A notebook presumably belonging to a UHCL student was recently discovered outside The Signal’s office windows.

In an attempt to identify who the notebook belonged to, further inspection has shown that it appears to have served as the student’s personal journal and been intentionally abandoned. This may be due to what the notebook contained.

The majority of the notebook’s contents, including the notebook itself, aren’t particularly exceptional. Tucked away towards the middle of the notebook’s pages, however, was a slimmer, visibly older and tattered page that, according to some of the preceding journal entries, was originally found by the owner on Aug. 28, in a library book.

Additional journal entries written before and after Aug. 28 confirm that the book containing the note originated from UHCL’s Neumann Library.

The note in question, aside from being in poor condition, is difficult to read or make sense of. Over the course of the following days, members of The Signal’s editorial staff worked at deciphering the note’s message.

I ultimately uncovered the message, and was subsequently made the butt of several jokes about bad handwriting.

Edited for the sake of clarity, it reads:

“Tale of The Man in the Bayou – UHCL Shadow Student

In the fall of ’82, a student failed his classes, and failed over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

He never graduated.

His spirit still lives on in the Bayou, seeking vengeance by continuing the cycle every Fall.

Watch your grades.”

In spite of the note’s unnerving subject matter, the owner of the notebook was initially dismissive of this story (see Aug. 28 entry) but kept the note. Where the situation began to take an even stranger turn is seen in their journal entry for Sept. 15.

The entry begins with the student believing themselves to have been “seeing something” out of their periphery for the past few weeks when leaving their evening class. They then express that this is something they can no longer attempt to ignore.

“I know I should be focusing on my classes, but I’m worried.”

After several more weeks pass, the student can be seen becoming more distressed over their grades. This is only worsened by looming midterms, and comes to a head in a journal entry dated Oct. 21: last Monday.

In the entry, the student is upset at having failed (presumably all) of their midterms. This is only worsened by the fact that they have already used all 6 course drops allotted by the state of Texas. And, instead of communicating with their professors, more and more of the student’s time is spent in the Neumann Library’s 3rd floor archives.

Though it does seem to have paid off.

The student claims to have found a printed article from The Signal (or the UHCLidian, as it was formerly known) that gave mention of a “mysterious figure” having been seen out in the woods around campus, and remarks that the figure’s description closely matches the one that they’re being followed by.

Note: The Signal has been unable to find any evidence of this article’s existence

In the entries for the days following, the student’s mental and physical health can be seen rapidly deteriorating. They hastily write out record of themselves cutting off friends, family, and their former partner. They also no longer attend any classes. And yet they keep losing sleep–haunted by the same shadowy figure.

In their Oct. 27 entry they write, “Failing all my classes. Shadow Student for sure following me. Must be this dumb paper I kept around. Tossing both out into the woods today. Goodbye.”

This is the final journal entry written.

Though fairly easy to dismiss this finding as some kind of prank–or visible documentation of someone who might have benefitted from a visit to the campus Counseling and Mental Health Center–The Signal strongly advises exercising caution around any other notes of this sort.

Since the recovery of the note, several members of The Signal editorial staff have spoken of seeing a shadowy figure looking into the office windows after dark.

Editor’s Note: Only a select few images of the journal entries mentioned in the article were included. This was done in the interest of preserving the student’s anonymity.