NAU's Morton Hall, Part II: The Search for Kathy

              The first thing I wanted to find out was if the story surrounding Kathy's apparent suicide were true. Like an halfway decent researcher, I went to the local newspaper archives dated to winter of 1953. After a good amount of searching page by page through about 20 volumes of the Arizona Sun spanning from September 1953 to January 1954, I came up with nothing, not so much as a passing mention of a suicide on NAU's campus nor an obituary. In fact, aside from one or two obituaries for elderly citizens, most of the articles were concerned with escalating tensions in Korea and the march of McCarthyism.
              It may be worth noting that an alternate telling of the Kathy story states that rather than a breakup, Kathy's fiancee was killed in action during wartime. I was able to dismiss this since, as of late 1953, military action in Korea had not begun. Therefore, the likelihood of a young American man being killed in armed conflict was almost null.
              I began to think that maybe the incident wasn't reported to the public as a political move to keep the institution's reputation positive. But, I thought, the school's own records wouldn't lie. As such, I began pouring through the yearbook archives. To my delight, I found that a Kathy was listed as a resident of Morton Hall during the 1953/54 school year. Unfortunately, the same woman made an appearance in photos and text related to events that had occurred during the Spring 1954 semester. Yet another dead end.
              My last resort was to look through the school library's special collections. During my inquiry with the curator, I learned that they had been collecting articles related to the very haunting which I was investigating. I took the opportunity to look through the special file. While most of it was a lot of the same articles on the Kathy story that had started me on this quest, I was able to learn some significant information about Morton Hall itself. Before Winter 1956 students weren't permitted to stay in the dormitories during the Winter Break period. This lends credence to the possibility that being unable to return home caused Kathy extreme stress and worry.
               Sadly, this would be the last bit of information I could gather through purely academic research. It seems I would have to be more active in my search for answers. Luckily, being a student of NAU, I had a unique means of looking into the stories. I set up an interview with the current Resident Assistant of Kathy's wing in Morton Hall. Through this avenue was I able to gather the best possible evidence available to me without performing a full, scientific inquest.