Two undergraduate students sat hunched over their notes in the Business Office of the University of Michigan Intramural Sports Building on a Tuesday evening in November. Midterms season was upon them, which meant a scarcity of spots in the libraries. As RecSports employees, the two were taking advantage of their after-hour access to the building and studying at desks on the second floor.
At 11:30 PM, the boy sighed and stretched. The building had emptied of gym-users upon closing 30 minutes ago, and the two had been studying for a while. He excused himself to the bathroom for a study break and his friend nodded in acknowledgement without looking up from her work. She, too, was tired and ready to retire for the evening, but needed to keep going.
Suddenly, she looked up. She’d thought she’d heard something. She put down her pencil and listened closely—it sounded as if there were girls talking outside the Business Office door. She glanced down at her phone; the screen read 11:40. All patrons should have vacated the building over half an hour ago, and the Building Supervisors on closing shift also should have finished their work and left the premises by now.
She was a Building Supervisor at the IMSB, and if there was someone lingering in the building after hours it was her job to make sure they left. She rose from her seat and opened the door. There was no one there. She peeked her head out into the hall and looked both left and right. Darkness looked back at her, the main hall just barely lit by the dim overhead lamp. No one was there.
She shook her head and closed the door behind her, returning to her seat. “It’s late,” she told herself. “I probably just imagined it.” She quickly settled back into her chair and forgot about it.
Her friend pushed back into the Main Office, coming back from the bathroom.
“Hey, who were you talking to?” he said.
She stared at him.
He looked at her strangely and asked, “Is someone else here?”
“No,” she said, finding her words. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought I heard girls talking, so I assumed someone was up here with you,” he said.
“No,” she said again. “I thought I heard girls’ voices too but I checked and no one was there. I wasn’t talking to anybody.”
For a moment, they just stared at each other, eyes wide as the facts settled in. What were the odds that both of them, from separate areas of the building, had heard the same thing? If there was no one else in the building, where had the voices come from? Who or what had the voices come from?
My co-worker told me this story a few days later. I am also a RecSports employee, and had worked the closing shift on that Tuesday night. She asked me if the other closing supervisor and I had stayed late past our shift for any reason. She was searching for an explanation of the girls’ voices after building close. I thought back to the date, and recalled that I had not. Upon closing the building, we had promptly departed around 11:15 PM. The voices and strange sounds had been heard around 11:40 PM. The story was bizarre and freaky, and I didn’t forget it.
During finals week, the IM Building functioned on fewer operating hours due to the reduced use of facilities by students, cooped up once again in libraries and various study spots on campus. So I personally took advantage of my employee after-hours access to get a good workout in and de-stress. Since the building closed at 7 pm during finals week, I’d go over around 8 pm for a nice jog. It was creepy enough to be in the building alone, but even creepier to leave it by myself, switching each light off and finding myself in total darkness as I speed-walked my way out.
Nonetheless, it usually wasn’t a big deal. But one day, I hopped off the elliptical and was dutifully wiping down my machine when I heard girls’ voices, talking to each other. They sounded sort of echo-ey and hollow, like an old recording. I froze, remembering the story my friend had told me. No one was near me. The sound stopped and I grabbed my belongings and sprinted down three flights of stairs, out the front door of the IMSB and all the way to my nearby home on Packard Street. I didn’t switch off a single light and my heart was beating so fast.
Completed in 1928 and said to be “the forerunner of all campus recreational centers in the country,” the IMSB was the first collegiate intramural sports building in America, and has sustained extensive renovation in order to maintain historical value as well as practical day-to-day use. Despite its lengthy 87 years of age, I looked into Michigan records and came up with no reports of death or marked incident citing the location as the Intramural Building.
Looking back, maybe my finals-stressed, caffeine-riddled mind imagined the voices out of some desire to break up the monotony of finals week. And maybe my co-workers were also experiencing some type of exam-induced hallucination when they heard the voices. Or, maybe there really is a ghost hanging around Michigan’s Intramural Sports Building.
So as you all move forward with your 2015 New Year’s Resolution to get in shape, head on over to the IMSB and maybe you’ll make a new friend or two.
