Bennington: Ghost Stories
EPISODE DESCRIPTION
Bennington alumni spanning four generations come together to share first person experiences and encounters they had on campus. As the stories unfold, undeniable parallels are drawn, and the liminality between life and death is laid bare before us.
EPISODE CREDITS
Written, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Luz Fleming. Original Music by Luz Fleming, James Ash, and Jacob Bronstein. Executive Producer: Jacob Bronstein. Theme music by Andy Cotton. Cover art and episode art by Andy Outis. Production assistance by Davis Lloyd.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Yard Tales – Bennington: Ghost Stories
Luz Fleming:
This episode contains strong language stories of paranormal activity and explores the human mind and the liminality between life and death. It may not be suitable for all ears.
When thinking about crossing boundaries and entering a space where you feel like you don't belong, I can't help but to remember some of the unusual occurrences in and around Bennington when I was a student there. Bennington College in Southern Vermont was founded in 1932 and has always had a reputation for its emphasis on hands-on learning, experimentation, and a certain celebration of the individual.
It's a place where a person like myself with a creative mind, but lousy SAT scores could fit right in. And it always made me wonder if we brought our own special brand of wild creativity to the campus, or if it brought it out of us and made us see things we might not have otherwise been able to see, including the paranormal.
I had a few very strange things happen to me on campus and I remember hearing countless stories from other people, but they were always second and third hand stories. So I decided to see if I could dig up some other first person experiences that I might be able to get on tape. I posted a message about this idea on a Bennington related Facebook group, composed, mostly of alumni from the mid eighties to the mid nineties and seemingly within minutes, the flood gates opened.
Sibyl Kempson:
She was really distressed and I guess the police pulled up on the road at the bottom of the property and wrapped her in a blanket. And that was it and I remember someone saying, she was saying, the same kinds of things that the first person had been saying who had lived in the same room and also who had had some kind of an episode and was taken somewhere for treatment.
Alex Pintair:
It was kind of hopping from one foot to the other back and forth, but in a way where it was so slow, it like stayed up in the air longer than would be humanly possible.
Kerry Hart:
So like the lights went out over there and then this weird breeze came through the room and then I could see a gray it's sort of like a gray blob walked through the theater. It was very strange.
Wendy Rosenfield:
We're sitting in the room minding our own business and the roller shade on the windows snaps up.
Kate:
An ash tray that was sitting on top of the piano slid all the way down the length of the piano and fell on the floor.
Wendy Rosenfield:
And the coffee cup by itself, slides forward, like, at least five inches.
Raven:
Just random piano sounds that almost felt like I was imagining it.
Robin Decker:
I would find them on the window sill.
Raven:
Voices or little singing sounds.
Robin Decker:
I would find them in my coffee mug.
Raven:
Creaking…
Robin Decker:
I would find them in my shoe. I would find them in my drawer.
Raven:
Just all kinds of weird noises that you don't know if it's just an old house or something else going on.
Melinda Castriatta Avellino:
He starts to tell us that he murdered somebody. He murdered somebody
Luz Fleming:
What up, this is Luz Fleming. You have come to the place where we tell tales of the train and the bus yard, the tenement yard, and the prison yard. We detail close calls and chase stories. We dig into larger conversations about crossing boundaries. The other side of the tracks, borders, and forbidden space, whether to make big life changes, to forward the artistic or professional practice, to escape peril, or just the sheer thrill of it.
So sit back and let us tell you some of our favorite Yard Tales.
I collected stories from alumni that span four decades for this episode and one of the most fascinating things about the process has been to see how many experiences are undeniably tethered to one another. Hearing the individual stories unfold and thread together as a collective experience has sent chills down my spine.
I can't wait to share all these stories with you today, along with several individuals, stories that are just plain wild, but first we're going to dig into some of the lore that has persisted for generations around the campus of Bennington.
Alex Pintair:
When we first got to Bennington, it seemed like there was a bit of an indoctrination that would happen between the upperclassmen and the new kids where they would sort of say, all right, so this is where you are now. This is our space, you know, there's a ghost in Jennings and there's catacombs under VAPA.
And there's all this stuff happening around here and, you know, welcome.
Kate:
Oh, well. It's crazy here because it's the place where the Four Winds meet.
Melinda Castriatta Avellino:
The end of the world was the Native American burial ground where the Four Winds met. They buried Native Americans that had mental issues that where the Four Winds met that was sort of like the story that went around.
Kate:
Oh, you know, when you're a first-year student there and you start hearing these stories, you're like, oh, well, that makes sense.
Maddy Wood:
But I have heard about the Four Winds. It was one of those things where I heard about it so much that I could swear that I was like experiencing it once when it was like standing in the middle of the lawn when it was really windy freshman year. I definitely believed that.
Kate:
And the place where the Four Winds meet, of course, we have this collective insanity, this collective mood that strikes us.
Lisa Sciandra:
But that may have just been a story people told to make it seem scarier.
Raven:
Yeah. I'd be interested to know actually the whole history of what happened. The Native Americans in that area, I mean, was Bennington really built on top of a burial ground? Is that real or is that just like white people, like, you know, making stories?
Luz Fleming:
Yeah, I always assumed those were campfire stories and I wasn't able to dig up much credible information one way or another on that one.
I've recently been in touch with Vermont folklorist and Bennington alum, Andy Kolovos, and he wrote, “It is very much a white colonial kind of narrative. One that combines things like guilt with romanticism to generate a narrative that explains why things happen to white people. So I have not done any real inquiry into those stories about Bennington College. I treat them more like Bennington College, folklore tradition, rather than anything tied to the history of the land, or even the broader folklore of Vermont. This is not to invalidate the notion of an insular folklore among students at the college. That's real and cool.”
Okay. So it may or may not be true, but there is absolutely no question that the Bennington campus possesses some extremely intense energy and I'm not here to prove or disprove any of the lore.
I just want to hear people's firsthand experiences, and so let's hear from someone who swears he saw a being named Goat Boy, who has always been associated with the Four Winds and the Native American burial ground.
Alex Pintair:
My name's Alex Pintair. I started at Bennington in 1992. The first time I saw Goat Boy was probably mid September. And there was some sort of a party. It might have actually have been a birthday party for me. I think my mom sent down a cake or something and we're all hanging out. And at some point a friend of mine and I just decided to step outside, get some air. We had walked towards the center green and we were just sort of talking and kind of walking slowly along and then we were just standing there. And it was one of those fall nights where it was cloudy and a little bit chilly and there was, breeze, there was always breezes going through there. And as we're standing there, it almost seemed like if you can imagine fog that just sort of gets a little bit more solid.
And over across the green up against one of the other dorms, it was almost like a patch of fog started to coalesce and get a little bit more solid. As it happened I nudge my friend and was like, “Are you seeing that?” And he thought he could, but he wasn't sure. And my dad had taught me when I was a kid that when it's nighttime and it's dark out, you can always see things better if you look just to the side of them.
Something about the rods and cones in your eyes, get tired during the day, so at night, your peripheral vision can be a little stronger. And so I told my friend to do that and then he could see it. And as we're kind of watching this thing it sort of slowly sort of forms that were looking at this skinny pale white body of what you would think of as a ten-year-old boy, essentially.
And then the head was the skull of a goat. These big black cavernous eyes, you know, this pale skinny boy body, it was kind of hopping from one foot to the other back and forth, but in a way where it was so slow, it like stayed up in the air longer than would be humanly possible.
And he had something, holding something in each hand sort of stick shape, but I don't, I don't know what it was. And we stood there and just watched this happening for a minute or so, and in shock and silence. And then I remember I said something like, “Are you seeing this?” And he's like, “Yeah!” And then I broke eye contact essentially, when we looked back it was gone.
So, of course, you know, we start walking across the green to like, see what's going on and we get closer and closer to it. There's nothing there. And we're just standing there sort of in the center of the green and looking around. And then I see something moving down at the edge of the green down where the edge of the world is there.
And it's, it's the same thing. It's like this fog just becomes a little bit more dense and suddenly there he was, and he's just slowly dancing back and forth. And my friend sees it as well. And we start walking again, down the green now towards the edge of the world and the closer we get, it just goes away and it's not like I saw it disappear.
It's just like, maybe I looked away, maybe I blinked. I don’t know, it was just gone. So then we get to the edge of the world. And if you remember that there was like a little Stonewall and it stopped being flat and it dipped down downhill and there was these fields and over on the left was this grove of pine trees.
And again, same thing and there is, and these sort of slowly dancing back and forth. And that's when I kind of got shivers. It had seemed all almost exciting when we had seen them the first time. And then the thought crossed my mind, you know, it's, it's leading us somewhere and I don't think I want to go where it's leading us.
Right where he was dancing down by those pine trees there's actually an old graveyard down there. So I was like, “Yeah, we should, we got to stop. We're not going down there.” And he's like, “Yeah, I agree.” And we went back, you know, back to the party. And we're a little bit freaked out. And I remember talking to, I think his name was Jason, who was the upperclassmen, and we told them what we saw and he's like, oh, you saw Goat Boy.
And we're like, “What is up with that?” And he said, “Well, the story goes that back when this was when the land that Bennington College now sat on was Native American land, they said that the Four Winds met right in the commons area. And they said that because of that, the land was cursed. And so whenever there was someone in the tribe who, you know, had gone insane or had killed someone or had done something evil, they would bury them there on the cursed land.”
And so apparently Goat Boy was the specter or the ghost of someone that had been buried there.
Luz Fleming:
So that sounds pretty fantastical, but I will say this. I hung out with Alex a lot freshman year and he definitely was not looking for attention or wanting to make up stories all around. He was a very sober-minded dude. And I remember him telling me that story right after it happened and he was truly fascinated by it, but it's now been almost 30 years and his story hasn't changed one bit.
Another piece of lore is around the Jennings mansion, which was built in 1903 and then converted into the music building for Bennington College in 1939. It is without a doubt, one of the creepiest old buildings on campus. So it's no surprise that it's always been considered haunted.
Raven:
And then of course, Jennings, I was there by myself most of the time, three, four in the morning. And I did often hear strange, just random piano sounds. It almost felt like I was imagining it. Or like voices or little singing sounds creaking, just all kinds of weird noises that you don't know if it's just an old house or something else going on.
Kerry Hart:
And so mostly slammed doors, but definitely sounds where like there's doors opening and shutting, but there's no one there, you know, like you're going through and you turn around and there’s door shuts and there's literally no one there. And sometimes that would happen to me in the daytime on the weekends.
I'd be curious, I go knock and there would be no one in there. So I was like, this building is just fucking weird.
Brian Sangudi:
With the super thick walls, um, the outside walls and then just old carpeting and like sound was weird in the building in general. Like wind passing through, there were some hallways, especially in the basement where we just never went.
You just, you don't even look in that direction, you’re like I don't even want to know what's going on over there, but yeah, I remember, uh, how crazy that place was.
Jeremy Hulley:
There's some weird stuff in the basement in Jennings. So there was a room that was mostly locked. It had actual bedrock coming through the floor and we spent a lot of time hanging out in that room and it was just eery.
I often had a sense, I don't even know what to call it like a powerful presence or something in that room.
Luz Fleming:
Yeah. The Jennings basement was very creepy. And I would know because I had my music studio down there. I was practicing one time and had to leave because the sensation of a presence in the room was so strong. A friend and I once decided to go down the main hallway in the basement that led to the boiler room.
There were storage rooms on either side that had like mannequins and horse heads and clown masks and shit, I guess, props for mold productions. But it was so bizarre. And over the top that we just turned right around and got the hell out of there.
But the basement, wasn't the only part of Jennings that seemed more inhabited than the rest of the building.
Maddy Wood:
I have heard about the third floor being the most haunted part of the building and that fully checks out.
Melinda Castriatta Avellino:
Well, the only things that I thought were spooky, there were the third floor and I hated it. I didn't like it. I felt like that was in like a ship, you know. All, it was, it was just a hallway with a bunch of doors.
Shawnette Sulker:
But the third floor, something was going on up there. And the hallway itself, I feel like the hallway itself was a little bit creepy.
Luz Fleming:
And through the process of collecting these stories, one room in particular has emerged as the most haunted room in the house.
Melinda Castriatta Avellino:
And I remember it sort of vaguely when I come up to the top floor, I would go straight to the end of the hall and it was the room to the left.
Kate:
Yep. That was it. It was the farthest east top floor with one of those gabled windows looking out over the backyard.
Lisa Sciandra:
Yeah, the one I'm thinking of was on the top floor at the end, it was kind of a corner room. If I recall correctly, it had kind of, um, sloped ceilings in the room.
I'm Lisa Sciandra and I was at Bennington from fall 1991 to spring 1993. It was my freshman year and I was going with a friend, but to Jennings. I played viola, she played violin, she was a sophomore. So we went together, it was late at night, at least nine, maybe ten. And we trudged through the forest up to Jennings.
And we went up to the top floor, the third floor, where it's just a long hallway of practice rooms. And she wanted me to use this one practice room in particular. It was on the corner in the top, had kind of slanted ceilings and it was pretty large. So she left me to practice and she went, I don't know where to practice, somewhere else.
And I just felt uneasy from the moment I walked into the room.
I pulled out my instrument and I started practicing and I just felt this. It's like a presence and an energy. Like, I didn't quite feel like I was alone and I was playing my instrument and I kept feeling something behind me and I kept stopping mid bow-stroke and I was whipping my head around to look. And of course there was nothing there. Uh, at least not that I could see.
So I was playing some more and just kept feeling that and kept looking around and started feeling more and more spooked. Then at one point out of the corner of my eye, I felt like I saw two hands in kind of a prayer position that were sort of opening and closing, kind of in slow motion almost.
And I went to look and there was this lamp. It was this big, heavy, old lamp. And at the base of, it was a brass eagle with its wings pointing straight up and coming together kind of like prayer hands. So I thought, okay, it's just the lamp. But I swear, every time I turned and I even repositioned myself, so I could see that it was just the lamp, but every time I turned and started playing, it looked like it was moving and I kept stopping and looking, and it was just the lamp, but over and over, those hands seem to be moving.
And finally, my friend came back and I was relieved and glad to leave there and she said to me, “So what did you think of the practice room?” And I said, “Well, really, I, I felt scared and I felt like I was seeing things.” And she just laughed and she said, “Yeah, that's the most haunted room in the whole building. I was wondering if you were going to pick up on it.”
Luz Fleming:
Gee thanks, and I had almost the exact same experience in that room as a freshman. I tried to practice piano late one night and just could not because the energy was so distracting. Did I see movement out of the corner of my eye as well? I can't say for sure, but as Lisa told her story, it did seem eerily familiar.
I never set foot in that room again.
And then of course there are countless stories of the ghost in Jennings.
Kate:
So I had a friend who was a beautiful singer. He had the most exquisite singing voice and he told me that one time he was upstairs in a practice room, one of the rooms facing the back lawn, sitting at the piano and singing by himself in the room.
And he happened to look over to the mirror, hanging on the wall. And behind him, he saw an old woman sitting in the chair, just listening to him sing. And he turned around. And of course there was no one sitting in the chair, but she clearly was enjoying listening.
Wendy Rosenfield:
You're alone in a room. And there's a woman like sitting and watching people play music in Jennings, there's like, like in the corner of the room and she's in white. And that's the one story that I've heard over and over again from several people.
Kate:
Then I had another friend who was practicing alone at night in Jennings and the power went out in the whole house. And as far as he knew he was alone in the house.
And so he was going to, um, was going to go down the stairs to the basement, I guess and try to find the electrical panel and circuit breakers and turn the power back on. And as he was going down the corridor or towards the stairs, he saw a woman flattened against the wall, just watching him go by in the dark, you know, and the way he described it, you know, was that she was sort of, you know, playfully, you know, hiding herself against the wall and watching him go past.
And he did go running, screaming down the hill.
Luz Fleming:
Many people say it was Mrs. Lila Jennings herself, the original occupant of the mansion. There are stories that she committed suicide or fell off the balcony and has been haunting the place ever since. Other stories say it may have been her daughter or granddaughter walking the halls at night and spoiler alert, Mrs. Lila Jennings did not commit suicide in the Jennings mansion, nor did her daughter Elizabeth or her granddaughter Elmira. By all accounts, they all died off campus of old age or natural causes.
But there's no question that the mansion seemed to be occupied by a female presence who often made herself as loud and visible as possible. She almost seemed like a bit of a prankster playing tricks on the students in the building. And I found myself saying out loud more than once that I met no harm and just hoped to practice in her space for a few hours.
Kerry Hart:
I remember going in and be like, “Hey, I'm here at your building. What's up? Going up the stairs.”
You know, and I was not really there to play piano, I went to just vocalize, so there was always a little bit of feeling of like, you're definitely going to hear me and it's going to be me. It's not going to be like generic sounds. It's gonna be my sound, so…
Luz Fleming:
One of the other common occurrences in Jennings was the sound of instruments coming from rooms when no one else was in the building. Often piano, definitely on more than one occasion, there's piano playing. And I don't think it's a student. And I like, I definitely remember one time where I was looking for it. So the looking forward it thing I absolutely did. And a couple of times I would knock and no one would answer and I would open the door and there'd be no one in there. And like, it's not like the piano playing stopped or something. It wasn't anything, that direct, but just the sensation of like, who else is here with me?
Because it doesn't feel like a student. And also it wasn't like practicing sounding. It sounded like playing. It didn't sound like somebody noodling to work it out. It sounded like someone playing, who knew what they were doing.
Jeremy Hulley:
My name is Jeremy Hulley. I started at Bennington in spring of 1992, graduated in 1994. My closest friend from high school had come up to visit. So we go to Jennings and is probably one o'clock in the morning, one or one thirty. He and I are standing in the entry area. I'd never been in the music library, so I don’t know, so it sounds to me like there was piano playing like live piano playing in the music library. So I just sort of walked around the desk and like knocked on the door and then the piano playing stopped.
And then it started, started with, it sounded like the office at the end of that first floor hallway. And so we're just like, I remember looking at my friend David and saying, “Hey, I'm just really curious about this here. Let's see if we can go find out who’s here.”
So we walked down to the end of the hall and it's, it kind of stopped again.
Started up. it sounded like, so we walk up to the second floor and we walked down a couple of practice rooms and it sounds like it's coming out of this practice room. We open the door and the piano stops and I don't have, like, I don't have any sense. We weren't scared. It was just kind of weird. So we walked back out into the corridor and it started again.
At this point he and I are like, “This is really, this is really strange.” So we try it one more time and eventually ended up on the third floor and I remember the two of us just walking back and forth on the third floor, having no ability anymore, to be able to tell where the, where the piano playing is coming from. And at that point I was like, “Forget it. Let’s go.”
And so one of the conversations that I remember having, I remember grabbing Stephanie Bennett the next morning and saying, “Hey, is there a piano in the music library?” And she like, looks at me like I have three heads she’s like, “No, there’s no piano in the music library.” I’m like, “That is super weird because when we were standing in that open space in Jennings the loudest piano we heard, sounded like it was coming out of the music library.”
Luz Fleming:
Here's Christine Howard Sandoval reading something that Terry Lewin wrote to me.
Christine Howard Sandoval:
So I took electronic music one of the first years it was offered. The studio had a special locked door and it was always a pain in the ass to get studio time. So I'd go up in the middle of the night. One night I made the trek up to Jennings, I opened the studio door, turned everything on, got my stuff set up and I could hear the faint sound of a piano playing.
I assumed it was Todd Tarantino and I set off checking room by room. Nobody, nobody, and the piano music sounded so distant yet distinct. I checked every damn room in Jennings and I couldn't even tell what direction it was coming from.
I only knew that I checked everywhere and couldn't find anyone, nothing ever scared me at Bennington, not the walk to Jennings with bats, not the weirdness of people tripping balls everywhere. I'm not sure I can say that this night and Jennings scared me. At least not in a way that made me panicky, but I definitely wasn't comfortable.
Oh. And I'd asked the Jennings regulars if they were up there practicing that night. I only know a few people who can play piano like that. None of them were practicing.
Luz Fleming:
Before we head back to campus, there is one last Jennings story you all need to hear.
Shawnette Sulker:
Hey, my name is Shawnette Sulker. I went to Bennington from 1991 to 1995 and I was a music major and I definitely practiced many, many nights and days in Jennings, and now I am an opera singer. This particular night I decided to go up there, but my usual cohorts were not interested and I borrowed a friend's bike and rode up to Jennings.
Yeah. Went up to the third floor where that always felt super creepy and I was there alone and practicing and the longer I was there, the more I kind of felt like something else was there on the floor with me. And I kept kind of like, you know, doing the turn and check, like what's behind you. And, um, the longer I stayed, the more, this feeling kept growing and I started getting really creeped out and a little bit afraid and no one else was in the whole building.
And so I decided, okay, I'm going to cut this practice short and leave and gathered my things. I, you know, had my bag with my music. I had like a suede brown jacket on and I went down the corridor and down the stairs and as I was leaving I felt like something was following me. And the faster I move the faster it felt like something was behind me.
And I would look, I wouldn't see anything, but I kept feeling this energy and I just almost was running out of the building. By the time I got to the door and I jumped on the bike and started peddling and I felt something chasing me and I, I kept pedaling and pedaling and like freaking, freaking out and it chased me all the way down the hill through the trees.
And probably it wasn't until I got closer to the dorms that I felt like I wasn't being chased anymore. So I went back to my friend's room whose bike I had borrowed. And I was like, “Oh my God.” You know, I was like vibrating, “Oh, I felt like something was chasing me. It was so weird!” You know and I'm telling her, and I'm taking off my jacket and as I'm taking my jacket off, I see slime all the way down the back of my jacket. And I'm like, “What the fuck!?” And I know for sure it wasn't there when I, there was nothing on the back of my jacket when I went up there. There was nothing when I put it on and then I'm trying to think logically, what could it be like, was there tree setup or something? Somehow something fell on the jacket as I was riding? But nothing made sense and it wasn't like it was one or two little drops of something.
It was like fingers that had gone, like, that and it had hardened, it was suede jacket it hardened and to this day, I can't, I can't explain that. And if you've seen Ghostbusters, maybe it was ectoplasm or whatever, but I don't know what it was, but I never went up there alone by myself ever again.
Luz Fleming:
What's up everybody, this is Luz, the producer of Yard Tales. I want to take a minute to ask you for a favor. A show like this takes a lot of time and effort to produce. We're not a big team. It's mostly just me. We don't have any sponsors contributing money or influencing what I make or what I say. This is independent media.
If that's something you support, please help me to keep making this show and providing it to you for free, by donating to Yard Tales. Even one dollar helps, but if only a small percentage of listeners gave the price of one of those big Blue Benn brunches. Well, you get the picture. Just go to yardtales.live/donate and click on the button that says “donate”.
Now that's yardtales.live/donate. Any amount is really appreciated. Thanks so much. And now let's see what's going on back at campus.
Shawnette Sulker:
One night in Dewey, in my dorm room, I had fallen asleep and I think I woke up is all I can say. It felt like I woke up and I couldn't move. I was completely paralyzed. It felt like my limbs were being kind of held in place on the bed. And the only thing that could move were my eyes, I couldn't make any sound.
And I saw something in my room, the room was dark, but I saw something above me in the room that was like coming down on me and I couldn't scream. I couldn't do anything. Petrified out of my mind and it was coming closer and closer and I feel like I just blacked out. And I felt like it wanted to harm me or, or do something actually sexual to me. And I just blacked out and, when I came to again, I could move.
But that feeling of fear and terror stayed with me for, for quite some time to the point where I was like afraid to go to sleep at night because I was afraid that that would happen again. So I mean, that's something, you know, you could say I was dreaming and maybe I thought I woke up, but I was still dreaming, but I I've never had a dream or a feeling like that or a experience like that ever again.
That was in Dewey. That was my dorm, it was on the first floor and yeah, it was pretty gross, not a good feeling.
Kate:
My name is Kate. Now let me preface this by saying I've had night terrors, so to speak all my life since I was a young child, but they were always just visual. But in this particular room in Welling, I had a physical experience that has been described to me as a night hag or old hag sleep paralysis experience, but it was really freaky.
I woke up in the morning and I could see the sunlight coming through the windows and I could hear the kids outside on the lawn playing some ball game, but I was paralyzed. I couldn't move. And I had been woken by the distinctly physical sensation of a body lying on me and a tongue in my mouth. And for quite a while I was unable to move.
And, like I said, I was aware of the light coming in the sounds from outside. And I don't remember how, I don't remember what happened to make me finally be able to move and get up. But it was the only experience of my life when the night terror took on a physical aspect.
Melinda Castriatta Avallino:
So I'm Melinda Castriatta Avallino. I was at Bennington from ’83 to ’87. I was a music major. I played piano and wrote composition. I thought I was having a dream one night and this has never happened to me in the dorm before ever never had an experience like this. I still have like very vivid dreams at times during my life. So this was like one of those, it was a vivid dream as I call it, which means it's one that I like completely remember and never forget. It was really strange and feels extremely real.
So I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought that somebody had come in my room and I sat up on my bed and my bed was in the corner of the far wall. And as the bed like came down the wall, there was a window towards the end of it. And so I felt like somebody had come through my window while I was sleeping and I sat up and I see this guy at the end of my bed and he looks like a vampire to me, but whatever reason, I don't know exactly what that means. Like, I don't know if he had fangs.
I don't know if he had a widow's peak. I don't know if he had a cape. I can't remember why, but in my head I thought he was a vampire and like I never watched vampire movies. Like I was not, you know, into anything like that, whatever. And for some reason, this person was sitting on the end of my bed and I started to feel like they were leaning towards me like they wanted to kiss me.
And I was like, “Whoa.” And I feel like that's when I woke up, I think as I started to lean back into my pillows behind me to try to get away from them. And as that happened, I literally saw them go back out the window, which is why I thought they came in through the window.
Cause they left through the window. I literally saw them fly out the window, which was closed. It was weird. And then when I was like fully up, I turned the lights on in my room and I got up and I noticed that the very bottom of my window was actually open a little bit, which was also strange because I never opened my windows.
I didn't even know how to lift them or do anything with them. The window was actually slightly ajar and then I shut it and it was winter. So I felt like the cold air coming in, I never would have opened the windows. That was another weird experience that I had before I left and I always felt that it was like a real experience that this person, whoever it was, this thing came in my room. Never experienced that anywhere else on the campus ever.
Maddy Wood:
My name is Maddy Wood. I'm a senior at Bennington. I'm studying music, performance and composition. I'm a singer songwriter. I have attended Bennington from 2018 and I'm graduating this spring, so 2018 to 2022. I definitely have had some unusual experiences on Bennington campus in regards to like, I guess ghosts.
I had a roommate who she was my roommate freshman and sophomore year, and her boyfriend also was on campus and so she would stay in his room a lot. So I was in the room a lot by myself and I would continuously get visited by what felt like the same thing and it was very often, but it was only when it was just me. Which was like a little disturbing.
Oh, the first time I really remember it was, it was first term my freshman year and there was one day, uh, during the week where my roommate and I wouldn't see each other all day cause I had an 8am and then I would come back and she had a 10am and we just had class at opposite times all day. So we wouldn't run into each other.
And I remember coming back from my class and I got into bed and then I only, this only started happening to me at Bennington, but I would get this like weird kind of like sleep paralysis where I was definitely awake and mostly conscious, but I couldn't move. So I was taking a nap and I was facing the wall, which so my back was to the door of our room at the time.
And I heard her like, come back into the room, which I remember noting being like, “Oh, that's kinda weird.” Because I don't see her today. So like, I wonder why she's here, but I couldn't roll over. And so I kinda, I guess just like went back to sleep, but then eventually I was able to like move. I just remember feeling, being like, “Why can't I move right now?” It was like very weird.
And I rolled over and then I saw what I thought was her like asleep in her bed. So I was like, oh, maybe she doesn't feel well or whatever. Um, but I definitely saw somebody in the bed and then I saw her at dinner and I was like, “Oh, why were you home this morning? Like, are you okay?”
And she was like, “Oh, I haven't been back to our room since I left this morning. Like, what are you talking about?” So then I was like, “Well, what. Well, who did I see in your bed?” And I told her, and she was like, “Oh, absolutely not. Do not like that.” And that happened a couple of times, not that exact scenario, but like we moved rooms the next term, unrelated, we just wanted a bigger room and it started happening again.
It was very like, I would be asleep except, so this time, second semester I'd be asleep and I would feel again like that. I couldn't move, but I was awake, but I couldn't roll over. I couldn't move any parts of my body, but I started feeling some something, or somebody's like touching me.
Like very often I would have somebody holding my hand and I felt someone like sitting, I could feel someone like sitting on my bed. Like I felt the bed come down at the end. And like, somebody would like put their hand on my leg and it was like, it was weird because I didn't necessarily feel like it was like scary.
Like I remember I definitely could feel like I was being touched, but it didn't feel like threatening in any way, but I definitely remember being like, somebody is sitting on my bed and like holding me and I thought that was, um, yeah, that was weird. And I also saw like a weird face in the wall on my roommate's side of the bed.
It stopped happening. I would tell her about it and then we did some kind of like, she did some kind of weird, like, I don't know if it was a spell or what, but, um, yeah and then it never happened again after that.
Melanie Fraser:
So I put my covers on and I had my lights turned off and when I was in bed almost about to go to sleep. All of a sudden I looked to the bottom of my bed and there was this weird white ghostly like thing, but it wasn't, it wasn't scary except for the fact that, you know, suddenly my covers come off and I do not think it was a reason to scare me.
You know, it was just supposed to be more mellow like I got your back, like, I mean, I’m here, It's good. I feel like she was trying to be calming in a word way. It was not supposed to scare the shit out of me. It was almost more comforting.
Kate:
Downstairs in the Welling pine room there were three girls living and separately they started experiencing a presence in the room and it seemed to be a soothing, gentle female presence. They would feel, for example, a hand stroking their forehead, and sometimes the windows would be closed, but the blinds inside would shake violently like in the wind, but the windows were closed and they were too embarrassed to talk to each other about it.
But they finally compared notes and realized that they all have been experiencing this presence of the room. And they also said something about like the chair rocking or there was a feeling of somebody sitting in a rocking chair, even though there wasn't a rocking chair in the room. So they decided to, for whatever reason, they decided to exercise this spirit, although she seemed to be friendly.
So they brought in this other girl from another house who was supposedly able to communicate with spirits. And she brought in, she was wearing this crystal around her neck and she went in there with these girls and they were, you know, she was commanding the spirit to leave. And all of us who were in the house were witness to them, running, screaming out of the room through the living room, went out the front door and saying that this angry energy had like burst into the crystal that she was wearing around her neck and was really upset that, that they were trying to get it to leave.
And that was the end of their exorcism attempts.
Maddy Wood:
I live in Bingham and I hear a lot about one particular ghost in our house, but like the story is that it was some, someone that lived in Bingham and she, she was doing an art project in the basement over field work term, and like accidentally killed herself because she was like using like her own blood or something like that.
And now she just like, thinks that she still goes here and she's like forever, like 20 years old and just like, wants to hang out with all of us. And that's why she's always around. I remember hearing that a lot freshman year. And then my friend who was a senior when I was a freshman, did like us like a seance in the open room being like you can't, I don't know, just kind of like stop, like you can be here, but stop like touching people and showing up in a weird way.
Robin Decker:
So my name is Robin Decker and I attended Bennington from 1980 to 1984. I was a music and German major and music was piano and voice. So I did have an experience in Stokes, which is where I had resided for four years. Between my freshman and sophomore year I went from a double in Stokes to a single and Stokes, very excited about that.
And over the summer, the person who had had the room before me was killed unexpectedly. And I read about it going between two jobs I was working that summer as I ran to get coffee at the local 7-Eleven and the person was on the cover of the paper. When the fall came I moved into the room and I do what I think most women do, which is clean the room. Cleaned it from top to bottom, swept, flipped the mattress, make sure there's nothing scary in the room. Make sure everything's clean, line the dresser drawers, put your things away on the desk, hang up a few curtains and make the room what you want it to be for the year.
And not long after I moved into the room, I found some pesos on the floor of my closet and I went, “Hmmmmm…” Didn't catch those when I was cleaning, unusual. I did clean the closet. It struck me as odd cause I had cleaned and I had swept and, and I had not seen any faces when I did that, nor did I have any pesos myself.
So I picked up the pesos and I put them in a little dish on my dresser. So three days later I went to go to bed and I fluffed up my pillow and then under my pillow were some pesos like, okay, very, very funny. Who’s playing a joke on me. I was sure that my friends were messing with me. Okay. I'll lock the door and I'll lock the window to the room, even though I didn't usually do that.
Stokes was a very safe place and full of good people and so went to class, came back, didn't find anything the first day, but kept doing it for a couple of days. Locking up when I left and closing the window. Came back and found more pesos. This continued on and off for the entire year I was in the room. I would find them on the window sill.
I would find them in my coffee mug. I would find them in my shoe. I would find them in my drawers. Just usually about three or four at a time, could not explain it. Still was trying to figure out who had access to the room and had to have a key who could have gotten into the room to drop them. Nothing came out in the entire year.
Many of those friends are still close friends of mine to this day. I'm very, very lucky that my engine crew are my special posse today and we all keep in touch and our children have grown up and consider each other cousins. And it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. And no one has ever been able to explain pesos.
Sibyl Kempson:
My name is Sibyl Kempson. I was a student at Bennington from 1991 until I graduated in 1995. I was a major in theater and I still am a theater practitioner. I write plays and I make performance. I always felt like there was a kind of darker energy there. The number of people who are getting carted off for kind of going off the deep end and having psychotic episodes and learning what I've learned in terms of like stuff like ritual practice, for example, there was something there that wasn't visible that affected us while we were there.
And I mean, I don't think it's an accident that so many creative people were going there and It was almost like amplified there, that rift for me. And when you describe going into that closet and there's mannequins and clowns and horse heads, it's, that's almost like an iconic graphic image for me of, of what was going on there.
And I had so many strange experiences that I couldn't explain that couldn't be explained in the language of our culture.
Maddy Wood:
Uh, yeah I feel like, honestly, I say this to a lot of people when I'm trying to describe being here, I feel like it fosters like only the most intense feelings. Like I don't think I've ever felt neutral here in my entire life, um, that I've been here.
Like I'm either really happy and I'm like, yeah, everything's great and I feel good about everything and everyone around me seems happy as well, or I feel like so in like intensely suffocated and like, this is the worst place ever. I feel like we all feed off of each other's energy so crazily, like whenever people are feeling a little bit off, like everyone picks up on that.
And then we just seem to have a collective like horrible mood or everyone's really on edge or everyone's having a good time. Like, it feels only extreme all the time.
Kate:
Right. And you know, we're a bunch of young, impressionable suggestible people, you know, there's a lot of drama that goes along with being at Bennington.
It's a dramatic place and we used to have a term called “The Dome of Insanity.” Which was what we would, what we would say when there would be like a mood that would grip the entire campus, we would go around and be like, “Are you freaking out? Are you freaking out?” Yeah, it's so weird. And there'll be like this dark gloom that would descend.
And this kind of feeling of a shared madness that seemed really widespread at a given time and we said, “Oh, it's the Dome of Insanity.”
Sibyl Kempson:
It was very strange. It was very disturbing and definitely one of those times where it was like, this is, it was not normal, but it wasn't until after I got out of school and that kind of thing wasn't happening once or twice a year or once or twice a semester that I realized I could step back and look at the larger pattern.
Wow. That happened a lot. Someone is ranting. Someone is really struggling. In a way that is a complete departure from their everyday personality.
Luz Fleming:
All of that is very true and it's an intense space to navigate at that age, but it's also a space with almost no boundaries where all of the tools for self-discovery are laid out and ready to be utilized. I'm not going to name drop, but Bennington is famous for turning out some of the great writers, musicians, actors, and creative thinkers of our time.
And I personally gained more knowledge in life lessons there than I ever could have imagined from my faculty, my peers, and from the ghost in Jennings.
Huge thanks to Alex Pintair, Lisa Sciandra, Jeremy Hulley, Robin Decker, Wendy Rosenfield, Kate, Melanie Fraser, Melinda Castriatta Avallino, Sibyl Kempson, Shawnette Sulker, Raven, Terry Lewin, Kerry Hart, Brian Sanguti and Maddy Wood. We're so lucky that you shared your stories with us for this episode of Yard Tales.
Thanks to Luke Taylor and Andy Kolovos for your help. And thanks to Karen Mu for the amazing piano playing.
And thank you for joining us today. Yard Tales is produced by myself and executive produced by Jacob Bronstein. Andy Outis is the design director, production assistance by Davis Lloyd, additional original music by James Ash, Jacob Bronstein, and myself. Shout out to Andy Cotton for the dope theme music.
Thanks for letting Jacob Bronstein put a spooky remix on it for the show. If you like Yard Tales, be sure to follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts and be sure to use Apple Podcasts to rate and review Yard Tales, because it really helps point more listeners to the show. You can find more information, images, and additional audio at yardtales.live and check us out on Instagram @yardtales and Facebook at Yard Tales Podcast.
If you want to leave feedback or reach out for any reason, send an email to info@yardtales.live, and be sure to tune in next week. When Claw Money tells some of her wildly entertaining Yard Tales.
Claw Money:
Who knew CHICO was so like completely like deeply embedded in the Lower East Side gang life, where like dudes were showing up to my bartending job and pulling guns on like the staff there being like, “Where the fuck is CLAW!?”