This ghost encounter occurred during the summer of 2002 on the graduate college campus of Northeastern State University (NSU) in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. NSU evolved from the former Cherokee Indian Seminary campus at the Cherokee Nation capital located in Tahlequah. The campus has a ghostly past extending back into the 1840s.
I was in my next-to-last semester of graduate school and I lived on-campus in an adult dormitory. Connected to that building was an annex to the campus psychology department. I regularly went from my dorm building through the psychology annex as a short-cut to the main library building.
My first of three sightings of this ghost occurred when I left my room one evening and took the short-cut to the library and walked through the psychology annex. In the annex was the office of a popular psychology professor, who usually left his office door open. Many times in the previous three years I passed his office and saw him inside at his desk and he would wave of say hello.
But during the start of the summer 2002 semester, I walked down the hall past his office and he came out and visited with me in a short cordial conversation. Then I went on about my business. I later went to the library where I learned that this professor had died of a sudden heart attack at the end of the spring 2002 semester!
What a puzzling shock! The librarian who told me continued talking about the death occurring in the professor's office in the psychology building annex. I was truly dumbfounded and did not say anything about my encounter with the ghost to the librarian.
I later left the library and took my short-cut through the psychology annex back to my dorm. As I turned into the hallway leading past the late professor's office, I glimpsed him at the far end of the hall standing and smiling very strangely.
I cannot tell you how extremely shocked I felt. I now realized he was dead and that I was seeing his ghost. No horror movie ever got to me like the stark terror of this true ghost encounter. Lord have mercy!
The professor's ghost turned and walked into his office. Then I walked past the office doorway. I glimpsed inside the late professor's office to find no one inside, except for a pale blue smoke swirling around an elaborate Victorian desk. And then the curling wisps of smoke vanished.
