If you look at the official Southern Connecticut State University campus map, there is a significant omission. Beaverdale Memorial Park, which borders Pine Rock Avenue, the location of the North Campus Residence Complex, has been replaced by blank spaces with pastoral sketches of trees. I get the PR value of leaving this cemetery off the SCSU map. Pictorially mixing campus life with the afterlife has a deleterious impact on attracting students and tuition. However, there may be a darker reason for not disclosing the adjacent domicile of the deceased.
The North Campus Residence Complex is the largest residence hall at Southern Connecticut State University and is pre-Covid semester home to more than 600 students. The midrise building and townhouses offer full apartment-style living for students with 60+ credits. Such amenities as full-size refrigerators, stoves, dishwashers and sinks have come complete with their own paranormal activity and have been reported to operate on their own. Even the SCSU Hoot Loot ID card-operated washers and dryers have been reported by student witnesses to be hauntedly-hacked and operate on their own. Much more disturbingly, students have recounted experiences of being followed by a dark apparition. One student in particular told me that when the apparition caught up with him while he was walking he became immobilized for a brief period of time, such that he was unable to avoid the encounter. The spirit had literally moved through him and held him in place.
When I walked down Pine Rock Avenue and stood among the grave markers observing the North Campus Residence Complex in front of me I experienced a chilling feeling of being observed by something unseen but right near me; almost as if we were observing the dorms together. Bordering where I was standing in the cemetery are the starkly contrasting structures of Tilcon Connecticut, a supplier of crushed stone, hot mix asphalt and ready mix concrete. But, even the reality of that commercial processing complex sharing the same proximate ground as the cemetery could not permeate the singular sense I felt of something paranormal enveloping me. As I stood fixed in my place, I looked directly in front of me at the North Campus Residence Complex and felt drawn into it as if through some other-worldly bridge connecting the living students and the entities visiting them. There was not a single cloud in the sky and yet the cemetery was perceptibly darker than the areas beyond it. I gingerly exited the cemetery, extra careful to avoid stepping on the perimeters of any graves lest I disturb some spirit auditing the student body. The warmth of the sun was a most welcome return.
Haunted New Haven 