America’S Most Haunted Campus

Ghost stories were very popular with college students at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. They still are today. As a college president, I sometimes told ghost stories to students on Halloween. One student wrote, The next time that the darkness closes in, the wind blows through the trees, rustling the crisp dry leaves, and the owls come out, screeching into the clear and starry night and soaring through the darkness to grab its prey from under the leaves, think twice about the spirited haunting that seems to frequent our stately campus. As the tales of campus hauntings grew, we concluded that our campus surely was Americas most haunted campus. I assured the students that these were only stories. It was not the ghosts that aroused their fears; it was their fears that aroused the ghosts.