Paranormal activity at Columbia is at an all-time high due to the Ghost of Low Steps.

It is a dark and quiet night, and I am walking across Low Plaza. It has been a long night spent alone in my dorm, hunched over a copy of Don Quixote at my desk, mindlessly drumming my fingers on my desk the words began to blur together. It is one of those nights that seem to have lost all rhythm of time and space—the hours pass like minutes, the minutes pass like hours, the warm orange light of my desk lamp gradually fades more and more into a detached haze. Have I gone to class today? Have I seen my friends today? Did I go to Ferris for dinner, only to be vaguely disappointed by surprisingly mediocre action grill quesadillas yet again? All material matters are irrelevant in this fog—I could stay up for one hour more or twenty, for on nights like these, the hands on a clock do not tick.

I decide to take a walk, to shake off the stupor. I pull on my jacket, grab my mask, and step out of my room. I’ll head over to Law Bridge, I figure. I can have a main character moment of standing at the railing and gazing solemnly down Amsterdam, with a pensive look on my face to indicate that I’m thinking very profound thoughts.

As I make my way down Butler Lawn, there is not a soul in sight, with the distant sounds of Amsterdam and Broadway providing ambient background noise. The lights on campus are slowly starting to flicker out—one by one, the multicolored LED lights in the windows of the freshman dorms blink off, and the shadowed structures of Butler and Low, despite the hollow light that still yet shines from their windows, loom like dark sentinels presiding over their slumbering dominion.

I make my traverse of Low Plaza, my pace measured and my mind beginning to clear. I look up at Alma’s statue, and amidst the vast openness of which she is queen, her statue seems so small, so alone. Ditto the Dick Fountains—during the day, when Low Plaza bustles with students walking to class, smoking cigarettes and walking to class while smoking cigarettes, the fountains rise prominently and firmly above the lively crowds, but now, all alone and without so much as a trickle of water running through them, they appear feeble, diminutive, flaccid.

I glance over at the darkened trees lining each side of College Walk, and I shiver. Throughout the cold months, they’ve been adorned with tapestries of light, light which seemed to make the very air shimmer and dance, but now they are Stygian black. The air is still and quiet in the absence of this light, and every shadow around the trees lengthens.

Footsteps echo on pavement where there are none. I feel a gust of cold air sweep over me—but there’s still no wind, the air is deathly still, inert, paralyzed. The mental fog persists, but it has grown to feel more acute, even sharp-edged.

I feel a chill rattle my spine as I press forward towards East Dick Fountain, my pace slowing as the air seems to thicken around me. It’s colder than it was before; still no wind, but something rustles against my arm, something else brushes through my hair. There’s a sensation of movement all around me, of something shifting beneath the surface.

I draw close to East Dick Fountain when, in a moment, I can sense it. I can feel its presence behind me, as palpable as the sexual tension between Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg (which is to say, somewhat palpable). I can feel a shape that has materialized out of thin air, as if, in the blink of an eye, mist swirled up from the tunnels under campus and solidified into a distinct shape that remains outside my view but is decidedly there.

I am immobilized in place, perhaps by the fear lurking within my own mind. We’d learned to coexist with this entity when it was here in physical form, even as we waited for the day when it would no longer intrude upon our lives. But make no mistake, it hasn’t left yet, not really. It may have been observed by only a select few, and understood by fewer still, but a trace of it still remains, its last vestiges slow to take their leave from the landscape of our lives.

It is a force that cannot be perceived, cannot be captured, cannot be controlled. One moment it is at the center of gravity, the next it is gone, leaving behind only a shadow, a whisper, a reminder of its presence. At first glance, it appears to be inviting—a refuge from the wind and the cold, a place to rest and lay your head. Maybe you can see silhouettes moving around inside, hear a muffled laugh waft through the air. Even when the entity is not right there in front of you, and even if you turn your back from where it once stood, if you look up at just the right moment, you can catch a brief glimpse of pastel-white, and you can make out its shape, stirring in the breeze.

This isn’t the only time this has happened. Sometimes, late at night, when there’s nobody around and the air is silent and still, I can still see it.

So if, when all is dark and quiet, you find yourself making the journey across the barren expanse of Low Plaza: beware the apparition that haunts Alma’s Watch. Beware the ghost of Low Tent.

Low Library but spooky via Bwog Archive