THIS IS A JOKE. It is part of our April Fools Day edition.

For over a century, Ashmun hill has been a hotspot for paranormal activity.  During the Fort Brady years, fully armed soldiers just disappeared, leaving absolutely no trace as to what happened to them.  Predating even this, the local Indians would avoid certain spots atop the hill, fearing that they would also disappear like some of their number had.  These were major concerns when LSSC’s committee was looking at sites to locate their campus, but secretly decided to go ahead and use the old Fort despite the ominous occurrences that had occurred.  

One of the most famous disappearing cases occurred in 1893.  Private Josiah Simpson, of the 3rd battalion of the 2nd U.S. Infantry Regiment, was detailed to bugle the nightly “Taps” call exactly at 2200 hours at the northwest corner of Fort Brady.  On this fateful night, he started to play the familiar notes, only to halt half way through.  The Officer of the Day, and the Sergeant of the Guard, who happened to be standing outside at the time, rushed over to the location, about to berate the poor private for stopping the call, only to find him gone.  His bugle, rifle, and his wallet were neatly laid out on the ground, in perfect order, but he had vanished.  The officers immediately gathered a search party, and carefully went over the entire Fort grounds, and the surrounding area, without finding so much as a trace of Private Simpson.  The Army did not desire the fact that they were having soldiers disappear to get out, so they quickly hushed the matter up.

When the old Fort was turned over to the State in 1948 to become Lake Superior State College, the few fort buildings that stood on the ground of Private Simpson’s disappearance were torn down, ostensibly because “they were old”.  However, ever since the 1893 disappearance, these buildings were avoided as much as possible by the soldiers because if was rumored that Private Simpson still haunted the area.  After tearing the old “haunted” buildings down, they came up with the brilliant idea to tear the ground up in order to build a new building, directly on the site of the disappearance.  They dedicated this building as the Walker Cisler Center, a building for students to hang out during the day, and into the night.  Even to this day, people who are in the Cisler Center late at night, such as the Compass editors and the janitors, occasionally hear the measured tread of a soldier, and the mournful tones of “Taps”.