
During one particularly snowy, cold and harsh winter, the Wells College campus was hit by a terrible epidemic of influenza. A large number of the students fell ill, and the weather prevented them from leaving campus. A small hospital was set up on the fourth floor of the College's Main Building, now a dormitory. The sick students were quarantined and a number of kind nurses stood watch over them, doing everything possible to ease their suffering.
Unfortunately, many of the students died, and there was no place to store their bodies in the dead of winter. A room on the same floor was made into a temporary morgue, and the bodies were kept there until the families could make funeral arrangements. The door to this room was painted red so that no one would accidentally wander into their resting place.
After the epidemic, the door was repainted, and the fourth floor was made habitable again. Within a few weeks, the red paint bled through the other color as a testimonial to what had happened to the women who had died. Because the Main Building has been redecorated since this ghostly happening, no one knows which fourth floor room served as the morgue. The location, however, is the subject of great speculation. Many brave first-year students have been known to wander the fourth floor looking for signs of red paint.
There are no further documents in the Wells College Archives to either prove or disprove the accuracy of the stories presented here.
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