Over the last few decades, haunted elevators have become a staple of theme park rides and seasonal haunted houses. This trope appears all over popular media too. From the haunted grain elevators of Buffalo to the bloody elevator in The Shining to the “Tower of Terror” thrill rides at Disney theme parks— there’s something about haunted elevators that resonates with us. I confess, my initial thought was: Haunted elevators? Really? But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Let’s break this one down into some more detail, and of course, I have to start with one of my favorite ghost stories…
The Caples Elevator Ghost
I may have mentioned this before, but I attended the most haunted college in America: Kenyon College in Gambier, OH. Every building on campus had a ghost story associated with it, and some had more than one! A notable psychic had even declared Kenyon “the most evil place on earth,” a place where the “Hell dimension” came closest to scratching the surface of the earth (whatever that means). For the record, Kenyon started out as an Episcopal seminary, so where all this Hell stuff comes from, who knows?
At a whopping nine stories high (ten counting the basement laundromat only accessible by stairs), Caples Dormitory was the tallest building in Knox County, and its elevator was famously unreliable. The dimly lit elevator car frequently stopped on random floors or between floors. Sometimes the doors would stick open. Sometimes the elevator threshold wouldn’t perfectly line up with the floor it was stopping on, leaving a small step up or down. And then there were plenty of days where the elevator didn’t run at all. But all that isn’t what made the elevator scary.
Legend has it that a very inebriated student had once boarded the elevator in an attempt to visit his girlfriend for an impromptu late-night rendezvous. Riding up to her floor, the amorous undergrad entered her room (since so many Kenyon students left their doors unlocked on this very trusting campus), but his snoozing significant other shooed him away. Disappointed but understanding, he pressed the button to recall the elevator. The doors opened. And he fell to his death in the empty shaft.
Since this event, multiple students have reported seeing this plummeting paramour’s apparition around the dorm— riding the elevator car, curling up in the bed in his old room, and (most terrifying of all), attempting to shake occupants of his girlfriend’s old room awake. A friend of mine who occupied the girlfriend’s old room even reported occasionally feeling cold hands on his chest at night and seeing shadows across the window despite being far above the tree line. Campus security have found lights and showers turned on during the summer when the building is locked up, and random calls even come to the switchboard from the couple’s old rooms despite all the phones being unplugged for the break. When the operators answer, they hear only a single scream fading and reverberating as if falling down the elevator shaft. While I’m not a big believer in ghosts, I also don’t like tempting fate, so when I lived in Caples during my sophomore year, I elected to take the stairs as much as possible.
Irrational Elevator Anxiety?
Setting aside all the ghost stories and urban legends for a minute, elevators trigger plenty of phobias: tight spaces for the claustrophobic, possibility of falling for the acrophobic, tight spaces with people for the agoraphobic, fear of failing mechanisms for the technophobic, and heaven forbid you get stuck in there with a clown. (You laugh, but it happened to me at the children’s hospital once.) Elevators play on a number of common anxieties, and while there’s no designated name for the fear of elevators, there are plenty of anxious riders out there.
That being said, the fear of elevator crashes is one of our less rational fears. Modern elevators have numerous safety features (counterweights, alarms, phones, etc.), so elevator accidents are very rare. As such, elevator mishaps tend to be over-reported not because of their regularity, but because of their rarity. There’s a fun trend in behavioral economics where humans tend to fear the less likely but more extreme scenario, so while fatal falls down stairs happen far more regularly, the drama of a falling elevator death scares us more!
For another example of this effect, consider the fear of flying in airplanes. Cars are statistically far more lethal, but because of the sensationalism that accompanies plane crashes, fear of flying is a more common fear than fear of a car accident. Falling vending machines kill more people each year than sharks, yet no one has turned vending machines into a chilling summer blockbuster. You’re around 50 times more likely to die from hitting a deer than getting mauled by a grizzly, but there aren’t any horror movies about hitting deer. And of course, the number one killer in America is heart disease, but we still don’t have a technical term for the fear of fried food. Fear isn’t rational; it’s sensational. So it goes with the fear of elevators. For many modern skyscrapers, the regularly inspected elevator may actually be the safest room in the building, but good luck convincing our irrational brains of that!
Of course, all this only addresses the fear of mechanical failure in elevators. What of the supernatural and the haunted? What of the fears which make no pretense of rationality? What of the elevators to Hell? Let’s turn our attention to the spiritual.
The Sacredness of Tall Things
Cathedral steeples, Muslim minarets, Babylonian ziggurats, Mayan pyramids, the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest— there are a lot of sacred vertical things, and this is true across many (if not all) cultures. Historian and author Mircea Eliade coined the term axis mundi (Latin for “axis of the earth”) to describe these sacred towers, monuments, and so on. For so many cultures, these structures represent connections between the heavens and the earth, between the holy and the worldly. Even structures like our modern skyscrapers, which don’t serve explicit spiritual purposes, may evoke a similar awe with the way they connect the world above with our world below.
Haunted elevators (especially elevators to Hell) represent a perversion of this trope. There’s something in us that sees these grand verticals as holy, even if we haven’t intentionally constructed them to be so. The idea that a pathway into the heavens could in fact hurdle us down to our deaths or down into the underworld pokes at a deeply rooted cross-cultural belief. Haunted elevators bring a little unholy into something we might not even realize we’d made holy. They invert our highest hopes, our highest expectations, our highest faith, and send us instead plummeting into darkness and corruption.
Getting to the Bottom of Things
A story about an elevator crash is not in itself scary.
Tragic, yes. Scary, no.
Sure, elevators themselves play on a number of common phobias (claustrophobia, acrophobia, etc.). And the way we report on and think about elevator crashes, though not fully rational, activates a panicky part of the brain. Even so, we still haven’t crossed into full-blown ghoulish horror yet. The psychological answers don’t account for why elevators feature so prominently into Halloween haunted houses and horror movies. The Caples elevator was unreliable, yes, but that’s not what made it scary. For that explanation, we need to cross into the supernatural.
When an elevator story enters spiritual territory —when an elevator threatens not to lift us into the heavens but to plunge us into depths of terror and torment—, that’s when things get really spine-tingling. Subconsciously, we ascribe some sacredness to tall vertical structures, so an elevator which betrays that trust and leads us instead into the cursed and the haunted? That’s some scary stuff! Haunted elevators play not so much on our fear as on our reverence. They invert an expectation. They pull the rug out from under our assumptions. While we anticipate a climb into gleaming heights, they instead cast us down into unknown darkness below.
And that’s why haunted elevators are scary.
