Have you ever been on campus late at night and got a chill looking at the Old Chapel? Maybe it happened in a stairway at Mary Lyon or walking up Orchard Hill? It’s possible that you weren’t alone.

One of the great Halloween traditions in New England is to tell ghost stories. UMass is over 100 years old and has its share of history and of course ghosts. Everyone has heard at least one UMass urban legend from a friend or has claimed to have a close encounter with something that wasn’t quite right. But what is fact and what is fiction?

I decided to find out. I took a ghost tour on Monday night with the UMass History Club, a group that will be seeking RSO status later this year. Katie Flynn, Michael Goldman and Michael Franck, members of the club, were our tour guides on this journey in search of the living dead. The history club based their stories on research done in library and through Collegian archives.

We began our tour at the Old Chapel. Back when the Old Chapel was still open, students used to ring the bells before and during services. One day one of the bell ringers was running late. He wasn’t watching the road carefully and was struck by a car and died. On Halloween night the bells can be heard ringing and they say you can see the silhouette of the young man sitting up by the bells. A moaning and knocking noise can sometimes be heard coming from the crypt in the Old Chapel. It’s fairly common knowledge that the Old Chapel used to house the University library. Could it be the ghost of librarian Henry Goodell? Urban legend: One of my friends had another Old Chapel story passed on from an upper classmen. He told me that a young woman had committed suicide in the bell tower and that you can see her hanging there on the anniversary of her death. There was also a young man who fell down the stairs and died. You can hear his spirit walking up and down the stairway. I was inside the Old Chapel two years ago when they put the time capsule into the crypt, and can definitely remember things not feeling right in there. Perhaps it was just asbestos.

South College has an anniversary ghost. The building was a men’s dormitory in 1867 but burned to the ground in 1885. There was a young man who lived in the upper floor of the dorm, and he didn’t die in the fire but had just lost his fianc