Watch out Neihardt Residential Center, you aren’t the only haunted building on campus giving ghost tours this year!

Chuck O’Connor, Dean of the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, announced Friday that Halloween ghost tours would soon be given at Richards Hall to showcase the ghosts of art majors’ hopes and dreams.

“These tours are an excellent opportunity to exhibit the results of our students’ work,” O’Connor explained. “By showing off the tortured spirits haunting one of our campuses oldest buildings, we’ll be able to raise awareness of the behind-the-scenes plights of our unseen art majors.”  

O’Connor explained that dramatizations of artist majors’ falls from grace would be staged in the building’s various low-lit studio areas.

“These performances will make viewers viscerally aware of the restless spirits wandering Richards Hall,” O’Connor said. “Whether the student was an innocent freshman longing to be the next Rembrandt, or a burnt-out senior pessimistic enough to be the next Munch, the skits our students performing are sure to send a chill down visitors’ spines.”

According to O’Connor, a highlight of the tour will be the building’s kiln area.

“This room was built for students to fire their pottery creations, but Richards Hall legends state that it’s something much darker,” O’Connor described. “Legend has it that in the forties, students were forced to cremate the bodies of other artists here who had perished in the pursuit of the perfect painting.”

The tour will conclude in the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery next to a seemingly blank canvas.

“This canvas has a vague outline of a screaming undergrad imprinted onto it,” O’Connor explained. “It was discovered late one night by a custodian in the fabrication space. It’s the perfect ending to this tour of our building’s tortured artistic spirits.

The tours will be starting this week, but the spirits are present in the building all year long.