12/25/2023 0 Comments Ucr ilibraryAs we finish up, a staff member comes up to Hartt and asks PRS to look at the Geology Building, which she says experienced several odd events recently.īut it certainly seems like Rivera Library has more than its fair share of head-turning events. PRS has been asked to do investigations of Watkins Hall before, and they note that Glen Mor 2, UCR’s newest apartment complex, was built on the site of a house that the owner claimed was haunted. It’s not just Rivera that’s claimed to be pursued by the paranormal. A library worker overheard her telling the story and piped up - the same thing happened to him late one night. “We didn’t even press the button,” an amazed Hartt said. After a stop and a shudder, the elevator zoomed up, depositing the baffled group on the fourth floor. They hoped to take the elevator to the basement - but it had other ideas. As we walk toward our next destination, Hartt says that during the group’s initial sweep of Rivera, the librarians cautioned them that accessing the fourth floor via elevator would be impossible: The fourth floor closes at 5 p.m., and the elevator is programmed to not go there after that time. In order to find the truth, we need to examine everything.”Īnd yet, the odd occurrences continue. “We welcome any kind of explanation for something. “We try to debunk things,” Santaella says. Hartt admits that even the recording isn’t necessarily evidence that there are ghosts present. The rattling door handle could be wind or vibrations in the ground. The refrigerator, for instance, could be explained by it not being level, or something heavy weighing against the door. The members of PRS are careful to point out that it is far more likely that there are physical reasons for some of the phenomena. Hartt herself says that during one of the PRS’s investigations into Rivera Library, a recording while walking on the very same staircase shows a faint but audible “hello.” Standing on the mezzanine of a brick set of stairs, she talks about the construction workers who heard the tramping of feet on the very same staircase, only to find nobody but themselves. Down in the basement, she points to the place where a night shift worker was rattled by a rattling door handle - with nobody on the other side. On the fourth floor, she shows us the refrigerator that staff have heard opening and closing by itself. As we walk through the library, current PRS president and fourth-year environmental science major Grace Hartt explains some of the strange phenomena students and staff have witnessed in the building. The combination of deaths and renovations has led many to speculate that several ghosts still wander the halls of Rivera Library. It’s rumored that Carmen’s spirit is still present in the library. She wouldn’t come back to work the next day - she died in a car crash. As the story goes, one night, after drinking too much, she drove herself home. Driven to drink, she often hid out in an elevator shaft during her work hours so she wouldn’t be discovered by her manager to be drinking on the job. Confirmed by records to have actually worked at the Rivera Library, Carmen had a troubled life at home. Perhaps the saddest story, however, is that of a woman known only as Carmen. Even the man for whom the library was named, UCR Chancellor Tomas Rivera, was not immune: His death in 1984 also came from a heart attack. ![]() At the age of 54, he suddenly died in his office of a heart attack. Ernst Ekman was a professor of history at UCR whose office was located in the Rivera Library. Just three years ago, a student worker on the fourth floor suffered a seizure and passed away. The library doesn’t just have an architectural history - it has a morbid one, too, as PRS founder and fifth-year neuroscience major Sierra Santaella explained. As the campus grew, so too did the library, undergoing renovations in 1963, 1968 and most recently 1998. The library has existed since UCR was founded in 1954, a small one-story affair that you can still see the vestiges of today. Krista Ivy, a librarian at Rivera, introduced students to the potential paranormal activity by first giving a history of the building. Hosted by the Rivera Library and the Paranormal Research Society (PRS) at UCR, around 40 students took a guided tour of the library and learned about just why so many people believe the Rivera Library is haunted. And of course, there are the obligatory horror flicks.īut some students spent their Halloween the good old-fashioned way: ghost-hunting in Rivera Library. Small children parade about in their costumes, Halloween parties liven up the drudgery of an impending winter and everybody gets an excuse to pig out on candy. Halloween is always one of the most fun times of the year.
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