Ghost campus

If you’re interested in reading something spooky about Stevens, put this paper down and go find last week’s issue of The Stute. This isn’t about Stevens hauntings or sightings of mysterious figures around the Torch Bearers statue late at night. In fact, it’s the opposite.

There’s almost never anyone else around campus when I’m out late walking. Not a single soul. Sometimes I feel like there’s a curfew I don’t know about — sometimes I feel like I’m the only student attending this school. I don’t know what it is, but campus at night just seems really dead to me. It’s eerie.

Now, I admit, there aren’t too many reasons to be walking down the hill between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., but I feel like there should be many other people who also stay up late because we’re busy college students. Most activities don’t run extra late like that, but actually, I’ve been in a lot of meetings that end at around 11 p.m., specifically for three different clubs.

Also, Pierce is open until midnight. So, I feel like more people should be up and about.

The reason I’m usually up late is that I’m doing homework last-minute. Because my roommate isn’t a night owl like me, I find a place other than my room. Sometimes it’s the Pierce Lobby or The Stute office. At whatever crazy hour I finish, I walk back to Davis, and I never see anyone else walking. It’s so strange to me. I feel like the chance of seeing somebody else awake on a college campus should be greater than zero. But every day I pack up my things and walk back and there’s not a person in sight.

I always look over the Hudson River to the skyline and I just wish I was over there. Or even back at home. I lived across the street from a lake, and a main road curved around that lake. The area was like a regular neighborhood of a small town. Still, if I was out on the front porch in the middle of the night, there would always be a few cars passing by around the lake and sometimes a car or two sitting on the other side.

I miss it. I just think there’s something really cool when you see a few people going about their business at strange hours of the night. You wonder, what’s their story? And you don’t feel so alone, because you’re not the only person out there. It feels like the world is actually alive.