“Once a Stevens student, always a Stevens student,” sounds like an idiom you would hear at a riveting graduation speech. You look back at your time here and smile softly, remembering the long detours you had to take to bypass the construction sites. Eventually, you had stopped caring for the perpetual sounds of buildings being torn down or others being erected. Your university was on the rise and presumably so were you. But that was far from the truth.
Ever since the class of 1874, your average Stevens alumnus leaves the small city of Hoboken with upwards of $40,000 in debt. We hear about the alumni who successfully carved a path to infamy and prestige in their respective fields; we don’t, however, hear about the mediocre souls whose student loans remain, forever, unresolved. Where do they find peace?
To answer that question, we have to take a trip down Wittpenn Walk. That is when we hit the desolate remains of Hayden and Jacobus. If you asked former residents of those two dorms about their lingering memories, you would get mixed feedback. Some will reminisce over the bonds built over bottles, others will recall late-night cram sessions, and finally, you’ll hear about the forlorn feeling that still emanates from within those walls, long after their demolition.
Surely, the tuition, along with the university, is on the rise, but the restless souls trapped in the debris of the ghosts of Hayden and Jacobus are also getting more prominent. Students, after pulling an all-nighter or getting blackout drunk, are rumored to have experienced an uncanny sense of discomfort that would dissipate once they distanced themselves from the vicinity of Jacobus and Hayden. They could neither report the gripping feeling of despondency nor change their place of residence. Instead, they talked about it to anyone who would lend them an ear, and, soon enough, a notable number of students were whispering about the trapped souls within the buildings.
You might be skeptical of the next few words, or you might have stopped reading because the feeling I just described resonated too much with you. Ex-residents allegedly heard suppressed screams and agonized moaning sounds that they could never trace to any specific room. It was futile to substantiate those claims because when students tried to capture said encounters on video camera, nothing remotely eerie would show up on the recording.
Some will dismiss this as baseless speculation; the truth is, the Stevens Board of Trustees was becoming increasingly wary of the stifled agony within these walls. The administration, well-aware of the ever-growing incoming freshman classes, resolved to tear down the buildings. They will assert the urgency in doing so; what they will not disclose is why it had to happen in the middle of the spring of 2019.
The administration knew they had to effectively end the deleterious dialogue that would drive away prospective students, so they did away with the buildings. And now the question remains: Where did these spirits migrate to, and who will be joining them next?
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