When junior Joey Spolestra heard the sound of giggling children running up and down the staircase of his house, he figured his time was up. 

He slept there for just one night. The house has since been sold, but for 11 years, the Delta Tau Delta fraternity called it home. According to junior Liam Martin, their former Manning Street residence had quite the history with paranormal activity.

On the night Spoelstra slept at the house, he locked it up for the night, so the only people who could’ve entered were other residents.

“I was the last person to spend a night in the Delt house alone because I came up here to move everything into the current house,” Spoelstra said. “I’m sitting there in the middle of the night and I can hear children laughing and running downstairs. And I just remember saying, ‘Well, guess this is the night I’m going to die.’” 

Senior Charles Kippley recalled strange markers dotting the floor and walls of the basement.

“You could still see chain marks and holes in the basement and in some of the walls,” Kippley said. “The basement had dirt floors, and they looked like they had been stirred up, so who knows what went on down there,” Kippley said.

He described the heavy, five-inch thick steel door in the basement that locked from the outside.

“There were some scary things that happened in that room,” Kippley said. 

Previous generations of Delta Tau Delta members also contributed to the spooky atmosphere. Some of them held seances there, Kippley said. 

“It was a very open concept house, and there were a lot of doors but very few walls,” Kippley said. “I swear if you were sitting in the living room in the dark by yourself, you could hear someone in the other room saying your name.” 

Kippley mentioned other haunted occurrences, such as the sound of stomping feet in the basement and the floor above the kitchen. Residents shared nightmares, several dreaming that the ceiling fan morphed into a giant spider. 

But the old Delt house does not have a monopoly on haunted occurrences on campus. Marie Taylor, a senior member of Chi Omega sorority, remembers having a creepy experience in her room on the second floor of the chapter house. 

“I was up late, about 1 or 2 a.m., writing a paper and my roommate was asleep,” Taylor said. “There was a desk light still on and at one point she woke up, turned to me, and asked me why there was someone sitting on the back of her desk chair. I didn’t see anything and so I said, ‘Sydney, there’s no one there – I mean, your backpack is on your chair.’ And she said, ‘No, there was someone sitting above it.”’ 

When Taylor asked her roommate, senior Sydney Metikosh, the next morning if she remembered anything from the night before Metikosh recalled seeing someone sitting at her desk. 

Taylor said she was a “bit unnerved” after the incident, but remained relatively unaffected by it. Metikosh was the one to experience the ghost, and their room had no history of hauntings before, so Taylor said a “prayer every night – just in case.” 

Kippley and the other Delta Tau Delta members, however, dealt with their ghost by giving it a bid.

“There was a crack in the wall of the basement, so we wrote the bid on a piece of paper and launched it in there,” Kippley said.