The haunting of CMU

To the untrained eye, Colorado Mesa University (CMU) is a fairly average campus. Underclassmen and upperclassmen alike are used to the bright, vibrant and modern collection of buildings many of us call home. 

However, CMU has a few skeletons hidden in its closets, and more than a few scary stories in store for anyone who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here are a few of the creepiest occurrences on campus according to the CMU students who have experienced them. 

CMU sophomore Lizeth Aguilar said that, throughout her time living in Monument, she would hear random voices and feel presences nearly all the time. There were a few times where footsteps or noises would wake her up, noises her roommate couldn’t hear. This happened a few times until one night, Aguilar felt the full forces of this malignant presence when it began to call her name. 

“I thought at that point, I was dreaming. Like I could hear it, and I was processing that they were saying my name. But I thought I was dreaming, even though I really wasn’t asleep yet. So I was starting to get freaked out,” Aguilar said. “Then they said my name again, really aggressively but still whispers. And then I felt someone slam the bed. I was facing the wall, so it was right behind me. [They] slammed the bed to the point where the whole bed moved. And I just instantly woke up.” 

Another time, Aguilar’s roommate as well as both of her suitemates were gone for the weekend when she heard the door to her suitemates’ room open. 

“[My suitemate] wasn’t home and [my roommate] went home for the weekend and [my other suitemate] spent the night with her friends in their dorm. So I had the whole place to myself and I was in my bed just hanging out and I could hear my suitemates’ door open and close from the bathroom,” Aguilar said. 

Monument follows a semi-suite style, so Aguilar’s bedroom was directly connected to the bathroom she shared with her roommate and two suitemates. For a while that night, she heard footsteps in the bathroom. She said that these creepy experiences in Monument were a regular occurrence for her. 

“That freaked me out and then like before, I would go to bed and I would go in and make sure that [my suitemate] wasn’t home, so I wouldn’t know what was going on. And like I said she spent the night with her friends, so it was the little things like that that would happen all the time,” Aguilar said. 

According to CMU sophomore Miranda Gudaitis, her room in Walnut Ridge definitely carries some spiritual energy. She said that once she and her roommate woke up randomly in the middle of the night around the same time, and all their tapestries fell off the wall. 

“[We] had woken up right around the exact same time, not necessarily the exact same time, but we had both seen each other wake up. Almost within five minutes of waking up, we see the tapestries all fall at once. I’m not even kidding, all three of them fell,” Gudaitis said. 

She said that not only did the tapestries fall, but they had been attached to the wall with Gorilla Tape, and the tape tore chunk-like pieces from the wall. 

“It was a pretty creepy situation,” Gudaitis said. 

Perhaps one of the most unsettling tales of the paranormal at CMU is the supposedly haunted basement at the Outdoor Program (OP), described by several OP employees as having “a really bad vibe.” OP employee Isy McNutt said that she and her co-workers have had many stories to share about the basement since the day an employee initially discovered a dead cat behind one of the doors. 

“Going downstairs, it’s just a creepy place. Some doors are weird, one door has random drill holes in it. One of our [light] days during the summer we went downstairs, and we were like messing around, you know?” McNutt said. “We [were] actually terrified. We [didn’t] want to be down there anymore. It was super creepy [and] we were messing with the doors, and I was like, “oh, guys, this is weird.”” 

After fiddling around with the doors, doors that appeared to be completely locked, McNutt and her friends were about to head upstairs when the door suddenly flew open and McNutt, who had been fiddling with the handle, fell into a dark closet. That was door 16. Another door, door 7, has a few random holes in it. Door 7 will not open, and the employees have tried every key in the building.

Arguably the creepiest part of the OP basement door 16 is a set of tiny handprints that’s barely visible among the white paint. The OP employees are unsure of what the handprints are and why they’re there. 

“One of our other co-workers put his hand on the door and said: “there’s some bad vibes right there. Like I do not like that.” So we all were like, we’re kind of making fun of him. So we put our hands on the door and [mocked him] like, “oh so scary,”” McNutt said. 

She said that then, at that point in the story, one of their other co-workers jumped away from the door and screamed after noticing the small handprints. She and all the other employees promptly ran upstairs, and now the OP employees seldom venture down to the basement by themselves. 

McNutt mentioned that the fact that the handprints are so high up on the door combined with the knowledge that the building that houses the OP used to be affiliated with the Little Mavs daycare is deeply unsettling to her. However, this is just one theory as to the origin of the handprints.