Ghost Stories

By: Lex Woodward
Contributing Writer

During my time here at Vol State, some fascinating classes have been thought up by
the communications department. Classes like emotional Intelligence, leadership, even
courses on TikTok and Taylor Swift. Recently, I was privileged to play guinea pig to the
newest addition to the class list: Ghost Stories.

Ghost stories is a one-credit class taught by Professor Sheri Waltz. It runs for 5 weeks and
it’s completely online. The work consists of readings, discussion posts, quizzes, and one
final project that I’ll talk more about in a moment. The course began on September 30th,
and as I write this at the end of October, we have one more discussion post to wrap up the
course.

The modules themselves covered many fascinating topics. Module one covered the
elements of ghost stories, where we talked about archetypes and recurring themes.
Module two talked about the psychological aspects of these tales. Module 3 covered ghost
stories and culture. The last module taught us the format of a ghost story and gave us a
project.

The fourth and final module had our big project. This was to tell a ghost story. We could
either retell an existing story or write our own. I chose to tell a story based off of an urban
legend in my hometown: The tale of Hungry Mother State Park. We had to record ourselves
telling the story and post it, which adds a public speaking aspect to the class.

As the course came to a close, I decided to talk to Professor Waltz about the class. She
and Professor Petrovic worked on these courses as a way to get students more engaged
and excited about communication classes after COVID. The leadership and emotional
intelligence classes came first and were well received. They then got the idea for a class on
ghost stories after going to a conference that was taught on a similar topic. They are still
looking for feedback for this class through the course evaluations.

There were many aspects to this course that I enjoyed. One was the discussion aspect. It’s
very difficult for online courses to foster any conversation between the students, but
discussion posts make it just a little bit easier. Also, as someone who is infamous for never
doing their class assigned readings (I apologize to any of my honors professor reading this)
I found the readings for this class to be manageable and relatively interesting. The final
thing I enjoyed was the final project. Even though the thought of public speaking is always
intimidating, the class size is limited, and you don’t have to see your classmates’ real time
reactions, which makes it easier. On top of that, you have a lot of freedom witht your topic,
as long as it is a ghost story, so it makes for an enjoyable project.
If you are looking for a fun communications credit, I highly recommend Ghost Stories. I
enjoyed the discussion aspect, and the final project took the daunting idea of presenting
and made it fun by getting to tell your own spooky tale. They plan to offer this course every
fall, just in time for the spooky season