Paranormal team investigates Oklahoma State University's Old Central

In any building upward of 100 years old, that's to be expected.

But some say something more than age is behind the strange noises in the building.

“There definitely seems to be some type of activity there,” said Tanya McCoy, a paranormal investigator.

McCoy is the founder of D.U.S.T. Paranormal, a Yukon-based ghost investigation team. The team toured the 118-year-old OSU landmark recently.

Old Central, a red brick building on the south end of OSU's campus, was the first building at the university, then called Oklahoma A&M College. Today, it houses the university's Honors College. In 2009, the university launched a two-year, $8 million renovation project to bring the building up to code. Before that, it had been used as a higher education museum since the 1970s.

Jamie McGuckin, a member of the paranormal group, said there had been stories on campus about people hearing unexplained noises, like footsteps, in the building. Staffers at the Daily O'Collegian, OSU's student newspaper, asked the group to investigate.

The group took readings in the building using temperature guns, motion sensors and video cameras. When they began to review the evidence they'd collected, McGuckin said, they noticed a few details that led them to believe something out of the ordinary might be in the building.

When McGuckin reviewed a video of team member John Tapley sitting at a desk that belonged to the first U.S. district attorney in the Oklahoma Territory, he noticed what he called a “light anomaly” — an orb of light — passing in front of Tapley's face. Although the orb wasn't visible to the naked eye, Tapley's eyes seemed to follow it on video, McGuckin said.