Yesterday the gag-order expired concerning a shocking 50-year-old cover-up from 1957 of an event that nearly brought an end to campus life at NIU.

Walking through Davis Hall from the first floor up the stairs reveals a door leading to a small balcony. The tiny balcony seems a little out of place, and from the other side of the window, a casual onlooker may notice that the shape of the building resembles a much larger doorway. These shapes are no mere coincidence.

“It’s not just a door, it’s a portal,” said former history professor Mortimer Jameson, who was teaching his first and only year at NIU when the event occurred. “It still makes me cry in the middle of the night, to think about those poor kids.”

Jameson’s tears bear the burden of guilt. He was teaching a class on prehistoric mythology of Kishwaukee River peoples on that morning, October 3, 1932, when he displayed to his class an ancient book of poetry written in an unknown language he had just deciphered. He had recited the first few lines of the poem when the sun turned pitch black.

“I thought the third letter was an L,” a sobbing Jameson said. “But it was really an R.”

It was this mishap that caused Davis Hall’s portal into the netherworld to open wide, and demons began pouring forth, slaughtering students, scholars, and even squirrels.

“Oh, it was a bloodbath, alright, and a huge financial loss to the university,” said Patrick Hathaway, now-retired, who was director of finance and facilities in 1957. “It could have all been averted if that [expletive deleted] idiot Morty had only realized that that poem was dangerously close to the proper incantation to open the portal.”

It was only after 245 students and faculty had been killed that a living gargoyle appeared from the portal with a trumpet, claiming to be the deceased architect of the building, C. Herrick Hammond. He demanded that all surviving humans at NIU come to pay homage to him, laughing and quoting the biblical book of Revelation as a joke, saying “Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth for the trumpet that I am about to blow!”

“That guy was a real whack-job,” Hathaway said. He said Hammond was known for his mysterious books in strange languages and late-night sessions communing with the spirits of the dead. Hammond used his unique charisma to win the bid to design Davis Hall, violently attacking any criticism of the building’s strange look with his awful temper.

Hathaway said Hammond was really an incarnation of a 4,000-year-old tribal chief and shaman from a prehistoric Kishwaukee River tribe, who had discovered a magic spell to become a deathless gargoyle, swearing vengeance on anyone daring to live on his land in the ages to come.

“I thought we were all toast for sure,” Jameson said. “I grabbed an ancient Kishwaukee dagger from my office over in Zulauf and ran over to Davis Hall; I knew what I had to do.”

As Jameson ran, he heard the gargoyle blow his trumpet, and the sound of an elephant could be heard. He reached the portal to find the tusk of the ancient tribal god Manitous beginning to come through the portal. The gargoyle spotted him and laughed, declaring that Manitous was here to judge the trespassers of his land.

“That’s when my Naval training came in handy,” Jameson said. “I stepped over a dismembered arm still holding a macroeconomics textbook and unsheathed my blade.”

Jameson chased the gargoyle, who stopped northeast of Davis Hall and kneeled to pray to Manitous for rescue, facing south. Jameson chopped off the gargoyle’s head, reversing the invasion, returning the sky to blue, and leaving a headless stone statue that remains on-campus today.

NIU refuses to comment on the current location of the head.

Afterward, Jameson was asked by Hathaway to foot the entire bill for the gag order, legal fees, bribes, the broken landscape and destroyed buildings, and when he couldn’t come up with the funds, he was dismissed.

“Well, what else was I going to do?” said Hathaway. “It took three years to clean up that mess, and luckily the public affairs team was able to claim it as a Communist plot. I can’t imagine what kind of lawsuits we would have had if people had actually known the truth before the statute of limitations was over.”

Now, Jameson plans to flee the country, in case any surviving family members come after him.

“The only thing that could ruin my day now is if somebody decides to put the head back on the gargoyle,” he said. “We’d all be in the smasher then.”