While the students were brainstorming various plots, I posted a submission flyer inviting students outside the class and faculty to contribute their best ghost story based on Alfred for the anthology. I wanted to make the anthology cohesive in its landscape, as this was the one thing shared by all the writers involved. Allen Grove as a second pair of eyes to proofread some of my edits of the final versions of the stories for the anthology.
She came early in the semester to talk to the class about Alfred folklore, and this visit inspired many of the students' stories. I started by taking a wide angle photo of the Steinheim and importing it into Adobe Photoshop. Within the software I was able to play with the colors and channels to remove most of the saturation from the original photo and 'ghost' our iconic castle.
For the back cover, I used a photograph from the archives, a very romantic photograph from a student's notebook from 1936 of a student in a lab coat with a skeleton resting on his lap. Not only did I like the picture itself, but it also worked well with the theme of some of the stories within the anthology. Hidden away in rural western New York in the Valley of the Mad, a small college town is overrun by crows and deer.
A special thank you to Laurie Lounsberry McFadden of the Alfred University Archives for all her assistance with Alfred's history and photographs.
Rutherford's The Blowfly Man and Anna Wiegman's ERR. The stories also shift in time from the mid-19th century in Meghan Rahner's The Mortician to the present day with Sydney Dominick's Lighten Up, Dude and Catherine Donahue's The Black Knight. Tori Pellegrino. The dead have been present in literature for as long as literature has existed, appearing in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), William Shakespeare's Hamlet. 1601), and one of the first English texts, Beowulf (c. 1000); Samuel's ghost even appears in the Bible. The popularity of the ghost story genre is also related to the growing interest in paranormal activities, including séances, hypnosis, and hypnotism, all of which have been seriously studied by the Society for Psychical Research.
The Victorian period saw the birth of photography, which, thanks to long shutter speeds and the limits of early technology, often transformed our world into one haunted by ghostly figures. The short story itself is largely a product of the Victorian period due to the presence of several journals and places to publish works of short fiction. In English, the word means "where heaven rests on earth." The name derives from the valley's topography and the river's relationship to it.
Legend has it that the Senecas called the place the "Valley of the Mad," a place where they exiled the insane members of their tribe to live among the deer and elk they hunted. This stop was commonly referred to as "Tip Top", known as the highest point on the Erie Railroad. The steep grade proved too troublesome for the steam engines of the time.
A product of its time, Alfred University's classrooms and residence halls were lit by candlelight or oil lamps before electricity, and unfortunately the iconic building, "The Brick," is one of the most famous fire victims. However, a fire broke out in one of the meeting rooms on the highest floor, causing the building to lose its dome and one entire floor, leaving it with only three floors. Before the residence halls became coeducational in 1970, The Brick was a women's hall where Alfred University's first president, William Colegrove Kenyon, strictly enforced segregation of the sexes.
It wasn't until the women saw the top of his bald head that they screamed, letting go of the rope and sending the basket and the president to the ground. President Kenyon was not injured in the fall, but that night marked the end of Brick's basket return system. Towards the end of World War I, in 1918, the insidious Spanish Flu spread, killing 10% of the world's population, including some of Alfredo's residents.
Some students who have lived – and some currently live – in The Brick have reported hearing unseen people and feeling as if someone has crawled into bed with them, and three students even spoke to one of the ghosts on a Ouija. Board of Directors. Cemented into the castle's walls are "stone[s] collected from Ice Age debris, all within three miles of the campus" (Alfred University Archives). Alfred University's class of 1908 wrote in their yearbook that their "mascot [was] the statue from the top of the former.
In Jean McCord's article, "The Black Knight" (1977), she writes, "Ralph Rhodes, President of the Class of 1942, wrote to the Annual Fund Office: 'If you ever want the 'Black Knight' returned , please let me know.
