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As my college career is finally drawing to a close, this month I am profiling the main place I have been roamin’ for the past few years, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Also, with UTC being considered by many to be one of the more haunted places in Chattanooga, I set up a paranormal investigation team to check things out.
As far as the history of hauntings at the university, I have found a gold mine of information. Georgiana Kotarski, author of “Ghosts of the Southern Tennessee Valley,” has done extensive research on the subject and has been a great help to me. She documented the most famous haunting at Hooper Hall in her book as well.
Kotarski said faculty, custodians and campus police have witnessed abnormal activity in Hooper Hall at night, such as doors slamming, footsteps, elevators ascending to the top floor for no reason and strange drops in temperature in certain spots.
For further investigation, Chuck Cantrell, assistant vice chancellor of university relations, said he gave a psychic a piece of paper with “615 McCallie Ave.” written on it. 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 Jan. 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.
Kotarski also said there have been reports in Patten Chapel of people hearing organ music in the middle of the night, slamming doors, footsteps and a woman in white seen at the chapel both at night and during the day. Brock Hall is on the site of an old jail and execution yard, as well as the old medical building where there was a black market for body parts, and there have been reports of strange noises and voices echoing through the hall.
There are numerous other spots that people have said they witnessed strange occurrences on campus as well, such as the development building, Frist Hall, the Metro Building and the Lambda Chi fraternity house.
Cantrell said if ghosts are really on campus, they are “caspers” and not malicious, and they are there because of their love for the university.
In April, I organized an investigation with the Tennessee Paranormal Investigation Team to further look into the suspected hauntings, and they set up equipment in Hooper Hall and Patten Chapel a couple nights to see if we could pick up any paranormal activity.
The first night at Patten Chapel was pretty creepy. We were able to go up into the bell tower of Patten that night as well, which basically looked like if somewhere was going to be haunted, that was it. A few members of the team saw about a three-foot-tall dark object running around the chapel on different occasions and one of the team members felt something push them in the tower. Basically all night there seemed to be weird stuff going on.
On the second night at Hooper Hall, it just didn’t seem as creepy. This could be due to the fact that being in a really old church such as Patten Chapel, looking for ghosts at night, creates a sense of creepiness in itself. However, from all the data collected by the team, the only actual hard evidence of a possible paranormal occurrence happened on this night in Hooper Hall.
We had split up into two different teams and I was actually downstairs when this happened, but I saw the video evidence and some other Echo editorial staff members were up there with some of the investigation team and confirmed it. There were two cameras set up in the upper hall, and the microphone on the camera in the middle of the hall between Hooper and Race picked up a loud bang. On the other camera you can clearly see everyone turning and looking when it occurred, and no one was over there. I was downstairs and didn’t hear the bang, and I know no one was below where the bang occurred on the downstairs level.
The team said the evidence is inconclusive from the investigation as to confirming a haunting, but that they have no explanation for the bang that happened in Hooper on the second night. If ghosts really are on campus due to their fondness of the university, I completely understand why they feel so attached.
Coming Up
I have been working on getting in better shape, which will be even more important for the vast amount of walking I will be doing in Scotland. Next month I will be walking the entire Tennessee River Walk in one shot and journalizing the experience. That’s right, all 10 miles from the Chickamauga Dam to the Ross’s Landing in one day. This should be interesting…
I will be roamin’ through your area soon. If you would like to make comments or have questions about any of my stories, or provide some ideas and information for future stories, contact me at roaminwithroman@gmail.com.
Chattanooga native Roman Flis is a senior at UTC majoring in communications, and writes both journalism and fiction. His columns profiling places around the area appear in Community News the second Wednesday of each month.
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