Faner Hall, named after SIUC Professor of English Robert
Faner, who died in the 1960s, stands like a wall on the SIUC grounds as if it divided the old part of
campus from the new. Dedicated in 1975,
a campus legend says it was designed so as to frustrate any student protestors
who attempted to take over the building as the administration could quickly
seal off individual sections. A classic example of the Brutalist style of
architecture popular at the time, the building houses many of the departments
comprising SIUC’s core curriculum-anthropology, philosophy, English, criminal
justice and economics among others, and if the stories are true, at least one
ghost.
According to those who have reporting seeing, the ghost
appears as a female student in her early twenties, with shoulder length brown
hair, wearing a striped sweater (not the Freddy Kruger type), jeans and
carrying a book bag. According to the story explaining her presence In what is
after all a building of relatively recent construction, she fell, slipped or
jumped from an upper floor of Faner onto the concrete plaza below. Of course,
given the style of Faner’s construction, it would be very hard for anyone to
fall from an upper floor of the building and a search of news records
unsurprisingly turned up no reference to any such death. Still the stories
persist and were fairly common on campus during the 1990s
Encounters with the girl generally took place during the
evening and most often involved custodial staff cleaning up after most students
and faculty had department for the day but enough students were in the building
for evening classes that seeing one more did not seem out of place, at least at
first. The most common stories involved a custodian sweeping in the hall, the
girl walks past, the custodian turns around and the girl is gone. Another common story involved the cleaner
sweeping the hallway, again the girl walks past, this time in the same
direction. The girl turns a corner, the janitor follows a few seconds later and
the girl has vanished. Granted, anyone who has ventured into Faner knows how
easy it is to get lost in there, but it
is not bad enough that someone can vanish in less than 5 seconds.
The best story of the Faner ghost involves one of the
women’s bathrooms. A custodian was in it
cleaning, when a young woman walked in and, ignoring the cleaner, entered one
of the stalls and closed the door behind her. The woman went ahead with her
work and finished cleaning, except for that one stall. Some fifteen minutes had
passed and the custodian realized the girl had not emerged. Wondering if there
was a problem, she walked over to the stall and asked “Excuse me, are you
OK?” No response. She knocked on the
door. The door slowly swung open , revealing the empty stall.
It appeared the Faner ghost might have departed the
building, as no new stories about her cropped up for several years. Then on one
of last year’s Haunted Carbondale tours, one of the participants said she had
worked as a staff member for one of the departments in the building and had, as
part of her job, worked late a number of evenings in the building. On several occasions, she heard a knock on
the office door and opened it to find no-one there. At least twice, she opened
the door to see a young woman walking away, not responding when she called
after her. Maybe the Faner ghost does still walk the halls of the building
after all.
A student was killed during the construction of Faner Hall when a load of construction materials fell on him, but since the DE story reports he was a fraternity member, it is doubtful he returned as a girl carrying a backpack.
