“Night Beings” Explore UMD’s Flipside

This article was originally published in the March print edition of The Bark, distributed at the University of Minnesota Duluth campus.

“It feels like it should be off-limits, but it’s not,” said Josie Belde, a freshman at UMD. It was 1 a.m., and Belde sat at the bottom of a dark stairwell near the Kirby Lounge, talking to a friend. “When there’s no one here, it definitely feels a little more intimate.” Further down the empty hall, the music in the UMD Store had been left on, and Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” was faintly audible. 

The Kathryn A. Martin Library is always closed by midnight, turning the lights off over unsolved math problems on the whiteboards, and the external campus doors lock at 10 p.m. But the hallways and common areas of UMD remain open all night. The pipes never stop whirring and the vending machines never stop humming. In Weber Music Hall, the wooden double-doors marked “Mechanical” rattle slightly in a machine-generated wind. Sometimes, somewhere, a door closes.  

“Silence is a weird sound,” said Mia O’Connor, “especially in buildings. It kind of makes me crazy if I listen for too long.” O’Connor lives in Ianni Hall, and sometimes walks around the main campus at night. Once, she lost track of time and stayed until 3 a.m. “I’m like, ‘Is there a ringing noise or is it just me?’ There’s nobody that I can ask that.”

In empty buildings, it’s possible for someone to be heard long before they’re seen. Joshua Haastrup’s footsteps clicked closer and closer before he turned the corner into the Kirby Student Center, carrying a white box. “I got too much pizza,” he said. “I was just seeing if anybody on campus wanted to eat it.” There were only two pieces left. The “night beings” were hungry. 

“Night beings” is how Kathy McTavish, the artist-in-residence at UMD, referred to the loose cadre of people who enjoy the strangeness of a deserted campus. “I always felt an affection, like we’re similar beings.” When McTavish attended here, she used to walk the halls late at night. “You would all the sudden see people and it felt like you were ghosts,” she said. 

Like ghosts, late-night roamers can float more freely. “I’m very drawn to the posters everywhere,” O’Connor said. “But I don’t have as much time or space to move where I want to go during the day.” What’s easily missed in the traffic of a crowded hallway can become the center of attention at night. “I find things,” O’Connor said. “There’s a strange amount of lost earrings in this school.”   

In the Swenson Atrium, a young man in white sat alone, facing the black night sky. Grayson Hughes was working on a paper for his English class. The atrium is one of his preferred campus spots, especially during snowstorms. When he was a freshman, he liked to explore all the nooks and crannies of campus in an atmosphere he called “both peaceful and eerie.” 

One night, Hughes found himself inadvertently playing the role of a spectre. He had wandered underneath the theater, and was walking up the stairs that lead to the stage when he heard voices. “I didn’t realize they were having a show,” he said. “I was about to walk onto the stage.”