Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Written by Steven Mynott
Back by popular demand, this is a follow up to our Halloween article about CI hauntings. We interviewed three more students and alumni about their ghostly experiences here on CI’s campus. We would love to keep making this series, but we cannot do it without your help. If you have had a paranormal experience on campus, please let us know by filling out our form at this link.
First up is Madelaine Brown, senior Studio Arts major. Her experience happened in the middle of the night in the parking lot outside of the Santa Rosa dorm building. This is her story: “It was about 2 a.m., and there was nobody else out. There were no other cars. It was just us getting back home late at 2 a.m., and I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and we are parked in the Santa Rosa parking lots, um, kind of adjacent to the old courthouse. So, from the view of my passenger seat, we were facing the opposite direction of the courthouse so I would have to physically fully turn all the way around just to look at it. And I remember getting the urge to turn around and look through the back window at the courthouse. And on the side of the courthouse, there is a series of windows, some are blacked out, painted and blacked out with, like, wooden boards. And I just remember getting the urge to turn around and look at it, and I see a white light at about three to four windows down, like a little orb, just like a small white light that moved from the middle of the board to the wall, and then it disappeared. And at first I thought it was a window. I thought someone was maybe inside. I just remember getting kind of creeped out and a little uncomfortable and usually I would explain it away and be like, ‘Oh, it’s just a car coming,’ or, ‘It was just something like a bug, like a lightning bug,’ even though we don’t really get them here. But I just remember being creeped out, and I remember telling the friend that was also with me what I saw, and they also tried to explain it away, and when we went up to it, we realized that it wasn’t a window, it was a blacked out, painted board. So it had no way of reflecting anything. So if a car had passed, it wouldn’t have reflected the lights. No light was bouncing off of it, and thus, no light would actively move consciously, and then basically fade out once it reached the wall.” Brown said that she and her friend stayed for the next ten minutes, analyzing other adjacent windows. There were other regular transparent windows nearby, but in the window where she saw the mysterious light, there was a matte-finish wooden board, with no possibility of reflecting any light.
Brown believes that she saw an orb that night. “I’m not really sure what or who it could have been,” she explained. “Uh, if it was something that was paranormal and isn’t something that could be explained away. But I believe that what I saw was an orb, and the urge that I got to turn around was my gut instinct telling me that something was there, or maybe something wanted to be seen potentially. So I’m, I’m going to, in my head, say that someone wanted to be seen and wanted me to go over there.”
What is an orb? Haunted Rooms, a U.K. based haunted hotel directory and ghost hunting organizer, claims that, “Whilst orbs are most often thought of as spirits, some believe them to be a separate form of energy that we don’t yet understand, or a manifestation of Native spirits.”
When I asked Brown how she felt about being a student and living in the dorms at a haunted university, her face lit up, “Oh, I love it. I absolutely love it. I’ve always had an affinity towards the supernatural and paranormal and, uh, a huge interest in what goes on in the afterlife and if you stay here or if you don’t, if you cross over or go into the light, whatever the, the many different things are. But I enjoy being on campus in general and I enjoy knowing the history of it and then it has such a rich history. And even if it’s infamous, it’s still covered in many different people who had lives, had stories and their stories are still here. And it’s just as important to, um, respect that and even if you’re here to get an education, there were people here that weren’t here for an education and struggled and are possibly still here so I want to respect them and I love being here so. Yeah, it’s nice being on campus.”
Abandoned courthouse in the southeast corner of campus.
Photo by Madelaine Brown
Brittany Lambert, who graduated from CI in 2018 with an Art degree, had several experiences with her roommates while she was living in the dorms. The first one involved the coffee table in their living room: “Okay. So, some roommates and I, we had the same room in Anacapa Building C for two years in a row, and one — well, this happened kind of consecutively over a couple weeks or so, but one night, we were all playing games in the living room. And, um, all of a sudden, the coffee table and the living room started, like, shaking. And two of my roommates that were sitting at the table, they just, like, started screaming and freaking out, and it was — like, I don’t know, the table was, they said it was — like, moving and vibrating, so that was weird.”
The second story Lambert shared involved mysterious music in the middle of the night: “And then, um, like, the following week or something, I was in the room that I had shared with another roommate of mine. We had bunk beds. And I was in the room alone, and I had just finished doing something, and I was about to leave the room, and her laptop, it was closed, and off from what I could see, ’cause it wasn’t making any sound or anything the whole time I was in there. But as I left the room, the Beatles song, ‘You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello,’ started playing, right? As I, like, walked out of the door. So that was really weird. I think that was the strangest one for me that happened.”
Anacapa dorm building
Photo by Madelaine Brown and Evan Grahn
Next, I spoke to Joarie Robles about a series of mysterious apparitions that she saw in Bell Tower. She arrived on campus early one dark and rainy morning in order to get some work done before class. She was working on her laptop, in one of the padded chairs in an alcove near an incline in the main hallway on the first floor of Bell Tower when she first noticed the first one: “Then from my corner of my eye. Um, I could see, kind of, like, it was this figure with her, like, your hair down, kind of like ‘The Ring,’ but not exactly ‘The Ring,’ because you can still see her face. But she had — she was walking — she had her hair down, it was black, and then in a hospital gown. And she was kind of just walking up and down, like, the incline very slowly, and it was creepy, ’cause I could see it from, like, the corner of my eye, and I kept looking towards it, like, to see if anybody was there, but nobody was there.”
Robles did not react at first because she was busy with her assignment and she thought it was just another person, but as she kept glancing up from her laptop, she realized that it was not a person at all. Robles continued, “So I was getting a little freaked out. So in the process, I was actually texting my fiance, and then I was like, can you call me? Because I don’t really want to be alone. So I had him on call, and I was, like, telling him, like, pretty much everything that was happening. He’s like, ‘what do you mean, like, you see something?’” But when Robles started talking to her fiance on the phone, Robles saw the figure move closer and closer to where she was sitting. She said it seemed like whatever it was could hear her conversation with her fiance. The figure approached the opposite side of the short dividing wall that separates the alcove from the hallway, stopped, and seemed to stare at the vertical support column. That was when Robles’s fiance told her that she should say hi. Robles explained that this is the moment she was truly afraid: “And then right when he said that, she turns her head facing me, and that’s when I freaked out, because I’m looking at my computer, and from the corner of my eye, I just see someone, like, stranding straight, and then turning their body towards me, and that freaked me out, and I was like, ‘Oh, God. I don’t wanna be here.’ And then I started freaking out, so then I told them, but I tried saying a little bit more in Spanish, ’cause I was like, ‘this person’s not bilingual, or the ghost. I hope they cannot hear me.’ So, I started telling, like, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. ‘Cause I don’t want to, I don’t want to say hi.’”
At this point, Robles tried her best to ignore the figure and get some work done with her fiance still on the phone, but she said that “he was telling his mom, ’cause mom loves spooky stuff. So she was searching, she was going on Google, and the first thing that popped up for her was Channel Islands University, and she’s never heard of this University — doesn’t even know where it’s at.” Robles continued, “So, she was like, ‘Is this, like, the University?’ And I said, ‘yeah.’ So she was, like, investigating because I started getting a little freaked out, and it turns out that Bell Tower actually did have ghosts.
“So during that whole process, that she’s telling me all the stories of the information she found out, um, I see the, like, I’m assuming it was patient. She was, like, she was average height. I want to say, the ghost, the girl ghost. She was, like, my height, maybe a little bit taller, but she was just walking up and down slowly at that point, because I wasn’t acknowledging her. So, it was very slowly, and then at one point, she kind of just disappears. I was like, ‘Okay. I can still see her from the corner of my eye,’ but whenever I look towards her, I couldn’t see her anymore. So, she left, and then, after, like, I want to say two minutes, she came back, but she came back with another figure, and this one was actually a black figure, like, fully on black figure. Like, it was way shorter than her, I want to say it was, like, to her shoulders.
“And it started freaking me out, ’cause they were a little further back, ’cause at that point, I did the sign of the cross, ’cause I got scared. He told me, do the sign of the cross, so I did it. And they didn’t get anywhere near me, but they were just kind of standing and just observing me.” As the figure was looking at Robles, she said that out of the corner of her eye, she could see it tilt its head to the side, as if in curiosity. She continued, “And then after a while, she kind of was just going up and down, like normal, but the black figure was just staring at me. Yeah. And then, so, after, I want to say, a minute or less than a minute, they left, and then the black figure came back after a few, like, 30 seconds, give or take. And he was alone, and he was just staring at me, kind of a little further away than he was before. Um, and he was just staring at me again, and it was kind of freaking me out. So I was telling my fiancé the entire thing. He’s like, ‘Mmm, black figure’s never really a good sign, but normally, it shouldn’t be exactly evil, but for sure, they most likely went through a tough time while they were alive.’
“So after a while, that ghost went away, and then the first ghost, which is a girl, and then the black figure, and then another ghost came.” Robles claims that this third ghost was probably a child, because it was much shorter than the other two. She estimated that its height was probably up to the first ghost’s stomach. She described the differences between the three ghosts that she saw: “ And the difference with this one, it was see through. So you could tell there was someone there, and it had, like, a figure of, like, a kid, like a little boy. But it was more see-through than anything, so it wasn’t black, it wasn’t, like, the girl, she looked like she was physical.
“And then, at that point, they’re just kind of all three of them are just kind of staring at me from the little corner, and I started getting freaked out, so my fiancé told me, it’s like, take a picture of where you’re at. And so I did. And you can see, you can actually make out two of the characters. The first one is a black figure, and then the shadow of them, sorry, the shadow of a black figure, the girl, you could kind of make out the little kid.” Robles quickly sent the photo to her fiance. “He was like, oh, like, you’re not kidding?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m not.’ So he showed them to his mom, his mom was like, ‘Yeah, tell her to get out of there.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t, because my lecture is going to start in 30 minutes or like give or take around that time.’ I was like ‘I can’t leave yet.’” Robles was kind enough to share the photo with us. Take a look for yourself. What do you see?
In this first photo, Robles drew outlines around the shadowy figures that her camera picked up.
Photo provided by Joarie Robles
Here is the same photo without the outlines.
Photo provided by Joarie Robles
Robles continued, “So, I was there, and then, at that point, a class kind of ended, so there was a lot of students that are passing by. So then I could still see them from the corner of my eye while I was, like, on my laptop, and, but then they kind of just disappeared, and I was like, ‘Okay, hopefully that’s the end of it,’” but unfortunately for Robles, “It was not the end of it.
“So, the girl and the black figure were kind of, like, peeking, and then the little kid kind of peeked, like, from the bottom, but the kid left away, and then the girl and the black figure were kind of just staring from, like, the side, just kind of observing me, I guess. And then the girl left, I want to say, after, like, 30 seconds, and the black figure was just standing. But at that point, it kind of moved instead of its head, it was a full body, kind of peeking. And then they left.
“And then at that point it was 30 minutes before the class started. So I was getting everything ready, and I just see from the corner of my eye, the girl walking up and down like normal. Like, she didn’t see me, she didn’t acknowledge me, and I was like, ‘Okay, it’s time to go.’” And as Robles was getting ready to go to her class, she heard a banging sound nearby, but there were no other people around. It was loud enough for her fiance to hear it through the phone.
Before she concluded her story, she mentioned that she saw the same female figure again before class, two days later. And ever since then, she does not come to campus early anymore.
