The Curious Truth:Ghosts and haunted mysteries of St. Bonaventure

Ghosts, legends haunt campus life

By:  Jeff Wilkin

    Feature Editor

    The story begins as a superstitious schoolmaster leaves a party on a dark and dismal night.  It's the time of year when tales of ghosts and evil spirits are most popular, and Ichabod Crane knows it.  As he nervously rides his steed through the small valley, he spots a shadow by a brook, someone who is also on horseback.  

    The "shadow" turns out to be the most famous and feared specter in the county, the Headless Horseman.  

    A chase ensues, and it is one that is to be decided with supernatural aid.  The Horseman rises in his stirrups and hurls  his head at the unfortunate schoolmaster.  

    Ichabod Crane was never seen again.  In the churchyard the next morning, all that was found was his hat...next to the remains of a shattered pumpkin.  County folk told and retold this story many times, and it soon became known in American literature as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

No headless horseman

    It's not likely that anyone will see any headless horseman chasing nervous professors down Route 17 tonight because the horseman's favorite "haunt" has always been Sleepy Hollow.  Bonaventure may not have a spook on horseback, but does have its own ghosts-in the form of campus legends.  

    Probably the most famous of the three chief legendary stories occurred in Devereux Hall in the early '60s.  Three students held a strange nocturnal session on the fifth floor lounge-a black mass.  They had read books on Satanism and tried to summon the devil.  

    Afterwards, one member of the group had psychological problems and had to be treated for them.  "This was the only thing that ever came out of the Fifth Dev affair," Father Alphonsus Trabold, OFM, assistant professor of theology, said.  "There are stories about Fifth Dev, but that's all they are is stories.  Not much of it is true."

    Stories ran wild throughout Devereux about the "mass" and still do.  Fifth Dev was supposedly closed down for a few years after the mass took place but Fr. Alphonsus maintains that it was for renovation purposes only.  Other tales spoof that the devil occasionally returns to Fifth Dev, but no one has ever reported seeing the "lord of darkness" up there.  The Rathskeller might be a better place to look for him.  

    Dev is also the site for another campus tale.  Supposedly an annual visitor to the World War II memorial exists in back of Dev-a soldier named William J. Cooper.  According to legend, Mr. Cooper looks after the memorial, shining his name every year.  

The Bona Venture

October 31, 1975

Vol. L1 No. 6

BACK