Cue the Ray Parker Jr. music and get ready to ask “Who you gonna call?” Chaz is on the case of paranormal activity at NIU.

I dusted off my trusty proton pack and changed the nine-volt batteries in my PKE meter to find any truth to the rumors about the haunted buildings around campus.

Is NIU haunted? Any ghastly ghouls abound in your dorm room? There’s the tall tale of the girl who returned to her dorm room to find her roommate slaughtered in Gilbert Hall. Other tales surround the Founders Memorial Library and the good ol’ Holmes Student Center.

Students always blame the loss of their files on the computers in the Watson Hall video editing lab on witchcraft and trickanery, so I went to the source to find- out for sure.

“No, [the loss of the files] is only correlated to people saving files in the incorrect place. I don’t think there’s any ghosts in here and I’m here pretty late at night.” As I was informed that there were in fact no ghosts in the lab, professor extraordinaire Laura Vazquez was hastily taking to foot, and I had to scrawl down her words in a near-jog behind her. What was she hiding?

Things seemed hush-hush at the library; the main desk attendant dismissed me with a shifty-eyed answer, saying he hadn’t heard of any ghost stories. What was he hiding?

The student center has a lot of human activity, but what about the paranormal? Senior media studies major John Ugolini, who’s also a Northern Star cartoonist, noticed very strange activity on the 16th floor.

“Sundays at 6 p.m. when the dark moons align, the gates of hell open on the 16th floor of the Holmes Student Center as the almighty Beelzebub releases his hounds of Hades upon the innocent virgin souls,” Ugolini said.

Someone wouldn’t make up this extravagant story just to get their name in the paper; that would be just plain wrong. So I asked an undisclosed member of management at the HSC hotel staff, who asked to be called “Chris.”

“It’s all generated from the basement, that’s the outlet,” he said. “They had to alter the structure of the building. They had to change the roof to a point to channel the spirits away from the 16th floor.”

Now I was getting somewhere. This anonymous yet credible source had provided me with the semi-solid information that all other credible sources were too afraid to uncover.

“There have also been reports of people taking the elevator and it automatically takes them to the 16th floor, and stays there,” he added.

Seeing as the architecture of the building was engineered to open a portal to the netherworld, there clearly is a conspiracy afoot.