Chamber of Secrets: Onno’s Anecdotes

By Gerjanne Hoek

Did you know that, might it ever snow in lovely Middelburg, and that as you then walk across Helmsquare one chilly afternoon, you then can spot a defrosted, dried-up spot right in the middle between Franklin and Theodore? Sounds mysterious right? The cause of that phenomenon lies under the ground, literally. As Onno showed Daan Brok and me the cellars under Franklin, we at one point entered a dark and long hallway of which he told us it led straight under Helmsquare toward Theodore.

In this hallway, we walked past the ‘Stairs to Nowhere’, you can see them in the picture. A dark cove completely shut closed with stone, and then two wooden beams that suggest that the whole construction might need some extra support. Now, if you remove the cobblestones from that spot on the square and start digging a little, you will stumble upon a panel in the ground, and if that panel is lifted, one can descend these stairs right here!

In the old days of our University buildings, that panel and the stairs were used to bring big barrels and crates of supplies into the cellars. Instead of going through the effort of moving or rolling them through the whole building (with all its corridors and stairs), they just made a stairs in the ground, straight to the cellars. Genius, right?

Oh how beautiful it can look during a bright night, when you cycle through the city and see the proud tower of the Lange Jan standing tall between the other buildings, lit up beautifully so that you can see it clearly and always know what time it is thanks to the massive clock. We were very surprised to find out that the all-powerful red button of the lighting of this very tower and clock is right underneath in Franklin! Apparently the buildings are all connected in this box of switches, and in the capable hands of Onno, who, for example during Nacht van de Nacht will work his magic on these switches, and turn the city buildings black!

Look carefully. Do you recognise that door next do the stairs? That is in fact the door to classroom Franklin 16. Where did those stairs pop up from?! Well, with one mighty jump Onno pulled a little loop from the ceiling and down they came. Believe us when we say that our school buildings must have more stairs that people. This piece of stairway-specimen was extremely wobbly, and with shaky hands and sweaty foreheads we slowly made our way into what we thought would be another mystical space. However, as soon as we felt safe enough to look around, we were informed by Onno that we were looking down upon the ceiling of the toilets.

Disappointing, you think? Absolutely not, as the next thing that Onno told us was the story of a lost UCR student, a nameless man, who, on one afternoon or evening fell asleep/was absolutely smashed/lost consciousness and got locked in the toilets and performed a miraculous escape which deserves to be adapted into a movie. He climbed on the toilet seat, lifted the ceiling plates, literally crawled across the ceiling floor and found the stairs, which he managed to let down and escaped his nightmare. Don’t forget that this all happened in the dark, in a highly disoriented state. Let us all take a moment to commemorate this student, the toilet-escaper.

The following pair of stairs leads to a famous spot: the balcony. THE. Balcony. Where each year, the graduating class’s Valedictorian is secretly and officially being asked to represent his or her year by the Dean of UCR. Ambitious as we are, Daan and I demanded Onno to show us this sacred place, so that we could already practice how we would react when that same question will be asked to us one day, ghehe. But, as we tried to slow our breaths after the twentieth climb of the day, we saw that Onno had bumped into a closed and very old- and heavy looking door, with a padlock on it. What followed was a story of such brilliance that it almost made up for our disappointment about not being able to access the balcony. In the past years, there has been a time that the Middelburg municipality has suspected UCR of misusing that balcony. They had registrated mysterious sounds… Sounds that could belong to people standing and shuffling and shouting. Weird noises that they thought could be nothing else but slightly drunk students (or faculty) partying on the balcony of one of the cities most monumental buildings. And therefore, appropriate measures had to be taken. The balcony had to be locked for safety purposes.

But what was really going on? Onno started giggling with mischief and anticipation to the prospect of telling us what he knew. And people, fasten your seatbelts, because the reason for those sounds lies in the non-human inhabitants of our building. A few consecutive evenings, a blood-thirsty and sadistic falcon had been playing around with a set of innocent doves on the balcony. The shuffling was him torturing them, and the sounds were the doves and also some mice screaming for their lives (which apparently sounds like drunk humans). Isn’t that just beautiful?

Gerjanne Hoek, Class of 2018, is a Politics and History major from Bunschoten-Spakenburg, the Netherlands.

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