The grisly tales of the Joe Brown suicide and Susie Caruthers’ short trip to the end of a noose in the Alpha Gamma Delta house may not be news to anyone who has spent at least a few months on campus.

But are those brave enough to spook freshmen with campus ghost stories brave enough to take on these locales in the dark?

“These are stories that are tied to murders on campus, suicides on campus,” Holly Stiles, a senior public relations and speech communications major from Murphy, N.C., said. “It’s kind of morbid.”

Stiles and Megan Ward, a senior public relations major from Lawrenceville, are both in an public relations campaign class. However, these two students decided to take their group project in a different direction.

“Each group in class takes on a client,” Stiles said.

“Our group client is the National Alliance and Preservation Commission. We’re putting this on to raise awareness of historic preservation in Athens.”

April is National Historic Preservation Month. The ghost tour is only one part of the “Pre-gaming for Preservation” week, which began last Friday with a pub crawl and concludes tomorrow with the end of the Online Scavenger Hunt.

“We’re trying to get people thinking about all the buildings around them and the history within them,” Stiles said. “I thought it would be a neat idea to do a ghost tour to create excitement about it and engage an audience that might not necessarily think about historic preservation.”

The tours begin at 8 p.m. at the Arch and leave every five minutes. In between tours, students can partake in tailgating-type games such as root beer pong and help themselves to ghost-themed baked goods.

The tour guides are drama department students – in costume – who lead participants to the Lustrat House, the Jackson Street Cemetery, and hit several spots on North Campus before finishing up back at the Arch.

In addition to stories about the sites included on the tour, participants will learn about other hauntings around town, such as the murdered fiance allegedly buried under the Phi Mu steps.

“Afterward, we’re doing trivia at Blind Pig and Mellow Mushroom,” Ward said, for those too spooked to go to bed just then.