Waldo Hall

A 1907 brick building on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, built by the Albany architect Charles H. Burggraff as a women's dormitory of 115 rooms and turned into offices and classrooms in 1965. It is named for Clara Humason Waldo, who sat on the board of regents from 1905 to 1919 — but the ghost is somebody else. Ida Kidder came to librarianship in her late forties, was hired in 1908 as the first professional librarian of what was then Oregon Agricultural College, and lived in this dormitory; the students called her Mother Kidder, and when she died in February 1920 the college held her funeral in the library she had spent a decade demanding. The story puts her on the fourth floor, which stood abandoned from the 1960s until a renovation in 2012. What makes it worth reading is that the university's own archive collected the accounts with names and dates attached — including the anthropology professor whose wiggling elk skull turned out to hide a cockroach.

Waldo Hall is a brick building at 2250 SW Jefferson Way on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, and its ghost story is one of the few in this catalogue that the institution's own archive has taken the trouble to write down. The building went up in 1907 to a design by Charles H. Burggraff, an architect from Albany, Oregon, and opened that autumn as a women's dormitory: 115 rooms, faculty living quarters, and space for the domestic science department. A renovation in 1965 turned it into departmental and faculty offices and classrooms, which is what it still is. It is named for Clara Humason Waldo (1858-1933), wife of the pioneer and Oregon supreme court judge John B. Waldo and a considerable figure on her own account: she sat on the board of regents from 1905 to 1919 — the first woman in Oregon appointed to the governing board of a state institution of higher education, and by some accounts the first in the United States — was the first woman to address an Oregon State graduating class, and took an honorary doctorate of science from the college in 1923. The ghost is not Clara Waldo. It is Ida Angeline Kidder, and she is the reason the story can be checked at all. Kidder came late to the work that made her name. Born in Auburn, New York, in 1857, she taught primary school, and only graduated from the University of Illinois Library School in 1906, in her late forties. After a first post organising state documents at the Washington State Library in Olympia, she was hired in 1908 as the first professional librarian of Oregon Agricultural College, as the university was then called. She took a room in the women's dormitory, and living among the students is what turned a middle-aged librarian into "Mother Kidder". She inventoried and reorganised a collection that had never been properly catalogued, extended the opening hours, scavenged extra rooms for shelving, and campaigned for a library building of its own until the state legislature approved one in 1917. A heart attack in November 1919 took away her mobility; engineering students built her an electric wicker cart so she could still cross the campus. She died in Corvallis on 29 February 1920, and the college held her funeral in the library she had fought for. In 1927 the regents put her name on a building. The haunting is attached to the fourth floor of Waldo Hall, which KVAL reported in 2014 had stood abandoned from the 1960s until a renovation in 2012. The reports collected by OSU's Special Collections and Archives Research Center are unusually specific and unusually attributed: a woman seen disappearing along a second-floor corridor; the sense of a presence in an office with nobody in it; a door slamming on a windless day; furniture being moved on the empty floor above; footsteps in high heels. They come with names — Elizabeth Thomas, who works in the building; Julie Hamby, a student advisor; Nikkie Pastre, an admissions specialist with a third-floor office — and with dates: accounts from 2002, 2006 and 2008. Students add that when the bathroom was closed for refurbishment the activity moved to the classrooms, cupboards swinging open and doors shutting while people sat at their desks. Waldo Hall is a contributing building in the Oregon State University Historic District, added to the National Register on 25 June 2008. It has never been listed in its own right, though in 1996 two graduate students in the anthropology department prepared a nomination for it as a class project. It was never submitted.

Waldo Hall is at 2250 SW Jefferson Way, on the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, Benton County, Oregon. It is an academic building in daily use — departmental and faculty offices and classrooms since the 1965 renovation — and it is open during university hours to anyone with business there. There is no tour, no admission and no ghost programme. The fourth floor, where the story is set, is closed to the public. It is not an exhibit and there is nothing to see; asking staff to be let up puts them in an awkward position over a floor they do not control. The rewarding visit here is the documentary one, and it can be done from anywhere. OSU's Special Collections and Archives Research Center publishes the online exhibit Where's Waldo? Exploring Waldo Hall History, which is where the named, dated accounts of the haunting come from, and it holds the papers of Ida Kidder's library. Kidder is remembered on the campus itself in Kidder Hall, named for her by the regents in 1927, and the whole of this part of the campus is a National Register historic district, which makes the walk between the two buildings worth doing on its own terms.