W&L’s campus comes alive in its midnight hours, but few know what moves in the shadows.

Students rarely acknowledge that ghosts do not put paper towels in the bathrooms or pick up the slips of paper that drift out of boxes of Café 77 orders. The night cleaning crew preserves Washington and Lee. They work strenuous hours until students arrive on campus, but their voices are never heard, and their efforts are rarely credited.

At 2 a.m., Charlie “Iceman” Garcia walks into Newcomb Hall and grabs his creaky custodial cart, a mop and a vacuum. 

“We are the superheroes of the campus,” Garcia said.

Garcia cleans the floors stained with a hungover students’ blue Powerade. Then he picks up the granola bars and plastic bottles crowding the overflowing trash cans. 

By 10 a.m., the building is spotless. Garcia works five nights a week. Alone. In the shadows.

“You don’t see anybody here. It gets lonely sometimes,” Garcia said. “But then again, I like to work alone.”

“The toilets, you sit on them, they don’t magically clean themselves,” Garcia said. “Along with other little things that you guys will not notice because you take it for granted every day.”

Garcia is from New York City, where he worked various night shift jobs. In his 30 years in Lexington, Garcia has worked at McDonalds and catered at Evans Hall. For the past four months, he has been a custodian.

Despite working various night jobs for years, Garcia says that no one gets used to it, especially when his wife and kids are asleep back home.

His supervisor, Janie Hotinger, agrees. She is the custodial supervisor for academic buildings, managing a squad of 35 custodians — the largest crew on campus.

Hotinger spent 32 years working in the restaurant business and is in her ninth year working at the university. Hotinger says the night shift is “just the craziest shift ever.” 

She is not just referring to seeing pale figures streak the colonnade or spotting the Cadavers, hooded members of the university’s secret society. Hotinger said that her body and lifestyle will never adjust to the hours.

“It was hard to get used to finding time to sleep because some people go to bed at 5 p.m.,” said Hotinger. “I can’t do that. You know, not have any kind of family life.”

 Hotinger spends her few hours of daylight with her grandson.

Her crew not only cleans on-campus academic buildings but also off-campus offices in town. She assigns her workers to specific buildings so each covers a certain square footage.

The larger the building, the more custodians needed. Most colonnade buildings, like Tucker Hall, just have one. 

Karen Holtzapfel, age 65, has cleaned Tucker Hall and the Tea Room for ten years.

She worked the day shift when she first arrived at Washington and Lee, but the summer heat drained her energy. Or maybe her previous 31-year tenure at a Burlington carpet factory took a toll. There, she helped dye the yarn in carpets.

There was no air conditioning in the factory, Holtzapfel saod. The heat smothered her from when she clocked in until she clocked out for the day.

Holtzapfel said she was happy to move to a new, more enjoyable lifestyle at Washington and Lee.

“I mean it’s just two different worlds,” she said. “When you are working at a plant and you have a meeting, you get chewed out.”

She loves her job and being part of a team. Instead of chewing employees out, Hotinger leads team meetings on Tuesday nights where they go over their roles and mingle over coffee before their shifts start.

Hotinger said that at the end of the day, every team member helps each other out.

Tracy Huffer, the director of operations and maintenance, has tried to maintain a “friendly atmosphere” within her department since she started six years ago.“There are challenges that these groups face that people do not realize,” Huffer said. “Departments have their little internal events and stuff.”

On cold, wintry days, Holtzapfel can be found cleaning the snowshoe footprints in the buildings and shoveling pounds of snow, even if there is no one around.

Outside of their jobs, these people are more than custodians. They are integral members of the university community.

Peggy Pugh cleaned Reid Hall for at least 30 years. She has retired and passed away but her presence in the Journalism and Mass Communications Department still weighs heavy. 

“She was more than a custodian,” said Joan Millon, the Knight Program administrative assistant. “She was definitely part of the journalism family.”

At Christmas time, the department would give her a gift, and in return, she would give the faculty a lovely cheese and cracker platter so staff could enjoy the holiday festivities.

The department even threw her a retirement party.

Workers like her do not come around often enough. And the ones that do are not forgotten.

They are the gas to the school’s engine and the oil allowing Washington and Lee to uphold its high standards and impeccable beauty.

As Garcia said, “We are the superheroes of the campus.”