The original gargoyle
Access: Open to the public when the building is open.
Directions: Begin this station at the front doors of Hubbard Hall, which face north
and overlook the Quad.
GIS: 43° 54‘ 27.59“ N --- 69°
57‘ 47.44“ W
---Photos follow---
Hubbard Hall features high on our list of spooky places on campus. With its Gothic architecture, long facade, and looming 100-foot tower, it looks as though it rose right from an Edgar Allan Poe story.
Hubbard Hall also features a rarity for buildings today: a fully operating gargoyle, which juts out from the top of the tower just to the left of the wooden doors as you face the building. This gargoyle is a replica of the original gargoyle placed on the building in 1903. The original was replaced in 2007 after nearly 100 years of weather had worn it down and caused several fissures.
Historically, gargoyles served two purposes. First, they are built to prevent water collecting on rooftops and to convey it away from the side of the building. You can see Hubbard's gargoyle doing this task on just about any rainy day. Its second purpose is to frighten away evil spirits with its terrifying appearance. Based on the stories Hubbard Hall has to offer, we might question how well it is serving in that role.
There's no getting around the fact that Hubbard Hall has been a dangerous building. It has at least three kills to its credit. One wintry morning, Athern Daggett, professor of government and a member of the class of 1925, slipped on ice on the front steps and died later in the hospital (the iron rails you see today were added as a result of this unfortunate accident). An economics professor had a heart attack and died in his office on the second floor, and an early Information Technology employee suffered the same fate in her basement office.
Louann Dustin-Hunter, a former security officer, has called Hubbard Hall the freakiest building on campus and provided several interesting stories. A security officer several years ago was securing the building and locking it up for the night. As he was standing just inside the large wooden doors and preparing to leave, he heard a voice call out: "Hello?" Thinking he must have missed a student somewhere, he called out; and when he received no reply, he went through the building searching again.
He found no one. Getting ready to leave, he suddenly heard the voice again: "Hello?"
He repeated the same process one more time with the same results. As he prepared to lock up a third time, he heard the voice again: "Hello?"
This time the officer went ahead and locked up the building. He had decided whatever was making that call wasn't going to be found!
Another story involves a custodian working alone after midnight when the building was locked and empty. There is a long rug in the lobby in front of the Arctic Museum that this custodian had vacuumed, rolled up, and set against a wall so he could mop the floor. He went to the basement to fill his bucket and retrieve his mop. When he came back up, the carpet was laid out on the floor in its original location. He scratched his head and concluded he must not really have rolled it up as he thought, so he just rolled it up again and proceeded to mop.
With the floor mopped, he decided to take a break while the floor dried. He went for a short walk outside and met some of his fellow custodians. When he told them about the rug incident, they confirmed that strange things like that had been known to happen in Hubbard Hall.
When he returned from his break, he found the floor dry...and the carpet once again inexplicably lying unrolled on the floor.
The custodian immediately walked to the Communications Center, left his keys, and told the dispatcher to tell his boss he had quit.
What might be the source of these activities? Well, it may be connected to the building's namesake and patron, Thomas Hubbard of the Class of 1857. Thomas Hubbard actually had a suite of rooms he lived in on the second floor of Hubbard Hall across from the Bliss Room. Much of the furniture from those days remains in the office that is there now, and the current resident reports that for years the doors of an old liquor cabinet in the office used to start shaking and she would have problems with items seeming to move around on their own or getting to places she had not left them. Rather than becoming alarmed, she took the spirit's hint and began leaving a bottle or two of alcohol in that cabinet and the strange activities subsided.
Though maybe not entirely. Also in this office is an old bell for ringing servants. A custodian I interviewed said that when he is walking by the office at night he frequently hears that bell ringing away.
More recently, a person seems to have had an encounter with Thomas Hubbard himself. A staff person coming into the building in the very early hours of the morning saw a figure in a Civil War uniform ascending the stairs to the second floor landing just as she was preparing to go up the stairs herself. When she got to the second floor, no one was there. What she didn't know at the time was that Thomas Hubbard had had a distinguished career as a general in the Civil War before he had the building commissioned.
