I live in St. Augustine, FL, where I attend Flagler College. While the dorm I live in is said to be haunted by numerous ghosts, my friends and I have had very few encounters. There are many ghost stories surrounding the girls dorm, the Ponce de Leon, the first of several hotels built by our namesake, Henry Flagler. Flagler himself is said to haunt the building, as well as the woman in blue, a woman who fell to her death after running from the love who denied her, as well as a small boy said to wander the halls, knocking on doors and making mischief. None are at all malevolent. After living there for a few months, many students have gathered their own slew of stories. These are the ones I've gathered since move in in August.
Two days after move in, my roommates, neighbors, and I were in my room when we heard a shout from down the hall. The six of us ran to the source, where a girl was standing in the middle of her room. Every poster, cork board, picture, and wall decoration were laying on the floor as if they had just fallen on the floor. A mirror had fallen so forcefully it had shattered. According to her, she had just finished putting everything up when it had all fallen simultaneously. We all went back to our rooms for the night, slightly spooked by the occurrence.
About a month into school, I was with my friend Brianna in her room, along with her roommate and a neighbor. We were discussing the event early in the year, and I was complaining that, as an avid ghost enthusiast, that had been my only experience so far at my supposedly haunted school. Suddenly, the four of us shivered, and I heard an indistinct muttering, as if the speaker were leaning down next to my ear. I jumped and spun around, but no one was there. It was definitely a male voice, unlikely due to the strict rules against the opposite gender in dorms. I was giddy the rest of the night.
An early morning in October was one of the strangest encounters was early morning in November, where I and two of my roommates were woken by the sound of every faucet (two sinks and a shower) being turned on forcefully. No one else was in the room, and all were dead asleep.
Almost everyone in the building has encountered the phantom knocking of the little boy. And of course, we all like claim ghost interference when wifi acts up. But that doesn't change the fact that simply asking Henry to cut it out fixes the problem immediately.
The most recent, as well as my favorite, did not occur at the dorm. Brianna and I were in a cemetery, where she was working on a project for history. She had to take several pictures of gravestones from different eras, and I was serving as her ride. I settled down with a book underneath a tree while she took her pictures, prepared for the the thirty or so minutes she said it would take. About ten minutes in, a cat comes from underneath the main office building, walks over, and sits down on my lap. For the next twenty minutes, we sit together, him asleep, me reading and scratching his head. It gets late, and the caretaker comes over to me to let us know that he's going to have to close the gates soon. As he walks up, he says, "I see you met Jack."
"Yeah, he's really sweet. Is he yours?"
"Jack doesn't really belong to anyone. He hasn't for a very long time."
"Oh? That's terrible. Does no one take care of him?" At this point, Jack wakes up, stretches, and walks away. "He doesn't need to be taken care of." It is at this point that we both look at Jack, who literally disappears.
When I asked her later, Brianna said that no matter when she looked, the entire time we were there, she never saw a cat on my lap.
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