Dr. James Jordan is a well- known LU anthropology professor, ghost storyteller and consultant for the TV show “Bones” who makes an exceptional cup of coffee.
Many Longwood students know Jordan for his annual telling of campus ghost stories, which took place on Oct. 25 this year. He has told these tales every Halloween season for the past 17 years.
Jordan shared where he found the information for his stories, saying, “I listened to people around campus. When I came here in 1978, people would say, ‘Hey you’re the new kid who's interested in old time things?’ I would respond, ‘Yes, I am interested in old time things.’ They would tell me about the engine relics ... things left over from the Civil War, and ‘Oh, we have stories too.’
“After a year or so, I thought ‘There are a lot of stories here; I should write them down.’ So, I started writing them down on 3x5 index cards, and after a few more years, I thought that I should do something ... and put them together,” said Jordan.
Jordan received his Bachelor's of Science in his home state of Pennsylvania. He served three years as Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps. He came to Longwood in 1978 and has been a professor here ever since.
Jordan is a man who never slows down, and his office reflects his personality with different types of knives and different college degrees and achievements he has earned covering his walls.
Jordan is not only an anthropology educator, but he founded the archaeology field school at Longwood.
Other positions that Jordan has served include being the executive director of the Nature Camp of Virginia and 12 years as a Naturalist for Virginia State Parks.
Jordan has received the award for Virginia Professor of the Year. Also, the field school is named in his honor, and he was awarded the Horace Mann Award.
“As an archeology major, we are interested in finding the words of the past. The job of the archeologist is to read the human story and have the information written down or recorded. So, the words are the broken pieces of poetry, a found arrowhead,” said Jordan.
“We don't recover it so much for the object itself, but the information or the words that information would contain.
The other thing that they do is they take the findings to a lab, clean them off and study the architects,” said Jordan.
He continued, “We take pictures of our findings so that we have a record of everything. We also measure how far one artifact was from another.”
“We make an elaborate map, and we are essentially known as book burners. We burn books; the book is the archeology site and has a story to tell, and we are taking individual words which are the individual things that we find, and we pick those up and we take them away,” said Jordan. "It would be just like erasing a word from a book."
“If you erase enough words you don't know what the story is, then you can't know the story of the book, and then you are destroying the book, the same way you destroy the site, in a way,” said Jordan
He continued, “It is then catalogued and put away like a book on a shelf.”
Jordan has won many achievements and awards. Not only is he an exceptional teacher, with the awards to show for it, but he is a beloved folklore teller. He is a good advisor, and an all-around good person that shines at Longwood.
