Edinburg campus
Juan Quezada- Custodian
What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
“When I was working on [Health and Physical Education I building] I used to go to clean the swimming pool … I was cleaning up one night, … and I heard somebody hit the rail, the tubular pipe, and I heard the sound Dnnnnnnnnnng! When I came out quickly, there was nobody [around]… I heard…[a] long time ago, there was a lady who died in the swimming pool.”
Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe in ghosts?
“Yes, I believe … I know ghosts exist everywhere and I believe if somebody died in a place, I believe … the bad energy, stays in that area.”
What is the most haunted location on campus?
Well, I was working at the [Visual Arts building] … and I was sweeping the hallway and when I turned my eyes to see the end of the hallway, I saw a big animal coming from ceramics, and it went into the wax room. So, quickly I went like ‘Oh, what’s that?’… And then quickly I went running and I opened the wax room. I opened the door. There was nobody.
What haunted locations have you heard about on campus?
[The University Library], here on the second floor. Two work partners … were working there and when they were cleaning up, they heard noises behind them and when they turned around, they saw a baby boy running, like a 5- or 7-year-old boy running. … They said that before that, they were cleaning again, and a police officer went. He was doing his rounds, and the police officer came to them and told them, ‘Hey … you bring your children over here? Which one of you brought your son?” and both of them told him, ‘No, we don’t have children here,’ and the police officer told them, ‘Well, I saw a little kid running through behind me … I tried to follow and there was nobody in the hallway.’
During one of your night shifts, have you ever seen something that couldn’t be explained?
Yes. One night I was working here [Liberal Arts Building South] on the second floor … I saw [my crew leader] passing by… I saw a shadow walking and I thought it was her, but she always used tennis shoes to come to work. And then… I [heard] somebody walking with shoes with heels, walking in them, and she told me ‘Juan, are you done?’ and then I checked my cell phone and I told her ‘Hey, I still have two more minutes to finish! Let me finish!” and then I saw the shadow go into the women’s bathroom. And then [I thought], ‘Oh OK, I’m gonna make a joke. I’m gonna play with her … I’m gonna wait for her then as soon as she comes out, I’m gonna scare her.’ I was hiding on the side of the bathroom, and she never came out. And then 5 minutes later, she came behind me and she told me ‘Juan, are you finished?’
Do you think our campus is haunted?
I believe so. One of my friends was telling me that [a] long, long time ago, that some area of the campus was a cemetery. So, the school before UTRGV, UT Pan American, they bought that area, and they built buildings.
Jaime Hernandez -Library Associate and kinesiology senior
What’s the spookiest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
The only thing I’ve experienced was just here in the library. One of the times I was up here [on the 4th floor], I was closing up and I made my way around, walking the stacks. I was waiting for … some students to exit the room and I lean back on one of the stacks, and I was waiting for maybe a couple of seconds, and I heard something. I heard something hit the floor and you could tell it was a book … but when I made my first round I saw [the book] and it was just on [the shelf] so I started looking around and [there] was only one group of students and they weren’t on that side. My coworker was laughing at me because I usually call out ‘The floor is clear,’ and I ran down the stairs, and I was out of breath. She’s like, ‘What happened?’ and I was like, “I think all those ghost stories I was telling you guys might’ve caught up with me.”
Do you believe in ghosts?
I’ll believe it when I see it. Nothing’s happened to me so far other than that book falling.
What is the most haunted location on campus?
The spookiest place I’ll say is [the Library]. But as far as haunted, I’m not sure. I haven’t experienced much or anything really.
What haunted locations have you heard about on campus?
I think it’s Troxel [Hall] that there’s a pregnant lady that’s roaming around. … The one with the little boy … When I first got to the library, they’d say ‘Yeah, fourth is haunted,’ and I don’t know where the little boy came from or how that story came about, but apparently the story goes that one night an officer was closing up, and when the elevator door opened, he saw a little boy run right by him and he went and asked the custodians, ‘Hey why’d you bring your son?” and the guys like, ‘I’m here by myself!” [The police officer said] ‘Really? I saw a little boy,” so that’s where all that came from.
Do you think our campus is haunted?
I’ve had students say that the Brownsville campus is haunted … but I haven’t seen anything here. It just looks creepy, especially at night … I make sure to bring my headphones ‘cause I don’t want to hear anything but yeah, it’s spooky enough.
Valeria Lugo -Chemistry junior
What’s the spookiest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
“My spookiest experience on campus has been this Summer 2019. I was working as an intern in one of the science labs and my mentor, he told me, he has been here for years, he told me when he was giving me the tour around the labs and everything that I needed to know that in the cylindrical staircase, several years ago during the Sunday week, the Sunday of the Super Bowl, a girl came to the university and she was sitting down the rail of the staircase and she fell over and she passed away, sadly.
That happened, and the weeks went by, I was doing my internship, along with another friend, that was an intern in the lab, and we were getting from the third floor, going to the first floor to drop off her samples, and we pressed the first floor, but we go up to the fourth floor and then we’d go down to the second floor and we just pressed one, the first floor. So that was like, ‘Oh my god!’ And you always felt, like, the shivers in that elevator. And it’s not only me, another of my friends from the lab, they were saying always that strange things happen, you hear noises, and all that.”
What haunted locations have you heard about on campus?
“That’s the only thing I’ve heard. That, it’s like all the chills and that experience.”
Do you think the campus is haunted?
“I believe so, because it’s just being here my first two weeks and we experienced that.”
Brownsville Campus
UTRGV Chief of Police Raul Munguia
What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
“OK well, personally, I haven’t experienced anything spooky and one of the things that we have here is the campus is pretty new so the buildings are all fairly new so we haven’t, you know, they haven’t been around long enough to get any types of reputations or have any experiences like this. However, we do lease a building further downtown, it’s called the Cueto building, and I’ve heard of rumors there that the second floor is haunted and apparently there was a jilted bride that was left at the altar and from there she regularly hung her, her dress on the window, and some of the employees there always feel something, sometimes when they come back in the morning and the lights are turned back on after they’d left them off. And just some things like that but nothing too scary. However, since UT Brownsville was collocated with [Texas Southmost College], which is right next door to us, there’s where you have your old buildings. And there’s some stories of hauntings and stuff. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s an Old Morgue there and there is an individual … that actually does the haunted tours.”
Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe in ghosts?
“I have never seen a ghost and … I don’t know if I believe in them or not. I’m kinda open, but, still, I know there’s some things that are unexplained, and I’m the type of person that there’s usually a logical explanation, but there’s some other things that are out there … there’s a possibility, you know, I am open to the possibility that there’s another commission that’s at play.”
During one of your night shifts, have you ever seen something that couldn’t be explained?
“No, never.”
Do you think our campus is haunted?
“I don’t believe it’s haunted and for the same reasons that I said earlier, is that they are all relatively new buildings. As you know, we’re still under construction and we just finished up a couple of new buildings, but all the buildings that we have here [on the] Brownsville campus, they are all, you know, relatively new and … as I said before, there hasn’t been any time to develop a history with them.”
Madyson Sauter political science freshman
What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
“Well, I would have to say that the spookiest place would be the dorms, because everyone here talks about how they’re haunted and I never believed that until around the second or third week, when I was sitting in my bed one night and my door closed randomly. I first thought it was the AC, and I was totally fine with it, or my roommates pranking me, but then a couple weeks later it was probably at, like, 3 in the morning, I was studying for a late exam and I was on my bed and I was just about to fall asleep and my shower turned on. I thought it was something with the water and I went up and the actual handle was turned all the way. Ever since then, our AC has been turning off and on by itself, it’s been going to heat, it’s been freaking out. Our refrigerator will be open sometimes and, like, the refrigerator door is heavy, so if it opens, it closes unless someone holds it, but we’ll walk by and the refrigerator door will be all the way open.”
Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe in ghosts?
“I have never seen a ghost and I do not want to see a ghost, but I do believe that something is making my shower turn on randomly.”
What is the most haunted location on campus?
“Oh, the dorms 100%.”
What haunted locations have you heard about on campus?
“I’ve always just heard about the dorms, every different building has their own story on whether its Sarah or a girl named Evelyne, you just have to ask around, but everyone in a different building has their own ‘ghost story.’”
Do you think our campus is haunted?
“Oh, yeah 100%, like, we’re right next to the border. Palo Alto is just a little bit away and so, definitely, I believe that maybe something happened or stressed out college students may have, like, taken a couple pills or something and have died. I don’t know, I don’t wanna figure it out.”
Noel Palmerez Art Instructor
What’s the scariest thing you’ve experienced on campus?
“Well, the spookiest thing is not necessarily here, of course, well, I mean, I had students that had their shirts tugged in the middle of the night when they’re trying to paint. You can actually see things moving from side to side, like, I always teach in the evening classes and I would have the custodians, the custodians wouldn’t last very long. They would always, of course, wanna move to another position because that building [Old Morgue], specifically, there was always noises, sounds, things like that. Some of the custodians would say they would see people, like, going up the stairs and once they [would] go up the stairs, there was nobody there. There’s always sensations, you know, or little aspirations or I’ve had some students take pictures at windows and, and sometimes they see shadows at the windows. … Sometimes it’s the imagination or sometimes, of course, students being tired but, you know, I’ve heard things. … Sometimes, of course, it’s a normal thing, you know, working at night and … it could be energies and things like that, but I’ve seen groups of people that are, you know, investigating on their own and … they swear that they’ve seen things within their cameras or they feel things … just because they’re kinda, I guess, more spiritually connected.”
Have you ever seen a ghost? Do you believe in ghosts?
“Yeah, I do. … It’s a natural thing, I think … if you do believe in the spiritual world … there has to be something like that, but of course, some things are expected and sometimes you kind of feel things … always hear things. You know, things that seem like they’re too loud or too creepy or too unrecognizable to know that they’re natural, but definitely, you do sometimes experience things when you’re listening or trying to look for things.”
What is the most haunted location on campus?
“Well, the only building that I’ve known that has a lot of those kinds of energies is the building that they call the [Old Morgue]. Downstairs, it’s basically during the, again, during the wars that they would have between the borders, when the school was barely being established or even before the school was established. There’s another building right close to it where they actually would do, of course, a lot of surgeries. But the morgue building at the very bottom, they actually have prison cells. They actually still have the old bars and things like that. So, there, there was a lot of presence according to others, but that’s where most people would always swear that they would see things. … Students would not stay there at night, you know, but this is something that went on for many, many years.”
Do you think our campus is haunted?
“Well, I mean, you would assume, like, if any place could be haunted you would think that this place would be because, again, so many people have come and gone. So many people, of course, have … passed away, unfortunately, in a very, very ugly way. … Well, that’s what they say. … We can’t really reason why we see things or hear things, you know, that would be somewhat disturbing.”
