Ghosts activity found in Wheelock

Lyndon State College has a long history and a strong tie to Vermont, so it's no wonder that a few ghosts and ghost stories would pop up on campus.

            Investigating the paranormal is by no means an easy study.  A lot of equipment and testing is needed to debunk or prove the presence of the paranormal.  This is exactly the type of operation the newly accepted Paranormal Club at LSC hopes to undertake.

"I've always been interested in the paranormal," the Paranormal Club President Montana Marshia, a freshman in graphic design said. 

Just having been accepted into the Student Government Association of clubs, the Paranormal Club has been testing its equipment, from electronic voice phenomena to flashlight tests, Marshia said.

The flashlight test, which the group undertook on Nov. 14 in the Wheelock 410 suite, was fairly successful, Marshia said.  Another member, Connor Snell, a freshman in global studies, shot a video of the flashlight test.

"We set a flashlight in the corner of the suite, by the door, so we could see if anything from behind was tampering with the light," Snell said.  Adding, they then turned out the lights and asked questions with the added phrase, "If yes, turn on the flashlight."

While the video was a little grainy from it having been filmed on a phone, one could clearly see the flashlight turn on after a couple of the questions with no one behind it.  Snell said they will have to go back and see if any of this can be duplicated by human hands, so we can see if what happened was indeed paranormal activity.

One investigation they hope to do in the future is probably the most famous paranormal story related to LSC, that of Emma Vail's wheelchair.

The stories all circulate around the Alexander Twilight Theatre at LSC.  For years people have claimed to see a wheelchair pop up all around the theatre.

People see it on the stage, or out in the halls going on adventures, Pat Webster, cataloguer for the Samuel Read Hall Library said.  One paragraph in an article in the 80th anniversary Twin Tower Topics, The Mysterious Faces of Emma Vail, describes an encounter where a security guard locked the wheelchair in a closet only to turn around and see it wheeling down the hall.           

However, Webster isn't buying any of these stories, because she knows the origins of the wheelchair. 

"It was purchased from a yard sale for a play called These Ruins are Inhabited in the 70s," Webster said.

It was stored in the theater for the longest time after that, and was in fact hauled back out when the play was redone, Webster said. 

"I used to be in the theater a lot, and I'd be there to the wee hours of the morning, and I never saw anything happen," she said.

Webster added, "The history of Emma Vail got mixed up over the years, first she was sick and old when she got married, and over the year's she became younger and more attractive, then one story was that she was Vail's mistress." 

In his book, Mr. Vail is in Town, Dan Swainbank, part-time English teacher at LSC, wrote that in 1897, Emma Vail became sick and eventually died eight years later on Feb. 3, 1903.