Her toes press against the frigid frame of the windowsill. She muses about her heart-broken life as she leans out of the sunken window, each of her breaths fragmented, and shorter than the last. One final push separates her fragile body from the chill of the evening air, and ushers a young life into death. Her clothes flap and her limbs flail as she barrels down each story of the tall dormitory building before losing herself to the pavement.
As with many of the ghastly tales circulating around campus, individuals cognizant of paranormal activity such as art lecturer Manuel Guerra can only recount the odd occurrences they have experienced or the dubious details relayed through these tragic tales. “I hear and see a lot of things when I’m here (UTEP),” Guerra says. “There’s a lot of stuff that goes on around here.”
A young woman’s tragic death at Barry Hall, currently a mothballed building that was once a dormitory, is one of many stories originating from the almost century-long history of this border-straddling university. Located in a region that has a rich past and is abundant in mystery, the campus is full of untold treasures to be explored by those who search for the unknown.
“This is the most haunted city in the country,” says Ken Hudnall, local paranormal expert, online radio show host and author. “This is a unique culture here and these stories, unfortunately, since the older generations won’t talk about them as they die off, these stories are gone. Every society has their stories about ghosts; it’s part of history. Unfortunately, historians are far too serious to talk about unusual things.”
Like most El Pasoans, Guerra acknowledges both the amount of history that has occurred underneath the blazing sun, and the possibility of paranormal events that may have materialized through past generations. Meanwhile, Guerra remains skeptical and is never too quick to call peculiarities supernatural. “Ghosts… sometimes I think it’s just your mind–all psychological–but I don’t know. It’s kind of weird,” he says.
Guerra has been associated with UTEP as a student and faculty member for about 13 years. Born and raised in El Paso, Guerra is a second-generation family member who has lived in this region. He shares common beliefs and customs with many of the other 80 percent of Hispanics living in the borderland. When it comes to paranormal ideas, he says, the region carries a mixture of both cultures. “It’s both (cultures), both my parents believe in things that I don’t,” Guerra says. “I went to a university, got educated and started questioning beliefs and certain things.”
The borderland may be seen as a battlefield, where old Mexican traditions clash with evolving modern and contemporary beliefs. The unearthly byproduct of this battle is a meshing of beliefs, practices, perspectives and circumstances. “It’s a very multi-cultural city and it’s a very diverse city. With diversity come different opinions according to lifestyle, religions and beliefs. With that come differences in opinions when it comes to paranormal activity,” says Henry Flores, the founder of the El Paso Del Norte Paranormal Society. “One definite we can all agree on is life after death.”
In regards to ghosts–who are neither alive or completely on the other side, but are trapped between two worlds–members of the community may feel like they are in the midst of two worlds, Flores says. “It’s a, ni soy de aquí, ni soy de allá (I’m not from here, nor am I from there) kind of thing. We get both sides here,” says Chicano Studies lecturer Pilar Herrera.
Flores says storytelling has an effect on the development of culture. Stories are repeated over and over, from generation to generation. Eventually, these stories may be adopted by a culture.
In regards to the supernatural, freshman theater arts major Donald Raphael says paranormal stories on the border are very distinct from ones in the northern U.S. Raphael, originally from El Paso, recently transferred back to UTEP from the University of Minnesota-Morris. “One of the stories is La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), and you don’t hear anything like that in Minnesota,” Donald says. “I actually did a little project about her up there, and everybody was just fascinated because they never heard of something like that in their culture.”
Senior history major Jessica Nevarez has lived in Germany and also has family in Zacatecas, Mexico. She says that the attitudes toward paranormal culture away from the border are very different. “Some people see death as something very dark, something very bad, but in Mexico, they don’t see it like that or even in Germany,” she says.
Hudnall agrees that Mexican customs are more accepting in regards to legends, death and paranormal activity. “If you’ve never really studied the Catholic religion, it’s basically fascinated with death,” Hudnall says. “Mexico, they are lot closer to it, the old traditions. Here, everybody’s very cosmopolitan, but we have a foot in each world.”
Over the years, the buildings that make up UTEP have elicited dozens of hair-raising rumors and near-folkloric tales. Other than ASARCO and Fort Bliss, UTEP, under different monikers throughout its history, was one of the first major establishments in the developing region. Tales of death, strange happenings and mysterious sightings pass through the halls of school buildings like the hundreds of thousands of students who have passed through the doors of Old Main since the school opened in 1914.
Custodian Esther Uribe worked evenings at Old Main alongside co-worker Carlos Diaz for several years before they were both transferred to other buildings. Although Diaz admits to once seeing a ghostly figure, Uribe says she has never experienced the shadow figures, phantom lectures or other incidents that others claim to have experienced at Old Main. “Yo nunca vi nada,” Uribe says. “Dicen (que hay fantasmas) pero yo nunca vi nada.” (I never saw anything. They say (there are ghosts) but I never saw anything,)
The empty campus is quiet on most nights. Most of the vacant rooms are closed and locked by the evening, except for the lithography studio in room 264 of the Fox Fine Arts Center. Guerra, who is usually the first to open and stays to close up shop, relates a tale that occurred one day when he was prepping a stone for engraving.
Before beginning the process, he heard his name called. This was followed by heavy knocking at the large glass windows that separate the workshop from the outside walkway. He said that he reacted swiftly and turned his head around toward the glass. Although the walkway was dark, he says he was positive he saw a shadowy figure. “Your heart freezes and you start to stare, stare and stare. You want to see some kind of movement,” Guerra says. “It wouldn’t move, and it looked like somebody was squatting down looking at me.”
Guerra says he has heard and seen strange occurrences before. Lights that flick on and off, doors slamming and opening on their own. He also claims to have seen figures outside and inside the building when he is certain he is alone. “I went out and nothing was out there. That’s when the hairs on my neck really stood up,” he says.
Old Main, Seamon Hall (now the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts) and Cotton Memorial are some of the eldest and arguably, most paranormally active buildings on campus, opening in 1917, 1927 and 1947, respectively. A common paranormal theory proposes that spirits react to changes in their environment; therefore, activity picks up in older buildings when they are being renovated. For many years, Seamon Hall was a dusty storage building, but it was revived in 2004 as an art gallery. Many have said it is an unearthly hot spot on campus.
One Seamon Hall horror tale describes tea parties that were hosted by scholarly professors in order to produce well-rounded students early in the school’s history. Girls from the community were invited to mingle with the students–all males at the time. The tale tells a story of a young couple that became too friendly with each other. When the young lady became pregnant, her aggrieved partner murdered and buried both mother and child on the grounds of Seamon Hall. In the past, custodians have reported that they witnessed a ghostly ‘30s-style black vehicle that drops a young woman off at the building. The frantic woman scurries to the door, but not quickly enough. Only a final and terror-filled scream is heard before the scene dissipates. Outside of these grisly rumors, these events have never been proven.
Although many tales at UTEP seem to be unverified, faculty members working at Cotton Memorial have done research on the building’s past to see if their ghostly visitations could be real. Sam Ricillo, associate professor of communication, says that research has confirmed the deaths of a janitor and a 19th-century woman, who was raped and murdered on the land prior to construction. Riccillo says the facts were discovered through research conducted by faculty members and a psychic. Riccillo says he has worked many late evenings in his office and has heard muted screams coming from above his office. “One always questions whether one is sane or not when you are hearing things,” he says.
Riccillo says he prefers logic and science to explain phenomenon rather than belief systems, although he acknowledges that these systems are abundant in communities such as the borderland. “People have interesting belief systems and in many cases, religious belief systems,” he says. “These tend to crop up because we still have to explain the cycle of how we identify what life is.”