Virginia Hall Defiled
3 min readBY ALISON THOET
The residents of the third floor of Virginia Hall awoke last Thursday and Friday morning, Feb. 1 and 2, to a hallway and bathroom filled with fecal excrement, for the third time since the Fall semester.
Ren Armstrong, freshman and psychology major said, “It’s disrespectful to both the residents and the maintenance staff.”
Armstrong arrived at the site and saw, “what looked like a leaf,” she said.
According to Armstrong, there were two piles of fecal matter in the hallway as well as in one toilet and one shower stall.
“Another shower stall had ladies underwear in it and there were footprints in the bathroom,” said Armstrong.
The next day, a similar incident occurred in the same bathroom.
“I walked into the bathroom when a cleaning lady walked in and there were more chunks of poo lying in the shower,” said Kay Graves, freshman and math major. “The cleaning staff was visibly more upset and irritated than the day before.”
Graves said she didn’t expect things like this to happen in an all-girls dorm. There have now been three incidents involving fecal matter in the third floor of Virginia Hall, according to Armstrong.
“It’s really disturbing because the first time it was a weekend and we thought it could be a guy, but now we know it must be someone here,” said Armstrong.
Roommates Kim Vizzi and Lauren Bortfield, both freshmen, shed light on the morning’s events.
“The bathroom was already gross to begin with, and then it was right outside of our room, too,” said Vizzi.
Vizzi was the first of the two to see the incident and woke up her roommate afterward to explain the situation. Vizzi vows to use a different bathroom after experiencing the morning’s event.
“It gives me a haunting mental image,” said Vizzi.
Each time these incidents occurred, the six-person cleaning staff of Virginia hall has been there to clean it up.
One cleaning lady expressed that she was “a little angry and aggravated” over the incident.
It took the staff about 45 minutes the first day to clean up the mess, as two men worked on the hall and the supervisor joined in the bathroom cleanup.
On the second day, a cleaning woman called down to her supervisor and told her about the repeated situation.
“I was very angry,” she said. “It was ridiculous for it to happen a second day in a row.”
However, the staff realizes that these issues don’t occur everyday and that they only put the staff behind on their work, as they have eight buildings to clean everyday, according to a custodian.
The cleaning staff supervisor admits she was hysterical upon hearing about the excrement in the hallway and bathroom.
“It aggravates you when you work so hard and them something like that happens,” she said. “But it’s our job.”
The supervisor believes whoever is responsible should be punished, but this is unlikely to happen, as the culprit remains unknown.
“We don’t appreciate some of the things the students do, but we still love them,” she said. “They are our family because we are here more than at home.”
According to freshman Sam Wilhelm, the third floor Virginia Hall residents will be fined for the incident unless the resident responsible comes forward.
“They shouldn’t charge us all money for something that we didn’t do,” said Wilhelm. “The person who did it should just fess up.”
The Bullet tried to reach Christine Porter, director of resident life and commuter students, but she was unavailable for comment.
