Video Evidence from a Locked Building
One College Green, La Plume, PA 18440
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Campus grounds are generally accessible. Ward Hall is a campus building with interior access limited to students and authorized personnel.
Access
Limited Access
Paved campus paths; hilly northeastern Pennsylvania terrain
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1868 · Pennsylvania Liberal Arts Education · Lackawanna County History · 19th Century Academy Foundation
Keystone College traces its origin to 1868, when the Keystone Academy was chartered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The institution evolved over the following century: re-chartered as Scranton-Keystone Junior College in 1934, shortened to Keystone College in 1944, and adopting its current name in full in 1995.
The campus sits in La Plume, Lackawanna County, though much of the physical campus extends into Wyoming County — a jurisdictional overlap that reflects the rural character of the northeastern Pennsylvania setting. The area around Factoryville and La Plume is wooded hill country, the kind of northeastern Pennsylvania landscape that tends to hold old institutional buildings with difficult-to-document histories.
Ward Hall, on the Keystone campus, currently houses the photo lab and faculty offices. Its basement is the area most associated with reported paranormal activity. A separate building, Moore Hall, figures in some of the campus's folklore: a professor reportedly died by suicide there in the late 19th century. Moore Hall has since been demolished, and the accounts connected to it now circulate as historical context rather than active reports.
The Pennsylvania Paranormal Association conducted an investigation at Keystone College and published findings on their website — one of the few instances where a structured paranormal investigation at this location is documented in publicly accessible form.
Sources
The Ward Hall account is notable for its documentary component. A student who attended Keystone College took initiative in 2005 to show taped video footage of the basement to a paranormal investigator who was visiting the campus. The footage, shot with recording equipment left overnight in the basement, showed a light at the end of the hall switching on and a dark, blob-shaped form moving across the end of the corridor.
The building's doors were bolted shut during the recording — no one had access to the interior. The movement of the form and the light activation were not explained by building staff or by the investigation team.
The account from a 2004 student, posted on Paranormal Witness, describes sensing both a pleasant female presence and a forceful, antagonistic male presence in the building. These two distinct characters are attributed to Ward Hall by multiple sources, suggesting an internal division in the building's paranormal ecology.
The campus as a whole carries a broad paranormal reputation. Keystone College holds an annual ghost tour led by John Zaffis, a Connecticut-based paranormal investigator with a long career in documented investigations. The tour's regular recurrence suggests institutional acknowledgment of the campus's folklore, if not confirmation of the underlying phenomena.
Lights turning on in the hallway of a building whose doors are bolted shut — the original Shadowlands report — is the most structurally specific claim in Ward Hall's dossier.
Walk the Keystone College campus and view Ward Hall's exterior. Ward Hall houses the photo lab and faculty offices; its basement is the zone most associated with paranormal reports, including a recorded light activation that was captured on equipment left overnight in the locked building. The campus holds a ghost tour annually led by paranormal investigator John Zaffis.
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