IF A BUILDING can be haunted by evil, pain and death, then Norris Hall at Virginia Tech is haunted. Less than two months ago, 31 people — 30 innocents and one crazy gunman — were killed on the Virginia Tech campus, most of them in classrooms on the second floor of Norris Hall.
Since then, Norris has sat empty, a big old stone building near the parade ground at the center of campus. School officials have pondered what to do with the building, which has become a focus of sorrow for students and faculty.
What should be done with such a building? There is no easy answer.
Such a question is not new. More than 40 years ago, Charles Whitman took his guns to the top of the tall tower at the University of Texas in Austin. Before he was killed, he had fatally shot 13 people on the campus below and wounded 31. After the shootings, the university had to decide what to do with the tower. Because it was a venerable campus landmark and a prominent feature of the Austin skyline, demolition did not seem like a good idea. In the end, the observation deck that Whitman had used was closed for two years. It was reopened for seven years, then closed again for 23 years after a series of suicides. It was reopened in 1998.
Partial demolition followed the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. The school library, where most of the killings took place, was torn down and replaced with an atrium. The school district built a new library, dedicated to the shooting victims.
Demolition was the right answer last fall for the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pa., after a gunman broke into the community school and killed five girls, wounding five others. Less than two weeks later, the small school was demolished and work begun on a replacement.
At Virginia Tech, the decision has been made to reopen part of Norris Hall this month. The wing with the classrooms will remain closed, but the rest of the building, with offices and laboratories for the school of engineering, will be in use again. Demolition of the building had been suggested, but that would have been a hardship to both faculty and students. Careers would be put on hold while laboratories were rebuilt and projects and experiments painstakingly recreated.
Virginia Tech is right to reopen that part of the building. The step is part of the healing process and a movement toward the restoration of campus life.
The school is also right to keep the classroom wing closed. Those rooms now evoke too many bad memories for the people who would use them.
In a few years, when memories have dimmed and the ghosts have begun to grow quiet, it will be easier to make a wise decision about use of the classroom wing.