The History of Haunted Campuses

As long as there have been colleges, they have been haunted. As Elizabeth Tucker, folklorist, Professor of English at Binghamton University and author of Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses, explained in an interview, "Campus ghost stories have distinctive patterns, because they are told by young people who are going through a big transition in their lives: the liminal stage between adolescence and adulthood. Campus ghosts reflect both the issues and stresses that come up at college and movement toward adulthood, an exciting but relatively unfamiliar stage of life."

College ghosts reflect the fears and the context of our time in a way that few other ghosts can. They also allow students to explore the raw edges of society, morality, and history in a way that is relatively safe. After all, ghosts aren't real anyway. Right? Right? Analyzing these collegiate ghosts like a literary text provides insight into the American psyche that is as disturbing and illuminating as the ghosts themselves.

Pinpointing the first college ghost is a bit like proving ghosts exist: tricky. According to Tucker, the first campus haunting occurred in Oxford, England. "Archbishop William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, has haunted Saint John's College, where he lived as a student, ever since he was beheaded in 1645," she said. "Students say they know the Archbishop is nearby when they hear the sound of someone kicking a soccer ball. If they look up, they will see that it's not a soccer ball but his head! Pleasantly creepy. Any of us who have read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books have learned about ghosts similar to Oxford's: Nearly Headless Nick, Moaning Myrtle, and the others."

Laud's ghost is playful, quite literally playing with his detached head. But he also points to the anxieties with England's gory religious history, when intellectual disagreements over the role of faith in society often led to death and eventually sparked a revolution. These anxieties still persist in a rigorous academic setting where intellectual discussion and disagreement is encouraged. Thus, Laud's playfulness gives students the ability to control their anxieties about going against the establishment.

America's oldest university, too, is also its most haunted. Harvard's Lowell House, named after former president Abbott Lawrence Lowell, is reportedly haunted by his sister, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Amy Lowell. Amy Lowell was a gifted writer, but, because of rules barring women from higher education, she was unable to attend Harvard. Harvard began accepting women into its school of education in 1920, five years before Lowell died. Consequently, she spent much of her life and death roaming the halls of the school. Sam Baltrusis writes in his book, Ghosts of Cambridge: Haunts of Harvard Square and Beyond, that while many have seen apparitions of this poet, she is mostly known by the scent of her cigar smoke. No matter how long she haunts the halls of Harvard, Lowell is a perpetual outsider—first as a woman in a world of men and now as a spirit in the world of flesh. She is also a reminder of higher education's exclusivity and bias against women.

Often, college ghosts aren't those who lived within the ivory tower, but rather those left outside. Many schools report hauntings by Native Americans who once owned the land that the largely white institutions now occupy. These are what Tucker calls "cultural hauntings." A cultural haunting, according to Tucker, "unsettles and troubles its perceivers; it involves obscure and difficult issues, as well as a little-known history and a strong sense of guilt."

The College of William and Mary, America's second oldest institute of higher education, first allowed admission to Native Americans in 1700, but few actually attended. Instead, the government sent prisoners of war and forced them to receive an education. They did this in order to convert the Native Americans into good Christians. The college's Royal charter states as one of its missions, "that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God…."

A student touring the campus in 2000 heard a ghost story from a tour guide about a Native American boy who was forced to attend the college against his will. He escaped one night and was found dead in the forest. In Haunted Halls, Tucker quotes the student as saying, "It was rumored that it was a set-up, that some Indian hater killed him. In the attic of the dorm where the boy lived, you can hear drum beats and feet dancing." This ghost story contains a strong sense of historical anxiety. And, although it was cheerfully recited by a tour guide, it reveals a darkness in the history of the college.

The whole institution of Tennessee Wesleyan College embraces its indigenous ghosts. There, students and faculty tell the story of a Native American, Nocatual, and a British soldier. The British soldier was injured during a battle and befriended by the tribe, who gave him the name Connestoga. Connestoga and Nocatula fell in love, but a jealous rival killed Connestoga, who died along with him by stabbing herself in the heart. The college has trees planted with the names of the two thwarted lovers. Students report hearing Nocatula and Connestoga calling to one another across the campus. In this case, the story of outsiders has been reinvented to represent and support campus spirit—taking ghosts that could instill historical guilt and unease and using them to glorify the school and its heritage.

Native Americans of the past aren't the only historical figures that haunt college campuses. Margee Kerr, the author of Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear, recalls that her alma matter, Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, was haunted by legions of ghosts. Students at Mount Saint Mary's take pride in one campus ghost, a Civil War soldier who was buried upside down and can be heard shouting, "turn me over!" According to campus legend, it's possible to see whole troops of Confederate soldiers marching through the trees on campus. Like stories of Indian hauntings, these Confederate dead both inspire regional pride and historical anxiety. Some ghost stories are pushed to the margins, whereas others are appropriated as symbols of pride; in this way, ghosts provide students with a real lesson in American traditions.

College ghosts have a knack for the zeitgeist. And college has always been about experimentation, especially with drugs and alcohol. In Haunted Halls, Tucker tells a ghost story that appropriately comes from the University of Northern Colorado at Greeley, where it's rumored that the ghost of a stoned student haunts the girls' dorm. All he does is come into the room and smoke pot. That's it. They call him Stoney Ghosty. Tucker explains that, while Stoney Ghosty is goofy and unthreatening, he represents the anxieties of drugs that haunt college campuses. College is a time when many students start experimenting with drugs, and girls are often warned about predators who might want to slip Rohypnol in their drinks. Stoney Ghosty is a man, but he lives in a girl's dorm. He is representative of the male threat and fears of drugs, but he's also something easily laughed off.

Stories about ghosts who died while drinking evoke similar anxieties. At Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, students tell the story of a fraternity brother who died after getting so drunk that his friends dragged him up to the attic of the Kappa Delta House and left him there. The house now holds a sorority, and they report hearing footsteps of the drunk brother, shuffling back and forth—a spectral reminder not only about alcohol poisoning but also that students should take care of one another. And, like Stoney Ghosty, his presence in a girls' dorm underscores anxieties about drunken fraternity brothers preying on women.

Rape isn't merely the subtext of ghost stories like Stony Ghosty or the frat boy in the attic: Sometimes it is the whole text. In many ghost stories about raped women, their cries for help come only after their deaths. Tucker recounts a story from a Binghamton University student who heard a story of the "Tie Dye Girl." She haunts the elevator of a building on campus, where her presence is marked by a metallic clanging and then screams. The story holds that the girl was once a college student who was raped and murdered by her boyfriend. Her spirit is now trapped in the elevator, and her screams remind girls to watch out for dangerous men. Other stories follow similar motifs—like the story from the University of Main at Orono, where the screams of a girl raped and murdered in her dorm echo through the halls on the anniversary of her death.

There are hundreds of stories like these, even on my own campus, where faculty and administrators disavowed any ghosts. As freshmen, my female classmates and I began to trade in stories that we knew were fiction—stories about girls, raped and murdered, screaming endlessly for justice, warning us with their presence. Even though we knew they were fiction, they felt real because our fears were real.

Tucker writes in her book, "The horror and hesitation to speak come through in students' ghost stories about wailing women. Along with the painful limitations, a sense of power emerges from these narratives. Even if the ghost cannot talk, she can scream—and she keeps on screaming until current students understand what happened to her." Women haven't been able to openly discuss the realities of campus rape until recently, but these dead women have been screaming to be heard on campuses for centuries.

Campus culture is rapidly changing. In her book, Tucker writes that ghosts often act to reassure the anxieties of students suddenly thrust into a world of shifting perceptions, history, and morality. She explained in an interview, "One residential college on our campus has a ghost called Charlene, who loves to bake brownies and do laundry; she also goes wild over the color pink and likes to steal pink clothes from dryers. Charlene represents the old gender stereotype for women: cooking and laundry as the acme of happiness. That is hardly the aspiration of most college women today, but the stereotype is, I think, comfortingly familiar… People enjoy hearing familiar stories."

Tucker doesn't just predict that ghost will remain static, just that the changes might not be evident. Many campus ghost stories involve students seeing the reflection of dead men in the mirror. I asked Tucker if this is a reflection of the fact that many people perceive the dark animus that lies dormant in college campuses to be male. She agreed, but noted: "My University just got its first transgender bathrooms, and faculty members are learning that the usual matching of male and female pronouns with male and female names may not be correct. Mirror ghosts reflect gender perception, so I expect there will be more complex and varied ghosts in mirrors in the years ahead."

College is itself a ghost hunt—it's an intellectual search for answers to the questions that haunt us as a society. And whether ghost will dig in or reach out is for time to tell. But they will remain.