At locked-down Bates College, anxious hours and sleepless nights.

Omar Yaish, 17, woke up on the floor of a friend’s dorm room at Bates College on Friday to face another day of anxious lockdown.

Beyond the boundaries of the college’s leafy campus in Lewiston, Maine, a huge manhunt was underway for the gunman who killed 18 people at a local bar and a bowling alley two nights before. The grounds of the 1,800-student liberal arts college were deserted, classes and sports practices were canceled, and students were ordered to shelter in their dorm rooms.

Some students had left town, to wait out the uncertainty with their families in Massachusetts or New York or Texas. But hundreds of others stayed behind at Bates, and spent Friday trying to fill the empty, isolating hours.

They gathered in dorm lounges to watch news of the manhunt and scroll through email updates from the college administration. They answered phone calls from their worried parents. They got on Zoom video conferences with professors and classmates to talk about how they were doing.

Once a day, they are allowed to leave their dorms to walk in groups to dining halls on campus and collect takeout meals of burgers, fruit and chicken lo mein.

“It’s been a rough couple of days,” said Mr. Yaish, an international student from Jordan in his freshman year at Bates. On the night of the shooting, he raced to take shelter at a friend’s dorm, and has been sleeping there ever since under a borrowed blanket. “We just want him to get caught,” he said of the suspected gunman.

It is hard to sleep now, students said, so some have been sitting up in one another’s rooms until 2 a.m., trying to make sense of the past two days. They recount stories of hearing gunshots off campus on Wednesday night and running for cover, or spending hours hiding in the library, gym or dining halls as sirens wailed in the city and their phones buzzed with active-shooter alerts.

Garry W. Jenkins, the president of Bates, said that one college employee had been wounded in the shooting rampage, but declined to provide additional details. He said no Bates students had been hurt or killed.