One chilly April night, a timeless, red-bricked university perched upon a hill, laden with history. There, one young man walked out of his dorm room and into the cobweb enshrouded hall of an urban legend.
For Miami alumnus Walt McKeever, there was no other subject upon which to base his murder mystery novel, Dissolved Into Darkness. The novel is loosely based off the legend of Ron Tammen, the Miami sophomore who mysteriously disappeared 53 years ago.
Allegedly, the Miami University sophomore walked out of his room in Fisher Hall (removed in 1978) April 13, 1953 - and was never heard from again. Several theories exist, including murder, draft dodging, and the more readily believed, amnesia.
McKeever, who graduated in the class of 1954 and is now a retired professor of psychology from the University of Toledo, was a junior at the time of Tammen's infamous disappearance. He was particularly drawn to the case after a psychology professor, E. F. Patten, presented a psychological hypothesis explaining Tammen's disappearance.
"I've always been fascinated by the Ron Tammen story since Dr. Patten told me that he was of the opinion that Tammen suffered a dissociative fugue - an amnesia regarding his identity and life," McKeever said.
After years of work in clinical neuropsychology, McKeever ultimately returned to the Tammen mystery - lured by its legendary appeal. Although Redmond and Jennifer McClain, McKeever's fictional detectives, find themselves at Ravenslake University in Pleasanton, Ohio, the parallels to Oxford are clear.
"Anyone reading the book who's been to Oxford will be able to tell," McKeever said.
Yet the real focus of the novel centers around Ron Henry Tammen Jr., a young man typical of the era. As resident assistant in Fisher Hall, he was also a varsity wrestler, brother of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and an accomplished musician. He had a 3.2 GPA, and with no known financial troubles - there seemed to be no need to run.
Yet that fated night in April, assumptions were proven wrong.
According to the Miami Mysteries and Ghost Stories Web site, it was a snowy Sunday evening April 13, 1953. Ron Tammen left his second floor room at approximately 8 p.m. to retrieve new bed sheets from the hall manager. Someone, Tammen claimed, had put a fish in his bed. He then returned to his room to study psychology.
That was the last anyone saw of Tammen.
His roommate, Charles Findlay, returned later that night to find Tammen gone, the radio on, the bed carefully made and his book open. Findlay, assuming that Tammen had merely gone to spend the night at his fraternity house, didn't think much of his absence.
The next morning, when no sign of Tammen appeared, Findlay quickly alerted authorities. A thorough police investigation found Tammen's room relatively unhampered with his Miami ID and license in his wallet, his car keys and fraternity pin in his desk and his car still in the parking lot. No clue whatsoever laid the path to his whereabouts.
The following summer, Carl Spivey, a resident of nearby Seven Mile, Ohio, claimed that a young man had come to her front porch at midnight on the night of April 13.
According to Mckeever, who spoke with Spivey years after the incident, she recalled that Tammen was a confused but polite man. He asked her where he could catch a bus. After directing him to a bus stop, Spivey later remembered that the bus route had been just recently cancelled. But by then, it was too late.
"No one knows what happened to him after that," McKeever said. "He went off to catch a bus that never came."
From then on, information would only sporadically surface in the continuing investigation. One particularly chilling piece of evidence was brought forth in 1973 by Garret Boone, the Hamilton County coroner. He claimed that in 1952, Ron Tammen had come to him requesting a blood test - the only student in 40 years to ask such a question.
Yet many questions have never been answered. Why go to Hamilton when there was a hospital in Oxford? And why go to a coroner?
And, as McKeever said bluntly, "Why did he go to a man who only dealt with dead people?"
The murder and draft-dodging stories continued to circulate after the disappearance, yet the most popular stories seemed to stay on Miami's campus, particularly Fisher Hall - a place containing its own haunted history.
According to the Miami Mysteries and Ghost Stories Web site, Fisher Hall originally opened in 1856 as the Oxford Female College and then sold to George F. Cook to serve as a mental asylum and sanitarium until 1926. The building and land were then ceded to Miami University to serve as home for first-year men.
The newly reopened Wilson Hall, located on East quad, was also part of the purchase. Wilson, however, seems to have escaped most of the haunted memories of the asylum.
"I really enjoy living in Wilson," said Katie Patterson, a senior resident adviser in Wilson. "Its history makes the building more interesting. Plus, it gives us an excuse to have a haunted house."
Fisher Hall was not so lucky, according to Philip Shriver - the Miami president especially popular for his haunting Halloween stories. After Tammen's disappearance, residents of Fisher Hall began to hear strange voices singing in the formal gardens and muffled voices throughout the halls. They also saw mysterious shadows moving across windows.
While Fisher was being torn down, Shriver remembers the chilling sight of Tammen's room - Greek letters scrawled across peeling paint after years of frightened fraternity recruits had crossed its shadows during various initiation rites.
But Tammen's troubled past only adds to the depth of Miami's already rich history - as clearly evidenced by McKeever's book. And while McKeever's Miami was one of the 1950s, it rings of a particularly haunting era.
"It was much darker, if you want to say spookier, campus back then," McKeever said. "It was like it didn't belong in the rest of the world."
Shriver could only agree.
"You have a university that's isolated, in a rural area, on top of a hill," Shriver said. "We're going to have some stories."
McKeever's Dissolved Into Darkness is now available at Follett's bookstore as well as other bookstores across the country.
