The Ghost of James K. Polk

It wasn’t rain and it wasn’t quite mist, but on this night in downtown Nashville, the orange lights reflecting off the damp surfaces of the Tennessee State Capitol building made it glow like haunted amber.

We were looking for a tomb.

The four of us were in a summer pre-college engineering program at Vanderbilt called PAVE (Preparatory Academics for Vanderbilt Engineering) and we made for an unlikely cast of characters in a bad B-list horror movie: an aspiring environmental engineer, a varsity lacrosse player with mechanical engineering tendencies, a computer hacker obsessed with a first person shooter video game called Doom, and me, the indecisive chemical engineer wannabe who was still convinced that English Literature, not chemical engineering, would be in my academic future.

PAVE was introducing us to the stresses of what engineering academic life could be: long nights staring at computer aided design (CAD) drawings, modest food stipends vaporized at a local Mexican place called “SATCo” (short for San Antonio Taco Company), learning how to number crunch using Excel and FORTRAN (yes, FORTRAN!)

So we needed a break, a chance to distract ourselves, an opportunity to seek out something new.

Like the burial spot of former U.S. President James K. Polk.

We had read that it was here on the Capitol grounds somewhere and tonight we were going to see it with our own eyes.

We eventually sighted a historical marker that confirmed our intentions: President and Mrs. James K. Polk were buried on the Capitol’s east lawn (wherever that was).

The sodium street lamps reflected off the wet stone slabs surrounding the building. Between that orange light and the marble shadows, it was tough to tell what was a stair-step and what was flat surface. One wrong step and you’d be off a five foot precipice onto the grassy lawn below.

We rounded the last corner of the building before we finally saw it: a stone canopy with a large block in the middle, just the faintest silhouette of an iron fence spanning its perimeter.

That was the most tomb-y looking thing we had seen all night.

This had to be it.

We approached it, slow motion style like the cast of some fantastic reality show, shoulder to shoulder, looking for some tangible explanation that would confirm our grand discovery.

And then we stopped.

“Guys, guys. Wait.” said Neil, our e.e.cummings quoting environmental engineer.

Neil took a step forward, “Whoa!”

His arm snapped quickly out to his side, blocking us, the way your parents flung out their arm that time they slammed on the brakes and you were in the passenger seat.

We followed Neil’s eyes towards the darkness.

Just above the top edge of the large block of concrete in the middle of the tomb, something moved.

“What’s that…a cat?” asked Greg the computer engineer.

“Yeah maybe.” creaked my voice.

Then the shadow rose.

And by “rose” I mean it seemed to flow upwards the way your reflection would appear in a river as you approached it. The outline of a head and broad shoulders, the shape of a person lifting themselves up in one slow, horror-movie-moment push-up.

Then I heard screaming.

By the time I realized what was happening, Brian and I were looking at each other and Neil and Greg were already in a full sprint down the street. Neil was screaming, his voice hitting some pretty impressively high registers.

One of his Birkenstocks spiraled out to the side but he kept running, one foot bare, the other limping towards his car.

“Slow down, Neil!” I yelled, still running to catch up.

Neil shouted something in reply that wasn’t 100% comprehensible, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with my mother.

The next thing we knew, all four of us had piled into his tiny Jetta. We screeched through the empty streets in downtown Nashville back towards West End Avenue. The Capitol vanished into the haze of the rear view mirror.

Back in the safety of our dorm room, we rationalized as best as our logical minds allowed, shivering from the damp night, hands gripped around mugs of tea.

What had we actually seen? Had it been a ghost? How could we, as sensible engineers, separate the natural from the supernatural?

The next day we returned to the Capitol in the middle of lunch time. We planned to skip one of our afternoon programming classes so we could satiate our still unanswered curiosity.

The weather that day was gorgeous. Workers from the surrounding office buildings were out and about, lounging on the Capitol steps and benches, eating aluminum foil fistfuls of gyros and chicken wraps in the sun.

We Scooby-Doo’d the area where we had seen the ghost, looking for footprints, secret writing, ectoplasm, anything. We saw the tomb in the daylight. At least we had gotten something right.

Had it just been some wandering soul just trying to stay out of the rain for a good night’s sleep?

Had he or she just scientifically proven that no matter how logical a mind, chemical engineering students would still scream like terrified children at the first sightings of anything ghost-like?

I tried listening for a sound, an explanation, some kind of clue.

I thought I heard a phantom voice whisper in my ear: “If you’re going to take that first step to becoming a chemical engineer, you should probably start by getting back to class.”

The entire summer was still ahead of us.

Austin S. Lin is the Young Professionals Director for the Northern California Section of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and works in the Silicon Valley tech industry. All views expressed are his own.