They say the App Development building at Fort Hays Tech Northwest in Goodland was built on old farmland, long before the town's boundaries crept west. The land had a quiet history—until the day the power started flickering.
It was late October, just before Halloween, when the first reports came in. Students pulling all-nighters in the coding lab said they’d hear typing—fast, frantic keystrokes—even when no one else was around. Some brushed it off as stress. Others left early.
One student, Mia, was working on a solo capstone project—a local weather tracking app. The servers were running slow that week, and her Git commits kept getting corrupted. But that wasn’t what worried her. It was the folder that kept reappearing in her project directory: /dev/ghost/
Inside, a file with no extension: commit_log
She opened it once. It was full of gibberish code that didn’t compile—except for one line, always at the bottom, perfectly readable:
“I never finished. Help me.”
Every time she deleted the folder, it came back. And each night, she swore the lab got colder. Her fingers would freeze on the keyboard, the overhead lights flickering like bad fluorescent horror clichés.
She asked her professor about the glitch. He went pale. “There was a student,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “Back in 2009. Brilliant programmer. Stayed late every night. Got obsessed with building a decentralized app before blockchain was even a buzzword. Never finished it. He... died here. Heart failure. Right there at the terminal in Lab B.” Mia looked up. She had been working in Lab B.
The next night, determined to face it, she stayed late again. Midnight struck. A single terminal powered on by itself, screen glowing with a black terminal window.
She didn’t type that. But the app began compiling anyway. Suddenly, code scrolled faster than she could read. It was her code—but better. Optimized. Clean. Elegant. The monitor blinked. The message reappeared: “Thanks for finishing it.” And then… silence. The folder never came back. Mia aced the project. Got hired by a startup in Denver. But before she left, she visited the lab one last time. On the terminal in Lab B, someone had carved something faintly into the plastic casing: “Code lives forever.”
They say now, if you commit code to the server after midnight in that lab, you’ll sometimes get a pull request back—from ghost-dev-09. And if you ignore it… your next build might just crash. Permanently.