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Thousands of students have walked the grounds of campus since N.C. State was founded in 1889. According to a handful of the people who frequent campus today, some of those thought to be dead and gone might not be so gone after all.
At several locations across campus, strange events have led people to conclude that ghosts roam the buildings.
Erica Lezan, the assistant director of New Student Orientation, said a “ghost walk” is one of the events available for students during orientation. However, the tour emphasizes the University’s history more than ghost stories, she said.
The tour does include a few ghost stories, though. The tour guides address the fact that many people believe the 1911 Building is haunted because, when walking through the building at night, people have reported hearing footsteps behind them, according to Lezan.
She said a few years ago a Campus Police officer who was escorting an orientation tour near the 1911 Building said certain officers refused to enter the building alone at night.
Campus Police Lt. Richard Potts said he has never heard of officers who are afraid of the building, or at least he’d “never met anyone who would admit to it.”
Potts does admit, however, that he has heard rumors the Spring Hill House, a former plantation house on Centennial Campus, is haunted. The N.C. Japan Center now occupies the building, which the University acquired from the Dorothea Dix Hospital in 2000.
Potts noted that motion detectors have been set off when nobody could have been in the building, which leads some people to believe a ghost is present.
However, “that could be bad wiring, squeaky floors,” he said.
According to Tony Moyer, the associate director of the N.C. Japan Center no one has ever had any personal encounters in the Center, though the motion detectors in the upper floor of the building were triggered often in the evenings soon after the center moved into the building in June 2001.
During the Civil War, Moyer said 40,000 troops camped out nearby, so “It’s a fairly safe guess that the army might have commandeered [the building]” for use as a hospital or office.
The original owner of the land, Col. Theophilus Hunter Sr., is buried a few hundred feet from the house in the oldest named and dated grave in Raleigh. His son built the house though, so Hunter Sr. never inhabited it.
While Moyer said he has been at the Center late in the evenings and has never experienced anything he deems unnatural, he said the motion detectors could have ceased causing trouble because the ghosts were comfortable with the new residents.
“We were new occupants. The ghost didn’t know us, so whoever it is wanted to see what kinds of books we had on the bookshelves and learn what we were up to, but [since it figured that out] it hasn’t bothered us since,” Moyer said.
Lezan also said Winslow Hall, which is closed for renovations, is a popular site for ghost legends. It was built in 1897 as the campus infirmary, which was used during the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918, in which 13 students died.
Chancellor Wallace Riddick, who served from 1916 to 1923, lost his daughter during the outbreak. She was serving as a nurse in the infirmary when she died, and people who have worked in the building speculate that her ghost is responsible for strange occurrences within the building.
Spaine Stephens, an alumna of 2001, worked in the building in 1999, at which point it housed the Alumni Center. She said her co-worker, Debbie Beasley, was “very insistent about hearing and seeing things in there over the many years she’d worked there.”
“Debbie also said that they always heard stuff overhead,” Stephens said. “They said they felt like the presence they felt was connected to the deaths from the 1918 flu that happened when that building was the infirmary.”
Stephens claims she, too, had some bizarre experiences in the building while working there — particularly in the basement.
“As I was working, I felt like someone was watching me over my shoulder. I’m sure it sounds crazy, but it wasn’t like they were staring at me, but were just interested in what I was doing,” she said. “It was by no means a threatening feeling. If anything, as soon as I started feeling like I was being watched, I got a sad, nostalgic feeling, maybe like the people who died there felt.”
Some residential buildings on campus have also reportedly been home to ghost sightings.
Aaron Garner, a senior in chemistry, biological sciences and botany who lived in Syme Residence Hall in 2004, said his resident advisor said she had seen a ghost in the building the previous year.
“My RA told me that on move out day the year before that she saw a young girl in the hallway after all of the residents were moved out and the doors were locked,” he said.
“Since no one was supposed to be in the building, she went to see who she was, and she wasn’t there. … She went around a corner that led to nowhere, and the RA went to find her, and she wasn’t there.”
Garner said the woman told him the girl was approximately 10 to 13 years old.
Some students in Bragaw Residence Hall also claim to have experienced abnormal events in their rooms during the last year.
Employees of University Housing said they could not recall any reports of abnormal behavior in any of the residence halls on campus, though they did not deny that students could have made such claims in the past.
The people who claim to have seen ghosts believe they are people who have died on campus through suicide, murder or, in the case of Winslow Hall, illness.
Many people have died on campus through suicide and illness, and at least one person has been murdered, though the exact numbers of on-campus deaths are unclear.
The Campus Police Department will not release records of people who have committed suicide on campus. Director of Campus Police Tom Younce said the records from before 1990 are in storage, so he could not give an accurate estimate of people who have died on campus.
A few on-campus deaths have made news since that time, however. Anthony Robinson, a State basketball player, killed himself in his dorm room in 1992, but the University will not reveal which residence hall he lived in. Around the same time, another man committed suicide near the Brickyard.
In 2002, graduate student Lili Wang was murdered by another student, Richard Anderson, on the Central Campus tennis court near Carmichael Gymnasium. Anderson then killed himself.
Various other rumors circulate among students and workers regarding suicide by jumping from rooftops, particularly around Sullivan Residence Hall, Dabney Hall and D.H. Hill Library.
Several students have died from medical conditions on campus during the last few years, though most of the ghost legends originated were before the time of their deaths.