The Yerkes of Yesterday

The Yerkes of Yesterday

Centre College (Danville, Ky. : 1918- )—Anecdotes
Centre College (Danville, Ky. : 1918- )—Buildings
Centre College (Danville, Ky. : 1918- )—History
Centre College (Danville, Ky. : 1918- )—Students
Ghosts—Kentucky—Danville
Haunted places—Kentucky—Danville
Haunted universities and colleges—Kentucky—Danville

This is an oral history account about ghostly activity in Yerkes House on the Centre College campus.

Webb, Kelly

2021_01_18

Drury, Hannah

All Rights Reserved

MP4

English

Oral history (literary work)

Drury, Hannah

Webb, Kelly

YERKES HOUSE, Centre College, Danville, KY

PEARL HALL, Centre College, Danville, KY

Interviewer: Hannah Drury
Interviewee: Kelly Webb
Ghosts at Centre Interview Transcript
January 18, 2021

Hannah Drury: My name is Hannah Drury and today I am interviewing Kelly Webb, who has attended Centre since 2017. I’m here with Kelly Webb, interviewee. Today is Monday, January 18th, 2021. We are recording this interview over Zoom. And today we will be discussing Kelly’s experiences during her time as a Centre student. So hello Kelly, thanks for taking some of your time to talk to us today. I wanted to start off by just by asking you what is a typical day like for you on Centre’s campus as a student?

Kelly Webb: A typical day for me is waking up about fifteen minutes before class, running to get ready and head over to the building. I’ll have class and then when I’m done with my classes, in between the class breaks, I’ll have lunch and then I’ll go to work. So I work in the admissions office and I have a lot of student responsibilities there. (1:00) And then around 4:30 or 5:00, I get to go back to my room and start studying for the night. That usually takes a couple of hours and then I have meetings just about every night with different campus organizations. And then I stay up really late watching YouTube videos or TikTok.. And I go to sleep and do it all again.

Hannah: Definitely full days here. So in regards to any unexplained or strange experiences you’ve had on Centre‘s campus, when were those? What particular years are you going to be talking about today?

Kelly: I will mostly talk about my first year which was 2017-2018. That school year, as well as the summer in between my junior and senior year, which was 2020.

Hannah: Okay, so for your first year story. (2:00) Before you tell it, can you describe the location it took place in, just the kind of layout of the environment?

Kelly: Yeah. So my first year I lived in Yerkes on the second floor, and everything happened in our room that I’m going to be talking about. So, our room was set up in a way where our beds were on opposite sides of the room and my bed was right under the window. And so when you walk in, you see both beds on both sides of the room and the window in the back.

Hannah: Okay. So, now if you want to tell your experience...

Kelly: So a few unexplained things happened to my roommate and I my first year. So I think the first experience we had was random things going missing. (3:00) And we kept our room locked and there were very random objects that no one would want to take. For example, the filter out of our Brita water pitcher is just gone one day, no idea what happened to it. And some other little things like that just went missing. We never found them. And again, we kept our room locked. No one came in but us, so there was really no reason for those things to have been missing. Another thing that we experienced was one morning my roommate woke up and there was blood on her pillow. We tried to figure out, you know, where that blood would’ve come from. If she had a scratch, if she would’ve had a bloody nose, we don’t know. Of course those things could’ve happened, but we were unable to identify the source. So, it was a little weird. (4:00) Weren’t entirely putting it up to our paranormal activity, but it was something that happened that was confusing for us both, and a little weird and a little freaky. So there’s two other experiences that happened my first year. One was that I had string lights on my wall and I never plug my string lights in because they were really hard to turn off. And so, I just left them unplugged and we always had our overhead lights on, so I just never had the need to use my string lights. And even if they were not plugged in they would flash, and I don’t know, it’s scary to think about whether it’s paranormal activity or if the electricity was off in the room. It was just one of those things we can’t explain. And the last experience that we had is on our window, which again was above my bed. (5:00) There was a really small child-sized handprint. Like way up at the top, where someone would have had to be standing on my bed and jumping up there to even get to the top of the window. So you could see that handprint on the inside and it was kind of drugged down a little bit, but you could still tell it was child-sized. And this was connected to something else that other people on our hall experienced. We had a couple people swear that they saw a child outside in the hallway. So that was weird, and that just reminded me of another experience I totally forgot about until just talking about it. One night my, well I guess it was one morning, my roommate woke up and she had a text from her friend and her friend was really confused. “Why did you send me this?” So my roommate looked up and there was a message (6:00) that was sent from her phone to her friend that said, “come play with me” in the middle of the night. So those experiences together just made us feel like there was something more going on in that room than we wanted to admit to.

Hannah: I’ve heard a lot of people share stories from Yerkes and they seem to have some definite patterns there. One question I do have: Prior to these experiences had you heard any suggestions about activity in that building or did you only come to hear the stories later?

Kelly: Yeah. My roommate and I obviously were talking about them together. And one night she was out in the hallway and there was a couple of other girls who lived in different rooms standing in the hallway talking about their experience, and my roommate was like “us too.” So yeah, I definitely didn’t know any experience was happening in Yerkes other than what was going on in our room (7:00) before everything went down.

Hannah: That’s pretty interesting and the other story was from which point of your career?

Kelly: So the other story I have was in between my junior and senior year, so this past summer 2020. I was living on campus in Pearl and I had my own room in a suite. But again, I always keep my room locked so it was just me in the room and my bed was under the window in the room. So the window is up against the wall and my bed was up against that like longer. So if this was the window, this was my bed. And I had placed a book on my windowsill. And the book had a bunch of different notes in it from a bunch of different things all scattered throughout. (8:00) And one morning I woke up and there were a set of notecards that were laid out in perfect order, one through five or one through six. I can’t remember the numbers, which they all went together from a set from a lesson that I had taught. And they were laid out in that order that they were taught in. But the weird thing about it was that they weren’t in that order in my book at all. They were scattered throughout, and they weren’t like that when I went to sleep. And like I said, my bed was right under the window. There was no way someone could have come over top of me and done that without me knowing. And also yeah, I keep my room locked and so even if somehow I slept through someone reaching over me and doing that, they couldn’t have gotten in my room.

Hannah: So do you think your immediate reaction is to think of a (9:00) logical explanation for these things before you skip to conclusions?

Kelly: Absolutely. No one wants to think that weird things are happening to them, so with the book one I was trying to figure out how. Maybe if I had tossed the book on my windowsill and they had just fallen out, but they couldn’t have fallen out in that order. And then with the lights flashing like I said earlier, maybe the electricity was off in the room, somehow, someway. Or maybe my roommate had a nosebleed in the middle of the night, we don’t know. But I would definitely try to come up with a better solution than paranormal activity.

Hannah: Do you think, Centre is often described in multiple ways. You know, as being an institution of higher learning or these quick little taglines that we often associate with it. And especially with your (10:00) firsthand experience as a student, you’ve gotten to know the location pretty well. Do you think these experiences have at all changed how you think of Centre as a place? Or have you thought of newer connections that maybe you just didn’t make before?

Kelly: So I would say that the biggest thing that I think of when I think of all these experiences is about Centre as a historic college. We know that Centre is very old, we just celebrated the bicentennial. And so of course I didn’t come to campus expecting it to have paranormal activity, but to me it makes sense because of the age of the college. It’s not new. Most of the buildings haven’t been built recently and if they have, they’ve been on some sort of property that Centre has owned for a long time. I mean we do have a funeral home (11:00) acting as a dorm right now. And a columbarium on campus as well as the church that has a graveyard in it. So I definitely didn’t make those connections before coming to campus, but it makes sense to me.

Hannah: Kind of going off of that, so it has kind of expanded the way you think of Centre. Has that translated over into, say, your own personal beliefs system? Has it changed how you think about or view the world?

Kelly: So I am Christian and I believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. And for me I don’t see the biblical evidence of ghosts as we think of them today, but there is evidence in the Bible of demons and demonic presences. So I have no problem saying (12:00) that there might be some of that on campus, even though the things that we’ve experienced aren’t physically dangerous to us. It has shaped my view in a way like, oh this is real, this is a real thing that could happen. Whereas before like, I thought of demonic presences as something that happened in other countries and other places that aren’t as developed. Maybe some small things here and there but it’s for me as a Christian, it’s opened my eyes to being like hey it’s everywhere, not just in those places far away. It’s right here in your home.

Hannah: You make some really good points about the concept of place and how we think about that and relate them to each other. I guess kind of like my last question would be are there any other places that are important to you? Like how do you give a place (13:00) its importance?

Kelly: For me I have a lot of nostalgia for different places. So my grandparents’ house, both my maternal grandparents’ and my paternal grandparents’. Their homes are very important places to me because I spent a lot of time there growing up. And I have a hard time thinking about the idea of not being able to go back to those places when they pass and my family sells their homes. To think about not being able to just walk in and sit down on the couch, it’s going to be owned by other people. So places for me are important based on family memories and experiences that I’ve had with my family.

Hannah: That’s good. Well again, thank you for your time and your insight. We really appreciate it. (14:00)

Kelly: Of course.

END OF INTERVIEW

MP4

14:02