Hello, and Thank You, and Meet Tom Bayley

I want to thank you all again for your kind words in the last post and for your patience with me over this past week.  I know that in times past, I've gone longer than a week without posting, but I usually don't precede an absence with a depressing entry and then not even respond to everyone's comments for a few days.  Just to let you know, I check this blog as often as I check my e-mail; I see and read comments about as quickly as you post them, but much like my e-mail, I often wait a little while and respond to a bulk at once...but even for me, I was lax this week.  I'm extremely lucky to have such a great group of friends reading my stuff and I thank you for the support you give me. :)

SPEAKING OF YESTERDAY...rough day, yes.  But it was made better by my man Barack laying Mittens flat in a dominating debate performance that may have just won him the election, AMIRITE?  So, you know, every cloud has a silver lining...

Something else that happened yesterday was that I pulled out my sketchbook from my first semester of my senior year of college and I read the whole thing start to finish.

Now, if I were you, I would be sick to death of me always talking about BLAH 'I wrote something forever ago' or HAHA 'I have all this creative shit lying around that I'm going to bring up now' and that general kind of thing that I say all the damn time.  But the truth is that I HAVE CREATED SO MUCH SHIT IN MY LIFE that literally if all I did on this blog was write about things that I did earlier in life, I would...well...I would probably update more frequently than I do now.

Bellingrath dorm, Rhodes College.

Anyways.  My senior year, first semester, I took Intermediate Painting and, let's be honest here, I rocked the shit out of that class.  I painted crazy-awesome things, the likes of which I don't even know where they came from (since I have done nothing as impressive before or since), and I was also required to keep a sketchbook for the duration of the semester.  The main point of the sketchbook was to plan out the paintings I did in class, but I was also supposed to research established artists, AND (big "and" here) research something that was "of interest to me."  And what was of interest to my 21-year-old self?

Ghost stories on campus.

More specifically, I was interested in the stories that inspired the stories:  the real people who had lived and died on the grounds of my school.  (Yes, I realize the morbidness of juxtaposing this entry with the one that precedes it, but get over it.  I have.)

The most interesting thing to come from my semester-long investigation into Rhodes College's most famous ghost stories was that none of them could be directly traced back to a real death.  I found this fascinating at the time because of not only the excess of ghost stories on campus, but the excess of real deaths that had occurred there.  To my way of thinking, if you had all of this perfectly reasonable source material, why waste time making up fake stories?  But alas, it wasn't up to me to dictate campus legends, and thus it was that I ran into one dead end (no pun) after another in looking for the culprits of the stories I'd heard as a student.  But I did run across more than one interesting true story that stuck with me, and the one that stuck with me the most was that of Tom Bayley.

When I was a sophomore and a junior, I lived in a dorm called Bellingrath, which is nicely positioned near the dining hall on the southwest end of campus.  Today, as when I lived there, Bellingrath is exclusively a women's dorm.

A generation ago, it housed men.

Bellingrath has four floors, three of which house students.  I lived on the first floor (junior year) and second (sophomore) and Kara was an R.A. on the third floor our senior year, so I was very well-acquainted with the dorm itself, and just as acquainted with the legend of the ghost who supposedly haunted the fourth floor, which was locked to students but housed maintenance equipment as well as spooky noises and (allegedly) inexplicable lights.  And it was in the search for this (non-existent) fourth floor entity that I ran across Tom Bayley.

Tom Bayley

Tom was a senior during the 1969/1970 school year.  He was a history major and he was on the newspaper staff.

According to reports from the time, he was "quiet," but he had a lot of friends and he made good grades.

He lived on the third floor of Bellingrath with his roommate, Churchill Davenport, whose academic career was prestigious enough that Churchill made his way into the esteemed "Hall of Fame" for the 1970 graduating class.

In February of 1970, Churchill left his dorm room at about 6:00 p.m. while his roommate slept.  When he returned around midnight, his roommate was dead.

Tom had been drafted for the Vietnam War, and police found five suicide notes and a poem, all of which indicated how distraught he was at his draft notification.  Tom was supposed to report to the draft board that day, but instead, he drank a bottle of acid in his dorm room and it killed him.

It sounds ludicrous and maybe even creepy, but after I found him in the 1970 yearbook, Tom worked his way into my group of friends.  We all knew him, we all knew his story, and we all talked about him like he was someone we'd perhaps once shared a class with.  We even visited his old room the week of Halloween.  Kara held a "campus ghost story" talk for her residents; about fifteen girls showed up and I, as a featured guest, was unable to contain my earnestness when talking about the boy who had lived just down the hall.  As a group, we solemnly paraded to his room and took a moment to reflect, even as the girls who lived there at the time looked on as if we were crazy...

In some ways, Tom was an anchor for me.  An indication that a picture in a yearbook on a dusty library shelf could transcend time and make a difference in the life of a student with no connection other than attending the same school.  The next semester, when I took Intro to Digital Imaging, I featured Tom in my final project.  He's on my Facebook page even now, included in the album I put up shortly before our 5-year college reunion.  He was an integral part of my senior year experience, more real to me than some of the more forgettable people I really did share classes with.

I remember sitting with Kara and our friend Greta (my primary ghost research comrade) at dinner long after we'd finished eating one night, talking about the level of desperation one would have to feel to drink a bottle of acid.  Our generation is unbelievably lucky to not know the burden of a draft, even if we do know something of war.

Tom may have lived and died before my time, but his story resonated deeply with me and my friends...and it was strangely comforting yesterday, as I took the time to reflect on college life, to open up my sketchbook and see his familiar, haunted eyes looking back at me.