The Night We Scared A Whale DJ At The Roberson Mansion

Halloween is just under three weeks away, and you can see it everywhere from stores to homes decorated, some with displays that rival Christmas decorations.

There are several local and regional places to get your scare on from Elmira to Binghamton to Scranton. And they all have some very impressive setups. Of course, there are other places that don't necessarily specialize in Halloween-type scares but instead have some sort of a story that borders on the unexplained, like sightings of ghosts or other things that just can't be explained.

One of those places is the Roberson Mansion. The rumor is that there are ghosts running through the hallways and possibly Alonzo Roberson wandering throughout the mansion.

Back in the 80s, one of our evening personalities thought it would be a good idea to spend the overnight in the mansion as Halloween approached, with a live broadcast, and to hopefully see a ghost or hear anything unusual. We set up our broadcast equipment in the early evening and began the overnight broadcast at midnight, ending at 6 a.m.

I think the biggest challenge was trying to start awake all night. There were three of us from The Whale, along with a Roberson Museum maintenance crew member.

For the first couple of hours, we heard some creaking sounds, but that was pretty much it. Nothing to be excited or scared about. All the lights were off in the mansion except for a couple of lamps around our broadcast equipment.

Get our free mobile app

At about 3 a.m., two of us told our evening DJ that we were going to the bathroom, but in reality, we went to contact the maintenance person to ask him to open up the mansion intercom and make some soft unintelligible noises.

Our evening DJ was not aware of any intercom system, so when the maintenance person started making noises, the look on his face was priceless. We did our best not to laugh. Those noises were pretty scary. Our evening DJ was ready to shut it all down and run out of the mansion. We didn't let the joke go for long, letting him in on the prank before he bolted. We all got a good laugh out of it.

During the course of the overnight, we thought we heard some weird noises, but were not successful in seeing any ghosts or finding anything out of the unusual during our overnight broadcast stay. It was fun just the same, and something we'll never forget.