The Alva Museum
It was homecoming weekend for Northwestern Oklahoma University in Alva, Oklahoma in 1993. Normally I went home to Enid on the weekends, but I had helped build the drama club float for the parade and I was in the color guard of the marching band so I had to stay in town to attend the football game that afternoon. There were few options for entertaining oneself in Alva and I had already exhausted most of them in the two or three months that I had resided there, so I decided I would check out the Cherokee Strip Museum, as I hadn’t done that yet. It was a big brick building that looked like it was pretty old. Upon entering, there was a lady at the front desk and no one else around. As with most museums, the silence was deafening. I started up the stairs as I thought I'd check out the top floor first and work my way down. As I was going up, a friend of mine and her family were coming down, leaving the museum. We exchanged hellos and went on our separate ways. The curator and I were then alone in the quiet museum.
The upper floor was basically a long hallway with rooms on both sides. I decided that I would start at one end and work my way to the other end so I began my long trek down the hall. The first room I went in was done up as an old operating room, tables and all. Archaic machines that were, at one time, state-of-the-art life saving devices. It was a little creepy – they looked more like some kind of shiny torture traps. Even so, they were quite intriguing. Across the hall from the operating room was a room that fancied an old funeral parlor, complete with an ancient carriage basket just the right size for a body, old embalming paraphernalia, the works. Just the nature of that room made it a bit uncomfortable and gave one a quick sense of one’s own mortality. Against the wall at the end of the hallway, sandwiched between the operating room and the funeral parlor, was an old medical contraption of some sort that had switches and so forth on it. It was not something I was familiar with or could figure out a use for, but it seemed to fit in with all the other aged trappings of illness, death, and decay.
I wandered, meticulously looking in every room, seeing all the stuff of a small town museum. I was at the opposite end of the hall from where I started when I heard voices and saw, out of the corner of my eye, some people come up the stairs and enter the upper floor. Turning to see who was there, I saw no one. I assumed they went into one of the rooms at the other end of the hall. Going on about my business of historical enlightenment, I again saw movement so once more, I turned to see what was there. No one. “Hmmm… How puzzling,” I thought to myself as I traveled the length of the corridor back to the vicinity of the operating room, scanning every room on the way, only to find myself completely alone. Then I noticed something very odd indeed - the lights on the machine standing against the wall were lit up - they hadn't been before! In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure it had even been plugged in to anything. Considering I was obviously, at least as far as my rational mind could tell, the only person on this floor, I was more than a little spooked after hearing voices, seeing people walking around, and lights lighting up on the ancient medical contraption that hadn’t been on, so I decided to go back downstairs to see if perhaps I had missed something and there were more people down there. It occurred to me that it was possible that voices were simply carrying up the stairs. I went down to the main floor only to find that I was the only visitor in the museum.
After my mysterious afternoon at the museum, I relayed the story to my roommate and she agreed, it was indeed very strange. We decided to consult our neighbor, her aunt, as she was a long time native of the small town. I told her of the voices, the people walking that turned out to not be there, the lights on the old machine, the creepy sensation in the operating room. Her response was, “Yeah – that’s the old hospital. Everyone knows it’s haunted.” Well, maybe not everyone...
I had not lived in Alva long enough to know the local folk lore and I had no idea about the history of the old building. The layout made more sense upon learning of its former life of a hospital. Apparently, the operating room equipment was original to the building. So, without prior knowledge of the haunting, I could not go with the theory that my mind was playing tricks on me – I was truly there just to kill some time before a football game.
Later on that fall, the drama club that I was a member of decided to have their Halloween party there one crisp night in October. Needless to say, I was more than a little ambivalent when they shut off the lights and herded us up the stairs by flashlight beams to the old operating room…