Impresario of the Uncanny
The star attraction of the Kenyon College ghost tour still walks the earth.
Ghosts, after all, can be found anywhere. But at Kenyon, the spirited retelling of the tales has taken on a life of its own. Timothy B. Shutt, professor of humanities, takes pride in his polished role as guide, raconteur, and cultural observer. His tours have become a rite of passage for first-year students, a winsome send-off for seniors, and a sentimental journey for returning alumni.
"I'm puzzled to some extent as to why people like it so much," he said, and then solved his own riddle: "It's the ghosts and it's the theatricality."
With expertise embroidered by imagination, Shutt has led dozens of tours for hundreds of people since 1990. His performance samples a bit of John Belushi, smacks of mock solemnity, and suggests the host for overnight guests at a haunted mansion. "It's a little over the top," he conceded.
The history of the tour, Shutt said, is rooted not so much in the many ghost stories generated by the College but in the lingering guests at Reunion Weekend receptions. "The president had parties and sometimes people wouldn't leave, so they needed a distraction.
"Nobody had done a tour, but there had been talk about it for a good, long time."
Shutt has learned to tailor presentations to his audience. For alumni tours, he adds student actors as ghostly stand-ins; for student tours, he throws in spicy details.
The costume he once donned, turn-of-the-last-century gentleman's garb with tails and spats, is long gone, a victim of Shutt's corporeal expansion. The outfit brought to mind veteran ghost Stuart Lathrop Pierson, the 1905 victim of a fraternity ritual gone awry on the railroad trestle.
The story of Pierson's demise and his anniversary appearance as a ghost in Old Kenyon is a cornerstone of Shutt's tour. The stop at Old Kenyon also includes Shutt's version of what has been seen of, and heard from, the apparitions of nine students lost to fire in 1949. His account of the students' ghostly feet "hanging like stalactites" through the ceiling includes a sly reference to the Peeps, who furnished him with the story. Shutt intones, with exaggerated precision: "And this was told to me by the Peeps, and, as we all know, the Peeps are incapable of falsehood of any kind."
When the tour reaches Caples Residence, the wit grows more muted. Shutt became more sensitive to the 1979 elevator-shaft death of a student, believed by some to now appear as a ghost, after the student's classmates joined a tour and explained the emotions they experienced.
That helps explain why his favorite parts of the tour are those that come with a heavy dose of fantasy, including a fictional account of a student accidentally beheaded at Shaffer Pool, now the Shaffer Dance Studio.
The tour opens at the College gates, known to many as the Gates of Hell. There Shutt describes the geology-defying depth of the central stone plinth and, for some audiences, its phallic nature. Nearby stands the Church of the Holy Spirit, which some say forms a hellish pentacle with other old Knox County churches when seen from above. That may be true, but Shutt has a more realistic take on the trapdoor to temptation: "The gates of Hell are wherever you happen to be."
Although admired by his audiences, Shutt is actually ambivalent about his role as Mr. Ghost. "This is not what I want my title to be," said the popular and skilled classroom lecturer. "Better if it were just Mr. Actor or Mr. Performer, because that's really what it is."
But a love of Kenyon lore, and perhaps an irresistible fascination with the supernatural, keep his tour in demand. Shutt has come to appreciate the fact that many people have some belief in spirits. Also, he says, people seem to be hard-wired to enjoy a good scare.
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