April Fools is months away, and Halloween is long gone. Therefore, this spooky tale of an alleged exorcism occurring on Columbia’s campus, not once but twice, may very well be legitimate.

According to the Columbia BWOG, they received an anonymous email on November 12th with the cryptic subject line: “Exorcism on Broadway 9.” Contained in the email was a detailed account of an incident involving several students—identified by the sender as Christian Koreans—on October 25th in which a Barnard student’s ailment was “cured” through the power of exorcism.

Naturally, one would be inclined to hastily spam the delete button, writing off the correspondence as nothing more than misplaced junk mail, but not the BWOG; no, they investigated the claims, ultimately finding them to be plausible.

The BWOG reports:

In the wake of the incident, rumors about the situation spread throughout the RA community. One RA said that he was forbidden by ResLife as an RA to talk about it, as it is general ResLife policy not to discuss specific incidents.

Last night, around 1 a.m. a Blue and White editor reported a similar incident occurring on the plaza between East Campus and SIPA. (Numerous students in EC also witnessed the incident.) After initially dismissing the "intermittent female shrieking" as partygoers, the editor told Bwog, "I looked outside and saw a group of about 8-9 people standing around a huddled female figure. All were wearing coats and faced towards her, largely unmoving."

A group of students gallivanting through the night? Dorm-room exorcisms?

If this wasn’t coming from a respected new source, I'd dismiss this story as an urban legend, but yet…

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing..." (Edgar Allan Poe)