Haunted places on campus (part 2 of 2)

Josh Escobar — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 19:00:01 +0000

rocor//creative commons

(Disclaimer: All the places, names and quotes are used fictitiously. None of this is real — absolutely none of it.)

Earlier this week, we fed some rumors about some allegedly “haunted” places on and around campus. Now, we bring you our second installment of creepy Berkeley locales:

4. The stairwells in Wurster Hall. “It’s not just graffiti on the walls. It’s people’s feelings.”

— Kevin Bercerril, 2013 grad with a bachelor’s degree in architecture

There is so much pain in Wurster Hall. Students year after year get assigned drawing projects that take 25 hours week after week. The drawings have to be so precise. On rubrics, it is written, “For an A, the viewer should look at the drawing and be able to hear the walls breathing.”

The stairwell seeps the biggest fears, the horrors, the yearnings of architecture students. You can read everything on the walls in the stairwells of Wurster. At night, you may see them — sleep-deprived, more zombie than human and walking around mumbling, “I haven’t slept in seven days. I have a critique tomorrow … Why do I do this to myself?”

In the Wurster stairwells, everyone can hear you scream.

5. The basement of Cloyne Court Hotel. Known as “the dungeon,” the basement of Cloyne has three doors: one that leads to the succulent garden one that leads to the Le Roy Avenue and one that leads to The Unknown. Some say that there are two-headed fish living in the basement, a popular myth based on the legends of pirates who first established the hotel back in the 1800s. Others swear that they’ve seen a ghost when the Campanile strikes midnight. Though accounts differ on size, color and weaponry, all claim to see a panda stalking the halls. Where it came from and what it wants, no one knows for sure.

Not all think that the ghost of a panda is bad. Some say that it protects the basement from evil pirates and thieves. Some say that in the future, all pandas will be ghosts.

Some say that the panda is the soul of Cloyne Court itself.

6. Tolman Hall. Since it was ruled seismically unsafe, official reports said, Tolman Hall was closed for safety reasons a couple years back. We at the Clog found this a bit suspicious. Why? We couldn’t say. All we knew was that after some deliberation, we found ourselves at Tolman in the middle of the night with phone-flashlights and emergency fruit snacks. It was barred off, and we didn’t want to break in. But through the slits, we could see that the insides were infested with vines. We were about to leave when we were approached by a graduate student who — by virtue of her beret and book bag, which was almost too heavy to carry — seemed very wise. She told us that the earthquake was a cover story. The real reason it was closed was that Tolman Hall was haunted.

Now it is only lived in by small woodland critters, because the halls creak and pipes leak even though there is no water going through them. In the halls roam the class of 1868. They walk around in short shorts and crew-cut hair. They sing barber-shop songs about drinking at the soda fountain and striking oil.

We didn’t believe a word she said, but as we were going back to the Daily Cal office from the lower floors of Tolman, we heard singing.

Do you have any campus ghost stories? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: rocor under Creative Commons

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

The post Haunted places on campus (part 2 of 2) appeared first on The Daily Californian.

College sex: Berkeley edition

Nadia Cho — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 02:38:27 +0000

Because I couldn’t afford to fly home the day before Thanksgiving this past week, I spent all of Wednesday in Berkeley. I only had one class that day, and the campus was marvelously empty. So at around 4:20 p.m., I called up my partner, and as two mischievous UC Berkeley students would, we set out on a nice little sex tour through campus. Since I started my column off a few months ago writing about a sexy encounter with a lady, I’ll end my classy kissing-and-telling with some afternoon delight I had with a man.

In response to the spring 2012 “Sex on campus: actually doable?” column, yes — having sex on campus is actually very doable, and it’s lots of fun. It’s also surprisingly easy.

That particular column brought up concerns about not getting to “finish” when doing it in a public place. Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough to have goal-oriented sex, but sex isn’t always about cumming and having orgasms. Sometimes it’s for shits and giggles. Having expectations and goals can ruin the fun of it. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying. Keep this in mind should you ever attempt sex on campus.

I’ve always had the cliched fantasy of having sex in Main Stacks, so we wasted no time in heading there first. The trick to doing it in Stacks is to go at a time when there won’t be a lot of people studying at the same time and to pick a section of books that people won’t ever think to look up. Like the British Royal Academy archives.

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck. We moved the adjacent shelves to block our location so that we couldn’t be seen from the rows on either side. I liked having our shelves of choice close to each other so that the setting was nice and cozy.

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up. You can even re-enact the awesome sex scene from the film Atonement. I definitely love a man who can fuck well while standing up.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it. It’s fun to challenge yourself to not make any noise while having sex. There were two instances in which people walked by the shelves between which my partner and I were going at it hard-core. It was like a game — having to frantically put our clothes back on and immediately pretending to be interested in the data collections of the European Union while panting and giggling hysterically.

For a place to have loud ass-slapping sex, the classrooms in the dungeons of Moffitt served us well after Main Stacks because the ground floor of Moffitt was completely deserted. It felt great to have sex in a classroom that I used to hate sitting in for hours without cellphone reception.

Doing role play involving a student-teacher or GSI in a classroom like this one is LEGIT. It gives you an idea of how fantastic it would be if your hot GSI pounded you on the front desk every time you forgot to turn in a homework assignment.

The next building I chose to desecrate with my perverse ways was Wurster, which happens to be my least favorite building after Evans. Something I learned that day that blew my mind is that there are classrooms in Wurster that lock. With all that privacy, I had just as much fun banging as I did walking around classrooms in lingerie and writing dirty things on chalkboards.

For those whose bucket lists include the item “have sex on campus,” the inspirational message from my classy afternoon is: Just do it. You might find that it’s senior year already and that you never took advantage of all those lunch hours, Saturday nights and Wednesdays before Thanksgiving during which there were probably very few people in the libraries or buildings on campus.

Don’t be scared. Make the screw session worth getting caught, and remember that you are definitely not the first person to have had sex on campus, nor will you be the last.

Other than providing fun places to get down, Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognize the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Learn to appreciate your sexy side and experience a few frisky things during your time here. Take the Female Sexuality DeCal, have sex in Morrison, do the naked run and talk to people who are willing to share their personal experiences. The wide acceptance and freedom of open sexual expression are among the greatest legacies we have the opportunity to uphold at this university.

Contact Nadia Cho at sex@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter: @nadiiacho.

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Haunted places on campus (part 2 of 2)

College sex: Berkeley edition