Imagine yourself walking through Ridenbaugh Hall late one evening. The hallways of the former dorm, once home to the University of Idaho’s female students, are typically filled with practicing music majors but are now eerily silent. You may feel something watching you intensely across the echoing corridors. You might hear footsteps, maybe a giggle or a faint scream, that make your neck hairs tingle.
You turn to the hallway to find it desolate, but you know you simply cannot be alone. Maybe you’re taking a late stroll through the Arboretum, and you once again feel that someone may be much too close for comfort. You hear crunches of twigs behind you, but it is again desolate, leaving you scared and equally confused.
Back in 1887, Moscow made its debut. Not soon after, in 1889, the university came along with it. Since then, many people have had experiences around this town that are unexplainable. While some may provide you with rational explanations, others have had experiences of their own to prove that maybe Moscow is just as haunted as you might dare to think.
Of course, there are notorious rumors, such as those that drew infamous ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren to the UI campus back in 1992. The Warrens claimed that a woman hung herself in room 225 of Ridenbaugh Hall, and though there is no documented record of this occurrence, a UI professor admits there is something off about Ridenbaugh.
Dr. L. Gustavo Castro-Ramirez, a professor of vocal coaching and a collaborative pianist at UI, has an office in Ridenbaugh and shared a rather unnerving experience involving his Bluetooth speaker.
“A couple of years ago, I was working late in my office and I had left my Bluetooth speaker on, but I was not playing any music,” Castro-Ramirez said. “Suddenly, it started playing some super loud rap music and it scared me quite a bit.”
Castro-Ramirez stated it was the “most random and unexpected thing” that happened to him. He had no explanation for it other than that the cleaning crew works in the building late at night and one of their devices may have been connected to the speaker.
“Who knows?” Castro-Ramirez said. “Since then, I do not leave my Bluetooth speaker on anymore.”
Venturing off the UI campus and into the streets of Moscow, a local nursing home, Aspen Park, has given Amber Strain quite a fright. Strain started working at the nursing home in 2012 when incidents began occurring that just couldn’t be explained.
“I was told there was a playful ghost, and that things would move,” Strain said. “When I was in the kitchen alone, I would hear someone whisper my name on many occasions, and I also saw a garbage bag that we kept over the mixer move, but there was no breeze. I also saw a cart move by itself.”
Strain recalled one particular incident during her time there when someone, or something, got especially violent with her.
“I was talking to a co-worker, and I stopped at a doorway to look to where my co-worker was,” Strain said. “As I turned around, binders and papers were thrown out at me.”
Soon after, the very same co-worker and Strain were setting tables in the dining room, when her co-worker had a startling experience of her own.
“(She) was freaking out and said, ‘Did you see or hear that?’” Strain said. “She said the grandfather clock had slammed shut.”
Strain said she never felt like she, or her co-worker, was in danger, but they wouldn’t be spending alone time in the kitchen moving forward.
Migrating down to the corner of Jackson and First Street, a pale yellow house stands out due to its odd adornment of refurbished bicycles and its church-like roof and architecture. Lydia Byers, the co-founder of the ghost-hunting group Palouse Area Paranormal, believes this building to truly be a place of intense hauntings.
The building, now residential, used to be Carithers Hospital, which according to Byers, was essentially just a doctor’s office. Built in 1908, it served a variety of purposes, including containing an autopsy suite and a morgue.
Byers interviewed an anonymous source who lived in one of the two basement apartments in the old Carithers building while he was a physics student at UI in the 1980s. The source claimed that strange happenings started when he heard heavy footsteps upstairs. A lady who had lived there for years told him that no one lived upstairs, that it was a storage unit that was blocked off.
Additionally, he said lights would flicker on and off, the toilet would flush by itself and the faucets would randomly turn on.
One incident occurred when his landlord installed a new furnace. It was late May, but it was so cold in the apartment that his breath was visible, even with the furnace running. That evening while working on homework, the source claimed to have seen a shadowy figure.
“He said he knew it could not have been his own because he saw his own,” Byers said. “It was dark gray, and this other shadow was dark black.”
Then, as quickly as it appeared, it vanished.
That same night, in his still-freezing room, he had a dream about a beautiful woman. The woman began engaging in sexual activities with him, but as she did so, her features began to distort. Her eyes were pitch black, her skin was sloughing off and turning gray and her mouth opened four times as wide as it should have to reveal one big tooth all the way across.
“I believe he might have encountered a succubus,” said Byers, referring to a type of demon claimed to seduce men and drain their life force in the night. “It is the only story I have ever heard (about a succubus) that I am inclined to believe because of what happened when he woke up.”
The source said he woke up soaking wet and was so dehydrated he fell on the floor, unaware of how long he was there. He finally mustered up enough energy to crawl to the bathroom where he drank the water from the toilet. After regaining as much composure as possible, he walked to the kitchen to retrieve a glass of water. The minute he entered the kitchen, the faucets turned on, the toilet flushed and the cabinets opened by themselves.
He left immediately the next day, leaving many belongings behind. It was revealed to Byers that he had been living in what was formerly the autopsy suite.
People may or may not be inclined to believe these experiences were those of paranormal encounters, of which Byers offers some advice.
“I always tell everybody not to believe everything you see, smell, or taste,” Byers said. “Our brains want to believe as much information as it can, and so it likes to fill in the holes. People will see an orb and say, ‘Oh, it’s a ghost!’ Always go into an investigation skeptical and questioning. Never go in 100% a believer.”
Story by Bailey Brockett
Illustrations by Joel Bartlow
Photos by Dani Moore
Design by Joel Bartlow