FARMINGTON – There’s a reason numerous people have heard Lillian Nordica singing in her auditorium, despite the fact that she died halfway around the world and more than 100 years ago.
“She was very famous,” Jane Parker said.
Parker doesn’t entertain the idea of Lillian’s spirit still haunting the auditorium of UMF’s Merrill Hall, but she is a longtime admirer of the Farmington-born, world famous opera singer, and has been on the board of the Nordica Homestead Museum since 1981. According to Parker, Lillian was quite a character. The prima donna married three different times, but demanded divorces from each man as their less than desirable characteristics surfaced. She sang as Brünnhilde, the robust, Germanic heroic legend, for the first on-stage interpretation of the character, and provided a separate performance of the song while stuck in a New York City traffic jam, with the hopes of clearing up the congestion.
“She did like to make herself known,” Parker said.
According to many people who have spent dark nights and quiet evenings in Nordica Auditorium, Lillian is still doing just that.
A number of maintenance workers have relayed stories of less-than-normal experiences, and campus security officers apparently have tales to tell as well. As for students, a campus ghost just makes the UMF package even sweeter.
“I’ve always been interested in this stuff,” UMF senior Alexis Pickens said. “I’m in the middle of the road as far as believing it. But I definitely believe there is a possibility.”
Pickens is the president of UMF’s Nightmare Club- a group dedicated to all that is creepy, supernatural, or downright horrifying. They meet every Wednesday to watch horror movies in the basement of Roberts Learning Center, and plan year-round events that focus on the scare factor. It won’t be happening this year due to the pandemic, but the Nightmare Club has an annual tradition of spending the night in Lillian’s concert hall. Pickens has slept over in Merrill Hall three or four times now, she said, and has definitely experienced strange happenings.
“Just a lot of weird noises, creaks and stuff like that. We brought cameras one year and there were tons of unexplained white dots and light orbs that showed up in the pictures,” she said.
The group specifically goes looking for the haunting experiences, playing hide and seek at midnight throughout the large building, and other games that require them to brave the dark halls solo. One club member, according to Pickens, swore there was someone in the room with her one night, but found no one when she switched on the light.
Whether it’s a piano tune playing with no player, or Lillian trying to regain her fame, UMF ghost stories abound, and not just on Halloween.
