Also in this week's C&EN, a pretty awesome Newscripts by Bethany Halford:
...LaQuetta Purkiss, who manages prep for Texas Tech University’s general chemistry labs, tells Newscripts she’s seen three ghosts in the school’s chemistry building. One is a young woman dressed in clothing from the 1950s who walks along one hallway. Another is a chemistry professor who will speak or nod at Purkiss.
The basement is home to a third specter, who bears the likeness of a former graduate student. Purkiss recalls first seeing him when she was working on a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy experiment. “He went into the connecting room, and I ran after him because no one was to go into that room without permission. I found myself standing in the dark and getting a really creepy feeling when I realized that he had walked through the door itself.”
Purkiss isn’t the only one to have a spirited encounter at the NMR spectrometer. Andrew R. Davis, a chemist at the Library of Congress, tells Newscripts he got an eerie error message when he was a graduate student performing an NMR experiment at 1 AM. The message read, “error code=I don’t sleep,” which Davis perceived as an “ominous warning from the troubled spirits forever trapped in the machine.”I'm not really one for believing in ghosts, but there is that weird feeling of being in a scientific building in the middle of the night, but hearing a noise or a voice you don't expect...
I remember at 3am hearing a loud bang out in the halls. However, our building was open 24/7, so any idiot could walk in at 3am without a key or scancard or anything, but a majority of people I saw late at night were students studying in the break rooms. Fortunately, grad students knew/know to keep the labs locked, even when working in those labs. I went out into the halls and didn't see anything, but attributed it to probably some undergrad who saw the lights on and heard music playing. Never heard it again...
ReplyDeleteThe NMR I did my PhD on would say "Error ##### I don't sleep" (# replaces numbers I've forgotten) on average three times a day. It had to do with a programmer with a sense of humor and a bad instruction to put a piece of the instrument into standby mode when that piece did not have a standby mode. No ghosts in the machine here!
ReplyDeleteI once hear some screeching and noise that sounded like the flapping of wings late in the evening in the NMR room. It didn't sound like the usual suspects (rats and mice) so I assumed it was a vampire that turned into a bat, and went home for the day and tried not to work too late until the situation was resolved. A week later I was told that the NMR manager found a bat that was using the NMR basement as an ersatz cave. Over the next two days he caught it and threw it outside. It never came back so it must have been trapped before or got scared of some old guy running after it all the time with a jacket.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, not as scary as a real vampire.
Was the ghost professor a professor at Texas Tech U when he was alive? Did he get tenure?
ReplyDeletehe has been dead for awhile but everyone was afraid to tell him
DeleteDo the ghosts come and ask to see a TLC or pressure you to stay late with them?
ReplyDeleteNo, but they come to put some ghost peaks into your HPLCs
DeleteI wouldn't be surprised if our building is haunted. The motion-sensor activated lights turn on in weird hours of the morning, when I'm certain I'm alone in the building. Sometimes I see shadow people in there when I take naps in the office (nothing like living on research standard time while doing kinetics experiments)...chalk it up to sleep paralysis. But who knows? Maybe they're only visible when in slightly off-kilter mental states, even if they're genuine entities? I agree with the other reports: NMR labs are creepy at night. There's just something about fallout shelter quality basements and old engineering. The sounds, the steam. It makes your hairs stand on end.
ReplyDelete