A university professor whose office was used to store certain archaeological artifacts has gone insane….
I know, it sounds like something out of a bad pulp novel–a shaggy Shoggoth story, where the professor is old and unmarried and his eventual death in a madhouse spurs a concerned young collegue or relative to investigate and discover the HORRIBLE SECRET.
Nothing like that happens in real life, does it? The insanity turns out to have been a long-concealed problem that probably developed over the course of years. The professor’s wife and children knew he was getting…eccentric…but concealed it to save his career. The artifacts? They’re old pots from a Native American village site excavated 50 years before and temporarily moved into his office during summer building renovation. He wasn’t even using<\b> the office while the artifacts were there.
Of course, that doesn’t explain the grafiti in Coptic in the 3rd-floor men’s bathroom that keeps coming back no matter how often the janitors scrub it away. Nor does it explain the old man’s raving about the ‘Cult of Museon.’ Or the students reporting black-outs and chills in that previously-mentioned bathroom.
But what the hell…it’s not like everything’s explainable, right?
Yeah, all colleges and universities have their own personalized ghosts. Where I am, one building has a kid and a woman in white who hang by the stairs, and another one has a kid who cries.
Heck, even the fast food joint across the street has one; a friend of mine who works there saw a person walk past him into a storage room and not emerge, and there’s no way anyone could get out that way… but the room was empty.
No, it isn’t the Golden Arches. No connection there, sorry to say.
I’ve been debating using this idea in a game, but probably won’t use it right away (school is interfering). I didn’t have the time to develop it into a full scenario, but didn’t want to just leave it as a ‘rumor,’ either.