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October 28, 2007

Tales of hauntings passed down at Rose-Hulman’s fraternity house

House, other buildings on property used to be an orphanage

By Austin Arceo

TERRE HAUTE — Rose-Hulman senior Matt Rutkowski remembers a night two years ago when, as his truck’s lights focused on the front doors of an old nearby orphanage dormitory, he and a friend watched as one door just opened, and then closed.

Only there wasn’t anybody around.

“… And there was no wind or anything, so we were like ‘what is going on?’” Rutkowski said. “It kind of freaked us out.”

It’s just one of many such tales supposedly taking place at Rutkowski’s fraternity.

The Pi Kappa Alpha property near Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has been the setting of such tales time and time again.

Next to the fraternity house, cars carrying license plates from across the country seem oblivious to the two abandoned, boarded up former orphanage dormitories sitting just feet away.

One of them is where Rutkowski saw the door mysteriously open.

“Nobody believes me to this day that this even happened…,” he said as he introduced his account yet again, this time on Sunday afternoon.

His fraternity house was part of a several-building complex for the former Vigo County Home for Dependent Children, which was also known as the Glenn Home. The orphanage was created in 1903, though the “main building” was constructed in 1896, and still survives, a Web site dedicated to the Glenn Home’s history reports.

Several buildings were replaced through the orphanage’s tenure, which lasted more than 75 years. It finally closed in 1979, and many of the buildings later became part of Pi Kappa Alpha’s property.

And then the legends began.

Sunday afternoon, Rutkowski and fraternity president Jason Rodzik recounted eerily haunting tales - stories that were handed down, and likely will be so again and again.

Rodzik explained the tale of how a young woman one night said she heard the sounds of children playing in water while she was walking in the parking lot.

It was the site of an old swimming pool, Rodzik said.

In another incident, Rodzik explained of a fraternity brother who was alone at the house when he repeatedly heard someone knocking at the front door, only to find nobody there when he answered it. After the third time of being interrupted by the disturbance, the young man not only checked the door, but walked around the entire property, only to find nobody.

As the young man came inside, he heard the knocking again.

It came from a small room underneath the staircase.

“And he just, like takes off and … locks himself in his room,” Rodzik said, finishing the tale.

Still, Rodzik admitted that everything he’s heard are “second-, third-, fourth-hand stories.”

“Well, the house itself is just over 100 years old,” Rodzik said, “so obviously that leads to a lot of … stories going back about it.”

An exploration of the nearby structures provides the visible proof as to why ghost stories can easily emanate from the site. Leach and Alden halls, the two dormitories next to the gravel parking lot, are darkened, dampened spots worn by weather and time, where someone can instantly forget that an engineering student could be playing video games less than 100 yards away.

The duo explained still more haunting tales that supposedly occurred on or near the Pi Kappa Alpha site, as some former orphanage locations exist outside the fraternity’s property.

But do all the tales mean that they’ve become believers that Pi Kappa Alpha is haunted?

“Well, I just feel that I’ve seen it, so ‘the unexplained,’ you know,” Rutkowski said. “Plus, it’s cool to think of in that way.”

Rodzik, meanwhile, doesn’t “really believe in ghosts.”

“So living out here for four years, I’ve had a lot of opportunities, I guess, to change that,” he added, “and I haven’t seen anything that has.”

He might think differently had he encountered Rutkowski’s occurrence. Just after Rutkowski and his friend had seen the door mysteriously open, they got a few of their friends, including Rodzik, to scope out the building.

As it turned out, Rutkowski thought he witnessed the door open an opposite way than the hinge allows.

“I tried to tell him he was crazy by kicking the door repeatedly” to prove it didn’t open that way, Rodzik said.

“Hey, you know, whatever,” Rutkowski shot back to Rodzik after he laughed. “Two people said it happened.”

Austin Arceo can be reached at (812) 231-4214 or austin.arceo@tribstar.com.

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