As a college work-study student at Saint Louis University (SLU), my summers were spent doing office work and loan processing for the university’s Financial Aid Department. It was 40 hours a week for minimum wage (plus a tuition credit each semester). There were a dozen or so of us work-study kids in Financial Aid, and we bonded over our shared misery of dealing with mind-numbing paperwork and eccentric Department Staff (our “bosses”). It was straight out of The Office / Office Space / Workaholics (pick your favorite office-ridiculing comedy). That meant finding ways to amuse ourselves to keep from crying.
Now it just so happens SLU is “famous” for being linked to the 1949 exorcism case that inspired The Exorcist movie with Linda Blair.
Jesuits at SLU were involved in performing the actual exorcism (of a teenage boy, not a girl as depicted in the movie) that took place in several locations including the priests’ rectory behind SLU’s College Church. SLU has adamantly denied that the exorcism also took place in DuBourg Hall – a large building that sits adjacent to the College Church and rectory. However, campus-wide rumors persistently labeled the fourth floor of DuBourg Hall as haunted with strange locked rooms where the exorcism (supposedly) was partially carried out. University archivist Randy McGuire contends that what likely occurred was the priests could hear the exorcised boy screaming from their offices on the fourth floor and this linked the exorcism to DuBourg Hall.
DuBourg Hall adjacent to the College Church.
Well it also just so happens that SLU’s Financial Aid office was on the second floor of DuBourg Hall, and the office generated a lot of paperwork. While records were kept electronically, every student file had a hard copy backup. With space in the office limited, inactive student files were occasionally re-located to storage. It was generally expected that the college work-study students would take on the responsibility of re-locating no longer needed files, broken furniture, old cabinets, etc. to storage as part of their duties. And, as you probably guessed already, storage was located on the fourth floor of DuBourg.
Moving files meant gaining access to the keys to the fourth floor, loading up whatever was to be moved on a dolly, taking the world’s oldest freight elevator up a few floors and basking in the freedom of being away from our desks. We were the world’s most educated moving crew, and as many work-study students would “help” with the moves as possible without raising Staff’s suspicions. Basically, we all wanted to escape for awhile. Moving files was considered bona fide fuck-around-at-work time.
The fourth floor was very dark. I believe there was limited or no electrical lighting with natural light coming in primarily from dirty hallway windows. The fourth floor was not temperature controlled so it was hot in the summers and cold in the winters. Every movement echoed. There were lots of old desks, filing cabinets and furniture in common areas and a long hallway of locked doors. The hallway had random debris in it. Doors we managed to open revealed rooms that appeared to have been hit by an earthquake with contents scattered around haphazardly. It felt like stepping back in time to a decrepit, abandoned high school. Definitely creepy, no doubt about it.
There were a series of doors and a series of locks to reach the room that housed the Financial Aid files. The room was much larger than was needed for our storage needs, and it was here that we played paperwad baseball and wiffle ball for as long as we dared after dumping the files off in the room. Paperwad baseball was fun, but did get boring after awhile. That left exploring the floor as the next best activity. And here’s the thing:
It was the fourth floor that was notorious for being haunted and for the exorcism, but then we discovered the fifth floor.
Now technically this may be semantics, because the only way to access the fifth floor is via the fourth floor. The entrance appears as a normal door to a locked closet or room, but behind the door to our surprise was a very narrow and extremely steep, rising staircase.
Oh boy, we were excited and freaked out! Of course, we had to find out what was up these stairs. Now the extensive research that went into this Fort Bachmann exclusive revealed many internet references to the fourth floor. One caught our attention. It was a comment regarding a very lame YouTube Video about the fourth floor. This commenter stated: “…i used to go up there all the time in [2003] before they redid it- there is still padding on the effing walls and demonic writings on a chalkboard. There were also strange cages for who knows what and newspapers on the floor from the 1940’s.” We think this person is speaking about the fifth floor because what we saw somewhat maps to this description.
What we found was a “mini-floor” like they tried to cram a bunch of rooms up in a slanted attic space. There were very dated newspapers on the floor. I remember feeling a draft with a sense of city air – like some place in the rafters was exposed to the outside. I don’t recall demonic writings, but random writings for sure. We were able to deduce that the floors tiny windows near the ceiling were facing Grand Ave and that they were the triangular ones on the roof as indicated in this screenshot:
DuBourg Hall rooftop windows.
The room contents were chaotic and one of the rooms was marked as 505!
And then there were the creepy cages – like jail cells. What was going on here?
We visited the fifth floor only a few times to show other work-study students. I now wish we would have taken more photographs. This was back in the early 1990’s. We have not returned to the interior of DuBourg Hall since graduation. In 2007, the fourth floor of DuBourg was remodeled. A YouTube video shows public elevator access to a remodeled fourth floor.
But the question remains:
What happened to the unspoken fifth floor?
Was it sealed off and left untouched with secrets to the exorcism buried within its creepy cages?
I guess we will never know.