If one were to pick a building on the Central Washington University campus that would be haunted, Kamola Hall would certainly be among the top candidates. For one thing, it’s old and historic, which is usually a criteria for haunted places. For another, as a residence hall throughout its existence, it’s housed thousands of students as well as faculty and visitors—so plenty of potential ghostly patrons.
The more-or-less straight history of Kamola is that the structure was built in 1911 as the first student housing complex (prior to that, students lived in housing in the community). Its original name was simply, “The Dormitory,” which was changed in 1916 to Kamola Hall.
The name change was suggested by Andrew Jackson Splawn, a local historian and one of the earliest residents of Ellensburg. He wrote a letter to the school requesting the dormitory be named to honor Kamola (also spelled Quo-mo-la or Quo-mallah), the favorite daughter of Chief Owhi, once the principal leader of the Kittitas band of the Yakama Nation.
In 1858, Chief Owhi was killed while escaping from military custody. He had been a key figure during the Yakama Indian War of 1855 and a signatory of the Treaty of Walla Walla. His daughter was believed to have been born in 1843 and died in the mid-1860s.
In an article in the March 14, 1934 Campus Crier CWU’s student newspaper, Splawn’s widow explained the origin of the name. She said the chief’s daughter did not originally have a name. One day, her father held her up to a rose and said, “Kamola.” Pleased with the sound and connection he saw between his daughter and the flower, he announced that would be her name.
“The word has no Indian meaning so far as we can discover, but Kamola came to be a prominent figure in their history,” the article said. “Wise in council, she was consulted by both her father, Chief Owhi, and her husband, Chief Moses. She was undoubtedly a remarkable Indian woman, for when she died she was mourned by the whole valley and, tradition says, was given the largest and most impressive funeral ever accorded to any Indian woman.”
The building named for Kamola was expanded in 1913, 1915, and 1919 to meet the growing demand for more student living and dining space. Architectural historian Lauren M. Walton described the design of the building as proto-Modernism styling with Spanish Colonial Revival influences and a touch of Gothic Revival. This design template was later also utilized in the construction of Sue Lombard Hall and Munson Hall.
Kamola was restricted to female residents during its first three decades. Between January 1943 and June 1944, the female students previously housed in Kamola were relocated to Munson Hall so the dormitory could serve as housing for U.S. Air Force training at the college. Following the war, the building reverted to being a women’s dormitory. It did not become co-ed until 1974.
In 2003-2004, the building underwent a $10 million renovation, to ensure it could continue to serve as a student housing facility well into the 21st century.
Stories about Kamola Hall hosting a spectral resident or two didn’t begin appearing until the early 1980s, when the building was converted annually into a haunted house during Halloween. For years, residents dressed up the hallways and rooms with creepy cobwebs and other scary imagery to frighten their fellow students and children from the community.
In 2003, the CWU Observer student newspaper quoted an alumnus, Evan Sylvanus, who claimed Lola was simply a ghostly character concocted in about 1982 to promote the building’s haunted house evenings.
According to the most prevalent Lola “legends,” Kamola is said to be haunted by the ghost of a deceased Central student named “Lola.” Apparently, sometime in the 1940s, Lola (last name allegedly Wintergrund, according to some sources) is said to have died of a broken heart or hung herself while garbed in her white wedding dress.
This tragedy, which happened either in the attic or from an upper floor of the dorm, occurred after she learned of the death of her sweetheart or husband during World War II. Interestingly, the university’s records indicate no one named Lola ever died in Kamola at any time—and, of course, women were not living in the hall during the early 1940s.
Despite the dubious origins of the story, the most compelling argument for there being something supernatural about Kamola came in the early 2000s. CWU’s then-official photographer, Richard Villacres, was tasked in 2002 with taking a moody photo of a female student dressed in a 1940s white wedding gown for a story about the building’s renovations. As he later explained, he was trying to create an image that would reflect the ghost stories about Lola.
Speaking in 2009 to the Ellensburg Daily Record, Villacres said, everything went fine with the photo shoot, but strange things began to happen when he developed the film.
“I shot three rolls of film inside Kamola of my model and the three rolls of film that I shot inside—two of them came out black, nothing—which has never, ever happened to me,” he said. “The one roll that came out had all kinds of bizarre fogging and weird marks on it. Especially one that was taken in the hallway inside. There is this ghostly figure in the background—all this weird effect is on there. I had no explanation for that.”
Villacres told the newspaper that he sent the film back to the manufacturer, Polaroid, to see if anything was wrong with it and the company found nothing. He said other photos he took that day came out just fine. He used the same camera on a subsequent shoot and, he said, everything worked fine.
“She [Lola] screwed with my film and, honestly, I have no explanation for it,” he told the Daily Record. “Something weird happened.”
There have also been reports of residents in Kamola hearing strange music in the building, of elevators opening and closing for no reason, and cold gusts of wind in places without windows. Some have claimed to have seen ghostly apparitions wandering the hallways.
In recent years, the legend of Lola of Kamola has gained momentum, appearing on nearly a dozen haunted places websites and blogs, and on ghost-hunter videos on YouTube and TikTok. In an August 29, 2009 entry on the www.ghostandcritters.com blog, a person named “Ivy” said that a few years earlier she had stayed in a room on the fourth floor of Kamola Hall for week in the summer and it “is most definitely haunted.”
Ivy said that during her time in Kamola several weird things occurred including hearing a knock on her door, only to open it and find no one there, and walking through a space in a hallway where she suddenly couldn’t move and was overwhelmed by feelings of dread. She also found the light in her room turned on, after she knew she had turned it off when she had left earlier that day, and her room key mysteriously moving from where she left it to other places in her room.
Is Kamola Hall haunted? That’s difficult to determine based on the conflicting evidence. Perhaps the right question to ask is: would you spend a night there?
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