From paint brushes moving on their own in the studio to haunting apparitions in the theater at night, UTRGV has had its fair share of ghost stories, a student and professor say.
The historic area where the Brownsville campus and Texas Southmost College sit was once home to Fort Brown, an 1846 construction that housed troops during the Mexican-American War.
Art graduate student Kimberly Sandoval has been at the university since 2014 and said she has “a little bit of a list of paranormal experiences” at Rusteberg Hall, a building UTRGV leases from Texas Southmost College.
“Whether or not there are ghosts is up for debate, but I can’t deny that there are things that happen that can’t necessarily be explained by professionals on the regular,” Sandoval told The Rider last Tuesday.
The graduate student said there are stories of two ghosts, a girl that haunts the photography, painting and drawing studios, and a boy that haunts the sculpture and ceramics studios.
“They’ll stay in those areas,” Sandoval said. “There has been a sighting of that little boy in the [ceramics] studio. … Some years ago he was standing in a corner of where, typically, like, assistants tend to work for ceramics. So, he was just standing there in the early hours of the morning.”
As for the 2D studios, Sandoval said she and others have often heard “creaks and groans” and “little footsteps.”
“I’ve witnessed things being moved, like, easels being moved by themselves,” Sandoval said. “The canvas is being adjusted or, like, if somebody has a sketch taped up, it’ll be taken down. … It’s fresh tape. Like, it’s ripped off the walls.”
She has also witnessed brushes being “smacked off” off easels.
“Some theories that students throw around is, like, because we do happen to be in possession of a female cadaver or skeleton, like, and it’s real,” Sandoval said, adding that the cadaver was donated to the art department as a reference for sketching before she came to the university in 2014. “… They think maybe that’s just how she presents herself because she’s in the studios.”
Other theories reference the location’s historic connection to the Mexican-American War.
Theatre Professor Brian Warren said he had an “incident” in the Albert L. Jeffers Theatre in Liberal Arts Building South on the Edinburg campus.
“It may be my own late-night feeling, but I saw something, you know?” Warren said. “If you wanna know, it was … a person. I was all alone. It was, like, 2 a.m. I was, you know, cleaning up the stage or whatever and I looked in the stands or the seats, and I saw a person in full theatrical makeup and some kind of costume. … I looked away quickly and then I looked back. It was gone.”
Warren said his first thought when he saw the figure was, “that can’t be.”
“There was something,” he said. “This phantasm, this image that quickly went away, but I can’t say I didn’t see something.”
Warren said some of the janitorial staff do not go into the theater after a certain time and that faculty and staff have told him they have seen and heard things at night.
The professor said ghost stories can be a source of inspiration and creativity, such as during the department’s most recent production of “The Haunting of Hill House.” Other productions Warren has directed in the spirit of Halloween include “The Evil Dead: The Musical,” “Diner of the Dead,” “Night of the Living Dead” and “Frankenstein.”
“I personally enjoy giving the audience something to do for Halloween,” he said.
A self-proclaimed skeptic, Warren said the theater is a site of intense emotion.
“Theater is a very passionate art form,” Warren said. “Therefore, we’ve had crying and anger and laughter, everything, in there. So, I’m no expert. I can’t say what attracts the spirit world. Perhaps they like places where a lot of human activity has occurred. I can only speculate.”
