How To Be a Narcissist's Karma

In rural Texas, I worked at a college that used to be a Nazi POW camp during WW2. While operating as a prison, the Nazis worked as (paid!) farm labor, and they built a theater inside the prison — now used as the college theater — to entertain locals. 

Even when the Nazis were there, the prison had a reputation of being haunted. 

Before WW2, local legend said that a slaughter happened on the Eve of the Civil War, when the last local remaining genocide survivors of Native Americans were attacked by crazed white men who feared that natives and enslaved people would venture north to join the cause against them. 

Local legend also said that there was an old Jewish burial ground that the prison was built on top of. 

What both groups had in common: they were historically targeted for genocide by sociopathic lunatics. 

And thus began the stories of the area’s hauntings, as POWs regularly reported being terrorized by supernatural phenomenon. 

After WW2, the prison was converted into a community college. And the ghost stories never stopped. 

It went far beyond legend: talk of ghosts on that campus were as ordinary as talking about what you did over the weekend. Professors and janitors swapped stories of things that happened after hours, when they were alone in the shadowy hallways and the windowless classrooms. 

I’d walk into class and notice dark bags under my students’ eyes. “What happened?” I’d ask knowingly. 

“We were awakened by the little girl’s voice again. We ran to the RDs room and had him pray over us all night.”

Security guards were known to come and go, citing that they didn’t get paid enough for being haunted, but one security guard remained steadfast: he was an enthusiastic ghost hunter who delighted in every paranormal phenomenon he ever encountered. 

He’d stop by my office to share videos of lights flashing on and off on their own, of toilets flushing by themselves repeatedly and stopping when he opened the stall, of radio static that suddenly became a person’s voice, instructing him to do something. 

This guard also ran yearly ghost tours. He allowed students and professors to come to the campus after hours, and he’d lock us inside the building and let us roam around in the dark, tempting ghosts to give us a show. 

I was a believer before I came to the college, but those tours only cemented it. I’d never been to anyplace with such a plethora of activity: we saw shadows of men that appeared and vanished, heard voices, heard cats squealing from no where, listened as radio static become voices as we asked question, and jumped as electronics went haywire and items fell off shelves, often hitting someone in the group.