Tappan Square has taken on an orange-brown hue. Stickers featuring ghosts, bats, and spiders crawl across campus. Autumnal winds spin leaves around in the air. It’s officially spooky season! As Halloween approaches, Oberlin students think about what could be spookier than their recently completed midterms as they answer the question: What are the most haunted places on campus?

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

College second-year Celia Vaughn:

I think everywhere here is haunted. Especially East Hall.

College fourth-year Eliza Greenbaum:

It was my second year when my friends and I decided to walk to a playground at night, close to that Halloween time of year. It was about a fifteen-minute walk away from campus. I don’t really believe in ghosts, but there was just something about that area that seemed off. There was this one machine — if you press a button and speak into it, it will repeat back what you say. I tried playing that game and one of my friends pulled me aside and said, “Do not do that, this place feels haunted.” We continued to stay there but eventually one of my friends tapped me and went, “We need to leave. I can feel a presence.” There’s a weird thing about playgrounds at night that feels wrong.

College second-year Aidan Champagnie-Ellington:

There’s this special place in the Arboretum: a little cove where all that exists is a chair. I think that a ghost named Chester lives there because there’s always a bunch of chestnuts on the ground. Sometimes when I’m walking to the Arboretum, I take my headphones off and start talking to my pal Chester because he needs to know what’s going on in my life. I don’t know if Chester’s real, but I like to assume he’s real. If you need to go to the Arboretum, meet Chester.

College third-year Cecily Miles:

I have spaces I would like to be haunted. I think Tank Hall needs a little orphan girl ghost.

College second-year Leo Powers:

There’s a basement in Noah Hall. You walk down about twelve too many stairs to get down there. You pass the laundry room, and the laundry room is nice. Then there’s a whole room next to the laundry room that no one ever uses. It’s way too big and open and a ghost definitely haunts there. Then there’s the rest of that basement, which is so much scarier. There’s a bathroom that stands alone in the middle of the basement which is just wrong. Somebody did that wrong. Also, there’s a cage down there. I don’t know what goes on in the cage. It’s a scary place.

College first-year Brynne Spaeth:

I feel like the bats in Warner Center make it haunted. They don’t act like normal bats.

College second-year Elijah Morton:

North of Bailey Field, there is a lot called the Boneyard filled with all sorts of materials that the College never used in construction: excess materials, stuff that they tore down, different kinds of signage. I just think if it’s called a boneyard, it’s gotta have some bones in it. And if it has bones in it, it definitely has a ghost in it.