NORTHFIELD, Minn. - The two women had no appointment. Clearly shaken, one bore a gash across her forehead. They asked to see "the ghost file."

Greg Kneser, then St. Olaf College's housing director, had never heard of such a file, supposedly filled with reports of ghostly and ghastly incidents on campus.

Still, Kneser remembers telling them, "Maybe I can help."

"They proceeded to tell me a ghost story. A pretty good one."

Flickering lights. A shadowy figure in an empty room. Late-night visions of a boy in a red cap.

Kneser took notes. He put them in a folder. That day in 1991, the ghost file turned from rumor to reality. Two decades and dozens of transcripts, e-mails and articles later, it may be the only file of its kind.

Kneser carries it, now 2 inches thick, on tours of residence halls and sites of other hauntings, telling its stories. On next Saturday, Kneser, now St. Olaf's dean of students, will lead alumni and parents on the tour as part of commencement weekend. Students hear his stories each fall, around Halloween.

There's the one about Ytterboe, a dog adopted by students in the 1950s, who still prowls the hilltop campus. In Mellby Hall, the college's oldest, a woman in white passes by students in the stairwell. Once, a student spoke to a bespectacled librarian sorting books, then saw her photo on a commemorative plaque on the library's wall. She had died a decade earlier.

Collecting the tales has converted Kneser from nonbeliever to thoughtful skeptic.

"Some are just wack stories, and you listen politely and write them down," he said. "But there are a number of things I've have heard from the most calm, rational, thoughtful people you've ever met that absolutely do not make sense. You cannot rationally explain what happened to them."

Like the two women who started it all.

One had been tormented for weeks by visions of a boy in a red cap. She'd wake her roommate, hoping she'd see him, too, but it didn't work. "She's thinking, 'Am I crazy?'" Kneser said. "And her roommate's thinking, 'My roommate's crazy.'"

Over a fall break, the woman who had the visions went home. The other roommate stayed. One morning, a friend down the hall asked her: Who was the guy in your room last night?

The woman hadn't had any guests.

Really? the friend asked. When I came into your room last night there was a guy with a red baseball cap sitting at the end of the bed.

Not a week later, the student who had been spared the visions woke up to see the boy. She screamed, and her roommate, sleeping on the lower bunk, woke with a start, banging her head.

That sent them to Kneser, and launched the ghost file.

Ghost stories haunt most college campuses, but Kneser's file -- and his tours -- are unusual, said Michael Norman, who has written seven collections of ghost stories and legends. His latest, "The Nearly Departed," features a chapter on St. Olaf and Kneser.

It's a "very real possibility that he has collected more ghost stories than have been documented at any other college campus in the nation," he wrote.

College administrators often "don't want these stories out," Norman said by phone. "Greg shrugs his shoulders. These stories aren't going to go away. So he has a good time with them.

"They're part of the campus life, the campus lore."

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168

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