The gathering place for LU alumni to wax nostalgic about their glory days and tell current students how easy they have it. Old hags & bright-eyed and bushytailed recent grads both welcome.

Moderators: jcmanson, Sly Fox, BuryYourDuke

By SuperJon
Registration Days Posts
#337339
Tell us a story of Liberty in the 70's and 80's. And not a typical one that we've heard 800 times.
By olldflame
Registration Days Posts
#337348
OK, I'll go first. I'm sure (at least I hope) we will get some really funny stories in this thread, but this will not be one of them. I think it's a cautionary tale reflective of the fact that christians are vulnerable to all of the same problems as anyone else.

Spring of 76 I shared a room at the old hotel with 6 other guys. 3 bunk beds, one of them 3 high. One of my roomates was a freshman. I'll call him George. George was a very intense kid who was planning to major in counseling. He was somewhat guarded about it, but he said one reason he wanted to be a counselor was because he had some problems himself. I didn't really get close with him (noone did that I know of). He said and did some unusual things occasionally, but nothing really outlandish or cause for concern.

One night, I came home from a play rehearsal. I can't remember why, but none of the other guys were in. This was a converted hotel room which had it's own bath with old-fashioned ceramic tile floors and walls. When I came into the room I turned left to go into the bathroom, turned on the light, and got the shock of my life. The entire bathroom; floor, sink, shower stall, and even the walls, was covered with blood. There was a pool of blood a quarter inch thick in the middle of the floor which had begun to congeal.

I immediatly sought out an RA, and when I found him I was informed that George had slashed both of his wrists in the bathroom. At some point, he had stopped bleeding, tried to get them to bleed more by running cold water over them in the shower, but it didn't work. Apparently he had second thoughts when he was getting ready to cut himself again and cleaned himself up and went to the RA for help. Of course they called an ambulance, and he went to the ER for treatment and a mental health evaluation. I spent the next couple of hours cleaning the bathroom. I remember scooping up most of the congealed blood off the floor with a dustpan.

George returned to school a few days later. I got a chance to talk with him and tried to encourage him that if he could get through this he would be in a unique position to help others as a counselor. He tried to finish out the semester, but couldn't make it. He went home a few days later. He did not return to school the next Fall. Sometime the next semester we got the word that George had decided to use a more reliable method for his second attempt. He shot himself in the head. Because of his religious beliefs and the counseling he received (both at Liberty and at home), he refused to take psychiatric medications. It very likely would have saved his life. I work in community mental health now, and it infuriates me when I hear people say that mental illness is just a spiritual problem or "irresponsibility". I see people every day who only maintain their sanity with the help of medication.
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By Sly Fox
Registration Days Posts
#337373
That certainly qualified under SJ's request but what a doozy. I'd love to bring things back up with a scintillating story but my feeble old brain doesn't recall anything at the moment that is fit for general consumption. Let me work up something.
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By jcmanson
Registration Days Posts
#337388
Wow, oldflame. What a story.

Maybe this will provoke some stories from the 90's:

My freshman year (2002), during a prayer meeting, stories were told of a bunch of students in one of the circle dorms who got very involved in Ouija boards. Anyone heard anything about this?
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By PAmedic
Registration Days Posts
#337391
jcmanson wrote:Wow, oldflame. What a story.

Maybe this will provoke some stories from the 90's:

My freshman year (2002), during a prayer meeting, stories were told of a bunch of students in one of the circle dorms who got very involved in Ouija boards. Anyone heard anything about this?
thats gotta be one of those recycled Liberty "urban legend" things. I was in #12 in the late 80's and we heard the same stories. Basically a bunch of Satanists who held seances in one of the circle dorms: complete with candles in a pentagram and Ouija boards.

sounds like a "stay away from the bad kids" thing that gets put out every year.
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By PastorZack
Registration Days Posts
#337428
my transfer year, (95-96) I had a roomate from Myrtle Beach, SC transfer in for the spring semester. He would go out odd hours in the night and sleep late and hardly ever go to class. Being my first year at LU, and trying to be a decent roomate I didn't tell the RA's. This went on for about the first three or four weeks of the semester.

Well, my other roomate and I started smelling 'odd' odours from time to time in the room. Only being recently saved and having my life changed, I knew what we were smelling. I noticed the visine and mouthwash and put two and two together.

So, my roomate and I decided to take it upon ourselves to make sure that we weren't going to be found with the 'reefer in our room, so we went looking for it. Sure enough, we found a couple of bags of weed, but that wasn't what was the interesting part.

After finding the weed, I found a basketball. I knew that my roomate didn't play basketball, so it caught me off guard. I started to notice some writing on the ball. Well, to come to find out, it was the Big South Championship ball from the win against Campbell in 1994. He evidently had stolen it.

After finding that I had to tell somebody. If it was just the weed, we would have confronted our roomate about that, but this was so much bigger. Needless to say, he was back in Myrtle Beach for the next weekend.
By 4everfsu
Registration Days Posts
#337431
olldflame wrote:OK, I'll go first. I'm sure (at least I hope) we will get some really funny stories in this thread, but this will not be one of them. I think it's a cautionary tale reflective of the fact that christians are vulnerable to all of the same problems as anyone else.

Spring of 76 I shared a room at the old hotel with 6 other guys. 3 bunk beds, one of them 3 high. One of my roomates was a freshman. I'll call him George. George was a very intense kid who was planning to major in counseling. He was somewhat guarded about it, but he said one reason he wanted to be a counselor was because he had some problems himself. I didn't really get close with him (noone did that I know of). He said and did some unusual things occasionally, but nothing really outlandish or cause for concern.

One night, I came home from a play rehearsal. I can't remember why, but none of the other guys were in. This was a converted hotel room which had it's own bath with old-fashioned ceramic tile floors and walls. When I came into the room I turned left to go into the bathroom, turned on the light, and got the shock of my life. The entire bathroom; floor, sink, shower stall, and even the walls, was covered with blood. There was a pool of blood a quarter inch thick in the middle of the floor which had begun to congeal.

I immediatly sought out an RA, and when I found him I was informed that George had slashed both of his wrists in the bathroom. At some point, he had stopped bleeding, tried to get them to bleed more by running cold water over them in the shower, but it didn't work. Apparently he had second thoughts when he was getting ready to cut himself again and cleaned himself up and went to the RA for help. Of course they called an ambulance, and he went to the ER for treatment and a mental health evaluation. I spent the next couple of hours cleaning the bathroom. I remember scooping up most of the congealed blood off the floor with a dustpan.

George returned to school a few days later. I got a chance to talk with him and tried to encourage him that if he could get through this he would be in a unique position to help others as a counselor. He tried to finish out the semester, but couldn't make it. He went home a few days later. He did not return to school the next Fall. Sometime the next semester we got the word that George had decided to use a more reliable method for his second attempt. He shot himself in the head. Because of his religious beliefs and the counseling he received (both at Liberty and at home), he refused to take psychiatric medications. It very likely would have saved his life. I work in community mental health now, and it infuriates me when I hear people say that mental illness is just a spiritual problem or "irresponsibility". I see people every day who only maintain their sanity with the help of medication.

Interesting, I remember the independent Baptist preacher at the church I attended as a teenager, preaching that women don't need to take pills to help their depressions, just turn off the soap operas. That pastor was a nut in other ways, he was a wannabe Jack Hyles, church filed for bankruptcy in the mid 70s to the tune of $25 million dollars.
By TDDance234
Registration Days Posts
#337484
I worked for a youth pastor years ago who had attended LU in the early 90's.

He lived on the circle - with just three people in the room. There was a kid on his hall who had pranked him pretty good, so he was trying to figure out a way to get him back. He had the bright idea to poop in an old jar and do something with it. They completed the act - and left the jar in the storage space over the door as they went to convo.

The realized about 6 months later, they had forgot about it and because it was sealed tight, there wasn't really a smell.

Once they found it, they had a bright idea. They unlocked the window to the kid's room and placed the jar on his desk. They went around to the other side and shot it with a BB gun. It had been sitting for 6 months, so it had fermented and as soon as that BB gun hit it, it exploded everywhere. The dean of men didn't like him very much.
-----
On a serious note, I was an SLD (I believe that was the year Sch14 and TTL lived the hall below us) on the circle my first year of seminary and one of our guys on the hall had attempted to hang himself in the stairwell.

Thankfully, we had a student try to sneak out and saw him. I ran down and helped get him down and kept him breathing. He ended up with a broken neck and a lot of other issues. He never returned to LU but we kept up with him and last I heard he was doing well and attending local community college classes.

I'll never forget the screams for help and the student, who attempted suicide, whispering "please don't let me die." I don't think I slept for a month.
By ATrain
Registration Days Posts
#337583
I agree with you olldflame, mental illness is no joke. TDDance, glad to hear he's been able to recover and is functioning well now.
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By BJWilliams
Registration Days Posts
#337596
I think the first year that the marching band started practicing over by dorm 28 on the circle a bunch of the guys decided to play tackle football. I mostly watched (because I knew Id get my knee destroyed if I played) and one of the guys who wasnt in band but joined the game after a play was lying on the ground in pain and one of the band guys was yelling for someone to call 911. The guy had dislocated his kneecap or something and so they had to get an ambulance on the field and everything...the people that were around him couldnt bear to look...now there have been a couple stories about attempted suicide...that one hits pretty close to home for me as well...
By rogers3
Registration Days Posts
#341718
Sly might remember this- I don't quite remember all the details. In 86 or 87... maybe 88 a girl got hit by a car a dragged part of the way around the dorm circle. I think that it was winter and frost on the windows had something to do with it. I don't think the girl died but I believe that she had some pretty serious injuries. Any one remember more about this?
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By Rooster Cogburn
Registration Days Posts
#341751
WOW, you guys are depressing.

I think it was winter of 1988 when we lost power on campus at the end of a basketball game (televised) in Shilling because a car hit a pole. When I got back to the dorm after the game there was no power and people were wandering all over. There were all kinds of crazy things that went on and there were guys and girls running all over and in all of the dorms (not me of course). I was in dorm 6 at the time. When I came out of the dorm to go wandering myself, some guys had set a box of trash and debris on fire outside of the dorm. A guy had a guitar and we all began singing Kum By Yah. Since I'm old, I don't remember who put the fire out, but I do remember an RA comping up freaking out and disbursing the singers.

One of my favorite memories from that same year was playing laser tag night after night in the ravine where the Vines is now. We had a blast.
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By Sly Fox
Registration Days Posts
#341768
I remember that incident, rogers3. I didn't see it happen but was heading to class and walking around the circle from my dorm (25 -- which was then a mens dorm) and came upon the ambulance. It was brutally cold that day with snow all over the road. One of my friends who witnessed it said the girl tried to run out and ask the guy driving the car for a ride but she slipped and somehow got caught on his rear bumper. The driver was oblivious to the whole deal and continued driving about 50 feet before people who saw it happened flagged him down. There was a 50-foot or so blood stained trail left int he snow. She didn't die and I believe eventually came back to school.

That was the same year I had a pretty bad accident myself. I had dumped off clothes at the laundromat next to the Kroger at the corner of Fort & Wards because I was wanting to check out some fireworks being launched at City Stadium. As I headed north on City Stadium near where the cutover to the old TRBC was located, a big German shepherd darted in between traffic coming the other way in full sprint. I noticed him just a split second before he hit the front end of my little Toyota Corolla. He was big enough that the impact combined with my reflexes trying to avoid the dog forced me to swerve to the right ... directly into one of those huge oak trees. As was common back in the day, I wasn't wearing a seatbelt and when my front end hit the huge tree head-on I went flying into the windshield. After falling back into my seat I was in a state of shock and felt no pain. There were people sitting all along the street in lawn chairs to watch the fireworks. One of them screamed, "I just saw a man die!". Feeling no pain at the moment and with recent drunk driving PSAs running in my head where they showed people going through windshields followed by "Drunk Driving Kills", I momentarily thought I had passed on. Then somebody opened my door and I asked me if I was OK ... when he reacted to my response as I stepped out of the car I recognized I must still be among the living.

Two days later I was back in class with my head bandaged up like a mummy and on crutches. At one of my classes, a guy asked me what happened and he was incredulous. It had been his dog that had gotten loose and it had returned with a broken leg in the backyard with no explanation just a few doors down from where I hit it. He told me the dog was fine. As for the car, I was just carrying liability insurance. Ugh.
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By PAmedic
Registration Days Posts
#341781
'88 was a bad year.

I was riding my Cannondale down the hill past the hill dorms toward the religion hall. A car coming out of the ONE STORY DeMoss building pulled out in front of me and drilled me. I went arse over teacups and landed on my back on those stupid concrete curb/swale things. The driver fled.

Campus secuity threw me in some kinda ambulance and drove me over to Lynchburg General- no prehospital treatment or stabilization of course.

Tore up my back and left forearm- still have the scars- and wrecked my nice Bell V1 Pro helmet. Still have the bent frame in my basement. Told the wife that one day I'll get it fixed.

It wasnt 'til '89 that I blew out my PCL playing indoor at Liberty Gym. That ended the soccer career.

Good times.
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By PAmedic
Registration Days Posts
#341782
PS: I remember the power outage differently: the ESPN game was indeed victimized by the blackout but we were told some seniors wacked a transformer with a stick/pole.

Clearly a misunderstanding of the explanation.

I do remember the running around and the fires. And the kum-by-yahs. The other thing going on back then was the lack of garbage pickup. I know some of our more forward thinking guys in Dorm 12 decided to help out by incinerating our own trash out in dorm circle.

After the second or third time security decided to hide among the dorms and wait them out- then the foot races began.

Ah- sport...
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By BJWilliams
Registration Days Posts
#342160
I remember the power outage in 2004...Im sitting in my CLST class and we are taking a test. All of a sudden the lights go out just as Im about to work on the last question. The teacher tells everyone to pass their tests in (Good luck doing that in a dark room) and after figuring out where the door was walked out and I saw everyone in the hallway. Everything on main campus was shut down. I went to the dining hall and they were trying to get rid of everything...It was pure chaos...as it got dark guys would hang out by where the old post office was (because there was very little light there) and would scare girls that walked by. I think they had to bring in a generator so that they could start the basketball game on time and the power came back on during the game.
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By prototype
Registration Days Posts
#342217
You guys are depressing me...

Where's the stories about the prostitute that lived in the old house by senior dorms...? Urban Legend or truth?
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By Purple Haize
Registration Days Posts
#342312
My wife had several of her cassette tapes confiscated by her coach. The artists: BJ Thomas, Air Supply, ABBA and Chicago!!! It is true!! Confirmed it with her coach who is now a professor!! Study
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By Sly Fox
Registration Days Posts
#342313
Did you check with your wife to make sure it was OK to mention those "artists" on here?
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By Purple Haize
Registration Days Posts
#342317
Sly Fox wrote:Did you check with your wife to make sure it was OK to mention those "artists" on here?
Yes we make fun of it, with her former coach all the time. Lord knows what they would have done with MY musical collection!!
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