There’s something fundamentally disturbing about auditory hallucinations.

Let me explain. A few weeks ago, I attended an art show at Pitzer College’s Grove House. At some point during the night, two friends and myself went out onto the back balcony. I was about ten feet behind them, so by the time I reached the balcony, they had already situated themselves on one side of this small area, three feet by seven feet.

I walked out and went to the edge. I was looking out over the Pitzer back parking lot, when suddenly a friend called out my name from a foot or two behind me. I started at the sound of his voice. "I’d almost forgotten he was coming," I thought, turning.

"Oh my god_______!" I exclaimed in greeting, forgetting the name in the same moment that I uttered the words.

Imagine my shock when I saw no one there.

And indeed, this is the central problem with my little anecdote; no one was there. No one called me, and try as I may, I was unable to identify the voice I’d responded to with such assured familiarity, and, most alarming, that I had somehow expected to be calling me. Naturally, neither of my friends had heard anything.

Now, this is not supposed to be an account of my personal descent into stress-induced schizophrenia. (No– it doesn’t run in my family, if that’s what you’re thinking.) Apparently, such occurrences are fairly common, even among us reasonable Pomona kids.

I know this because after the "incident" I began to ask around. What I found is that I am far from alone in having experienced the, for lack of a better word, "paranormal;" almost everyone I spoke to had had a personal experience of the inexplicable, and sometimes terrifying, variety. (‘Personal" here means that it happened to them or someone they know and believe).

The following stories are not made up. (The names are.)

This first story occurred in Clark V. Late one night, Annie and her boyfriend Robert were settling in for the night in his dorm room. As neither one could sleep, they decided to play a game. The game was essentially similar to the child’s game of finding shapes in the cloud, except that, instead of clouds, Annie and Robert were looking at the shadows in the room.

They had been playing for a few minutes, and their eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark. When it was Annie’s turn again, she looked into the corner, where she saw a tall, gaunt woman dressed in flowing robes staring at her. Scared out of her mind, Annie hid under the covers for nearly a half an hour before Robert, who saw nothing, was able to convince her to come out. When she did, the apparition was gone. ( The older sister of a current Pomona senior saw a similar figure in her dorm room at CMC.)

The second (really really scary) Pomona ghost story took place in an Oldenborg language quad. It was about 10:30 at night. Katie was studying on her bed, facing the door to the common room. All of a sudden, she had the overwhelming sensation that someone was watching her. When she looked up, she saw, standing about a foot away from the door, a little girl. Katie initially thought it was a real little girl who had somehow found her way into the common room. She described thinking first that it was far too late for a child to be roaming, and then, that it was highly unlikely that the girl had wandered unremarked through her suitmates’ room.

All of this consideration took place in the split second that she first noticed the little girl. But, sensing that what she was seeing was eerily out of place, Katie quickly became terrified. She glued her eyes to her books and tried to ignore the presence of the girl in the doorway.

But then the girl entered the room and began walking towards her. Katie, with an occasional terrified glance upwards, continued to try to study, edging closer and closer to the wall as the girl approached. Eventually, Katie found herself virtually lying down, her shoulders pressed against the wall, still trying to concentrate on her book.

The girl climbed onto the bed and leaned over on all fours to look into Katie’s face.

They stayed like this for a moment, before the girl pressed her cheek to Katie’s, climbed off the bed and walked back towards the door to the common room. There she turned around once before walking back into the common room and disappearing.

I asked Katie why she didn’t scream or run away into her suitmates’ room. She answered that even though she was terrified, she had the impression that to scream, or to acknowledge what was happening in any way, would somehow make her more vulnerable.

I also asked Katie what the girl was wearing. She was unable to recall exactly, saying that the whole incident was sort of dreamlike in her memory. The only image she recalled with perfect clarity was of the girl in the doorway, and noticing that she had a reflection in the common room mirror.

Now, I don’t exactly believe in ghosts. I say "exactly," because I don’t exactly not believe in them either. We are a society of reason, of science. Schools like Pomona teach us to deduce, to prove, and to argue. Subsequently, when we are confronted with things that do not fall into ready categories, our minds rejects them almost immediately. We hear a ghost story, but often spend the entire time automatically reconstructing a plausible explanation. "Maybe it was the light." "Maybe it was a dream." More often than not, we suspect the person telling the story of fabrication.

Sometimes, we might even think they’re crazy. Research studies have shown that when schizophrenics have hallucinations, their brains respond in exactly the same way that they would if they had actually seen or heard something. Pupil dilations, neuron firings...all identical. To the schizophrenic, there is absolutely no way to qualitatively differentiate between the two sorts of input ("real" and "imagined") to which the brain is responding.

And even though as an explanation, mass schizophrenia is hardly logical, we are more often willing to admit to temporary insanity than to having actually had a paranormal experience; virtually no one who told me their ghost stories would say that they believed in ghosts–this despite the frequency with which such incidents seem to occur.

So, is there something to these and the millions of other ghost stories out there? Or are we all just a bunch of lunatics?