area, led her to discover and document several possible hauntings around campus.
Horrors of Hooper Hall
The most prominent of the hauntings on campus is that of Hooper Hall. Sandy Cole of the center for career education knows about the Hooper haunting all too well.
Cole and her husband at the time, Bob Mills, stayed overnight in Hooper Hall back in the early 80s during a snow storm because Mills had to get the campus ready for the following morning. Just after 11 p.m., Cole said, they began to hear footsteps and doors slamming, but after investigating, the pair did not find anyone there.
According to Cole, later that night at about 3 a.m. something else happened.
"The dean's office was downstairs because we had a dean of admissions at the time," she said. "His secretary had a cuckoo clock and that thing started going off. At the time I didn't think anything about it. The next morning I was talking to her about the cuckoo clock and she said, 'That doesn't work.'"
Cole said Mills later talked to campus security about the incident. They said they did not like to go into the building after dark because crazy things happen there all the time.
Kotarski reported in her book that custodians have also witnessed weird happenings, such as elevators ascending to the top floor for no reason and strange drops in temperature in the upper stairwell.
For further investigation, Chuck Cantrell, assistant vice chancellor of university relations, gave a psychic a piece of paper with "615 McCallie Ave." written on it. Cantrell said the psychic told him a man named John had committed suicide in a room in the building that was filled with chemicals. After looking through some old newspapers, Cantrell discovered that indeed on January 7, 1924, a groundskeeper named John Hockings had gassed himself in a chemical store room in Hooper Hall, which at that time was the science building.
