Campus ghost stories
The UW's historic architecture may remind some of a Gothic novel. But older buildings aren't the only the settings for supernatural sightings made by night staff. Photo illustration of Denny Hall, based on original image by Mark Stone/University of Washington
Huskies looking to get in the Halloween spirit have many spooky options: Grotesques (not gargoyles) peer down from historic buildings on the Seattle campus. Coyotes hunt stealthily in the underbrush, and crows gather before flying by the thousands to UW Bothell. Indoor explorers can wander the long liminal hallway of the Magnuson Health Sciences Center or get lost amid Padelford Hall’s maze of disconnected staircases and dead ends.
Ghost sightings, though, are less common. Until you ask the night staff, that is.
Long after most faculty and students have gone home, UW Facilities staff are on campus maintaining buildings and spaces, keeping the Power Plant running, and much more. And a few of them have seen some things.
The lady on the staircase
The lady on the staircase
One night in 1990, Custodian Lead Pedro Borrayo Alatorre, filling in for someone who was sick, passed through the main entrance of Suzzallo Library. It was 2 a.m. and the lights had been off since around 11 p.m. Despite the darkness, he saw movement on the grand staircase that snakes from the building’s first to third floors.
A woman with a long, white dress was visible around the curve of the staircase. Borrayo Alatorre said he couldn’t see her face, but he saw her old-fashioned boots making their way down the steps.
He went on his way, but when he met up with his co-worker, he mentioned what he saw. His co-worker was so scared that he ran outside. When he told his supervisor, his eyes widened with fear, Borrayo Alatorre said.
He said it reminded him of a story his father told him as a boy. His father was out with his friends after midnight in the town where Borrayo Alatorre grew up, a very old town in Mexico near Puerto Vallarta. They saw a lady walking slowly down the street. When they caught up with her, she turned around. She had the face of a horse.
She was wearing a long dress too, just like the woman in Suzzallo.
After that night in 1990, Borrayo Alatorre asked others about the woman. “Who’s that lady?” he asked. Electrician friends who regularly worked in Suzzallo at all hours of the night said, “There’s a ghost in there. She’s no good. Stay away from her.”
“I never mentioned that lady again,” he said.
A Halloween mystery
A Halloween mystery
On Halloween night about eight years ago, Jim Rossi and Junji Otaki were working in William H. Gates Hall, the building that houses the law school. Part of the team that maintains lights and air filters, they headed to the fourth-floor lounge to change some light bulbs at around 11 p.m. They walked down the long hallway of the L-shaped building, passing by offices that were empty and dark.
At some point, something drew their attention. At the far end of the hallway, Rossi and Otaki saw a boy, maybe three or four years of age, sitting on the floor playing with a toy.
“It'd be weird enough to have a kid there that late at night anyway, just playing in the hallway — and the fact that we had just walked through there and there wasn't anybody there [made it even weirder],” Rossi said.
Rossi and Otaki returned to the lounge but then decided to go take another look. When they looked back down the hallway, the boy was gone.
They searched the floor and found no sign of the child or anybody else.
The sighting was so strange that they might have doubted it happened if they didn’t share the experience with each other.
“If I was by myself, I'd have been like, ‘Okay, I’m just tired or something.’ But we both saw it,” Otaki said.
Rossi said they talk about it every year or so “just to reaffirm it actually happened.”
“You give these things time, and memories can mess with you. Sometimes they aren't real. Like, dude, did that really happen?”
“It happened,” Otaki said.
The crying woman
The crying woman
Custodian Jose Marquez was locking up Meany Hall one night about 10 years ago when he had trouble with one of the locks in the basement. He called the group of Facilities Operations Maintenance Specialists (FOMS), known by their radio name Unit-2. They’re the facilities generalists who respond to emergencies or requests for help after the day staff goes home.
A woman from the FOMS team arrived and met Marquez near the lobby. She looked like she was afraid to go inside, he said. As they made their way to the basement, “I could tell she was looking around waiting for something.”
The FOMS worker told Marquez that she saw a ghost in Meany a few years back. The ghost was a woman wearing a long, white dress and black hair — and she was crying. The description reminded him of La Llorona, a ghost common in Latin American and Mexican folklore who weeps for her children whom she murdered.
“Why are you crying?” the FOMS worker told Marquez she asked. The ghost disappeared before her eyes.
After hearing the story, Marquez wondered if he would see the ghost too. Soon after that, he was given the task of cleaning all the carpets in the building. He was there by himself much of the time, and it took a whole week.
“I wanted to see if I can see that lady,” he said. “It was so interesting to me. I was afraid, too. But I wanted to see if there really was a ghost there.
“I didn't see any.”
The FOMS worker has since retired, but he never forgot her or her ghost story.
“She was so afraid, right? Yeah, I believe her,” he said.
