Grampus On Campus

Grampus exists, but different things are called that. For instance, Orca whales have been called Grampus. Not likely to find an Orca hanging out at TTU though. Various naval vessels have been named Grampus but that won't get us anywhere. So how do we complete the picture? See below:

This is the Texas Tech Biology building. If we take one of the accepted "Grampus" defintions, that of bottfly larva, this is the place where we are most likely to find the Campus Grampus. And you thought I was being funny. By the way, a very strange thing and sad thing happened at the Biology Building when it was under construction, in the days when I still lived in a dorm on campus. I walked right by the scene that night but didn't find out until later what had happened. It was after dark. I was returning to my dorm from the library and I passed a knot of students outside the fence that surrounded the construction zone. They were talking in low voices and waving flashlights. They were gathered around something on the ground. That something was a dead body, a student from a nearby dorm who had leaped to his death from the top floor of the not quite completed Biology Building. Witnesses reported that the student was speaking to them in the hallway of his dorm, seemingly normal, before he turned and ran. He was followed. He was seen to enter the construction site through a breach in the fence. He ran up concrete steps in a stairway that had, as yet, no enclosing walls-- the entire building was still a skeleton, with no external walls. When he reached the top he didn't hesitate. He hurled himself into the air and fell to his death outside the fence, onto a grassy area outside his dorm. Those dorms were demolished several years ago. I think it was the Carpenter-Wells complex if memory serves. Strange incident! Hard to forget something like that. I think at that time I was in Thompson Hall...