University students curate online museum of campus oddities
By CELANIE POLANICK
Staff Writer
PISCATAWAY -- Rutgers University graduate students and employees Jessica Teal and Ray Brennan spent Wednesday night exploring a wooded area of the Livingston Campus that used to be part of Camp Kilmer.
Discovering strange junk in the woods isn't unusual for Teal and Brennan, who have captured glowing orbs on film in dank basement machine rooms, interviewed hotel clerks about ghosts that place pictures in guests' rooms and discovered litters of baby coyotes in parking lots.
With the combined skills of urban anthropologists, historians and ghost hunters, the pair are the amateur detectives of Rutgers Rarities, an online museum that documents the past and present of Rutgers, one oddity at a time.
On Wednesday night, the two were exploring the remains of Camp Kilmer's train station and Army barracks.
Soldiers were brought in by train and loaded with supplies before they were sent off to fight in World War II, Teal said. Someone told Teal and Brennan there were "Blair Witch-type stick formations" in the woods, and anyway, the place is spooky, she said.
In the woods, Teal and Brennan adjusted the knobs on a circa-1950s refrigerator, now bent and rotting on its side, next to where a metal truck hubcap is being consumed slowly by the trunk of a tree. Brennan picked up a crumbling can of motor oil, labeled "motor Honey," which he said also came from the 1950s.
Nearby, Teal looked for clues to explain a formation of logs and sticks at her feet, about the size and shape of a child's bed.
"We should really get a metal detector," she said.
The team tries to venture out on investigations at least once a week. Since they met last fall, they've performed close to 60 investigations and collected 45 accounts, which are detailed descriptions of their experiences or stories collected from others, Brennan said.
Teal, a master's student in labor relations, does much of the writing, and Brennan, a doctoral student in materials engineering, works on historical background and photography. He is also the group's Web master.
"We started swapping stories about weird things we'd seen on campus," she said. "I thought I saw a unicorn, but it was really this albino deer. He had a story about wolves -- turned out there were coyotes on campus."
Like the coyotes, the pair's collection of stories began to proliferate naturally. Friends had stories, too, and soon the pair was interviewing amateur investigators around campus, collecting hunches, ghost encounters and tid bits of odd history.
They began to investigate rumors of tunnels under the College Avenue campus in New Brunswick, old tales of suicides and hauntings in Demarest Hall, and reports of strange things happening on the third floor of the University Inn and Conference Center on the Cook/Douglass campus, where they had an experience last summer that neither can fully explain.
As they walked along the hall in the center, they heard knocking noises.
"We noticed doorknobs around us were jiggling a little bit," Teal said.
Suddenly, her brand-new tape recorder began turning on and off, and Brennan's video camera was being tugged upwards by an unseen force, he said.
"I actually fought it," he said. "I pushed against it, and it was a strong enough force that I had to struggle to fight it. I was trying to justify it in my head, like, it was air currents, or something, but there was really no explanation. After everything we had heard, I came to the conclusion that it must be some kind of a spirit or something."
"People were skeptical," Teal said. "I played back the tape recording, and everything seemed normal except for these blank spots -- you could hear the tape recorder clicking on and off."
They'd like to buy some infrared equipment, or at least more sophisticated photography gear, but they don't have enough money, Teal said.
"It's hard, because we're not professionals; we're not ghost busters," she said.
They've also spent some time stalking the campuses' wild coyotes, parking by the woods on Livingston Campus and playing recordings of a female coyote in heat -- along with some less advisable lures, Teal said.
"I had this idea that if I tied pork chops to a tree strongly, we would be able to lure the coyote," she said, laughing. "Not all good ideas, really. The cops have come to know us."
Though it's sometimes difficult to justify to others what they do, Teal said, much of their work revolves around historical research and documentation.
Spooky anecdotes aside, the diversity of subject matter keeps the spirit of the project alive, she said.
"There are plenty of nights where we find nothing, of course, but there are plenty of nights when something does happen."
For more information on Rutgers Rarities, visit www.rutgersrarities.com.
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