The doorman had worked in that building for years and years. He had been a dockman as a young man, hard as nails, but he said, 'There's something in that corridor by X's (academic's) office.' The postgrads backed up his belief with various stories over the years.
The place had been a shop selling brushes on the lower floor at one point and the brushes were made in some of the other floors and the man who owned it all had lived there, too.
One day an old woman came into my office. I asked how I could help and she said she had lived there as a child, with her family. Her father had worked for the man who had the shop and her mother had been the charwoman.
Of course, we let her all about the place and she went round showing us where things had been, fireplaces we could tell had been bricked up, walls that had been there, all sorts. She had brought photos and it was amazing.
I made cuppas for her, the doorman, brought some biccies from the storecupboard.
'You've heard the trickster, haven't you?' Eh? 'Likes especially to call your name when no one's there.'
The doorman went white. 'On the second floor, aye, by the Western staircase?'
'Oh, that'll be him.' It was only then he told us one evening he'd been locking up as usual, heard someone calling his name, 'Willie!' He didn't answer so it kept up, 'Alright then, Willie Whyte, are ye?' He risked a glance back. Not the picture of a soul in the corridor. He said he just turned round and walked in a hurry down the stair.
Most commonly he liked to bang on the piano in one of the locked lecture rooms in the wee hours and scare the postgrads.