Episode 6: Dormitory Denizens and Haunted Halls

Greetings, ghasts and ghouls. It’s been a while, but I’m back in your earholes with another haunting episode!

Since I’ve been gone, Small Town Spooky has over 400 downloads which is amazing! I’d love to get it up to 500, so if you enjoy this episode, it would really help me out if you left a review on Google or Apple podcasts and subscribe. :) You can also email smalltownspooky@gmail.com with your thoughts, stories, or any topics you might like to hear on the show.

In October I ran a poll for an upcoming episode topic and the ghost-infested dormitory at Brentwood College Boarding School was the winner by a landslide. But it wasn’t enough for me to dig up the stories about Brentwood’s ghosts. Oh no. I knew I wanted to do more of a deep-dive into haunted dormitories from university and college towns all over the world.

I myself lived in residence in my first year of university and I did not have any haunting experiences, besides seeing what passed as “getting dressed” to go get food from the dining hall. Search “haunted dorm” or “dorm ghost” on Reddit and you’ll get hundreds of results, some from as long as ten years ago. Buzzfeed’s “17 Creepy Haunted Dorm Stories” listicle features accounts such as the student who had a full conversation with a figure they mistook for their roommate, only to discover that their roommate was actually still fast asleep in their bunk; hearing disembodied voices in the middle of the night; windows and doors opening and closing of their own accord; and the feeling of phantom hands brushing the backs of necks or legs as they passed by certain areas in the dorm. A recent Newsweek article showcased the “weird student accommodation” side of TikTok, and included a University of Nottingham student’s video tour of their uni house which includes a deteriorating staircase, cupboards with their hinges and knobs rusted shut, and bricked up rooms in the basement featuring stripped, iron-frame beds.

Most students learn within their first year of the ghost stories their schools have attached to their campus. What is it about dorms that make them so attractive to restless spirits? And what happens when you find yourself sharing your home away from home with a haunting roomie (or should I say boo-mie?). For those of you in the ghoul gang who are here for the spine-tinglers, the first hand accounts of the inexplicable, this episode’s for you. It’s light on the history piece, instead covering the undead denizens of dormitories domestic and abroad. Now let’s ghost into it.

Trigger Warning

Trigger warnings for this episode include references to institutional racism in post-secondary education and the transatlantic slave trade; colonial settlers appropriating land; mentions of accidental death, death by drug overdrose and suicide; homicide; eugenics, Nazis, and dead infants.

Home Away From Home

If you haven’t gone away for school, or if you’re not from a country where schools have their own residential buildings, you might be wondering what I mean when I say “dorm”. The word takes its meaning from the Latin dormitorium, that is “sleeping place”. You can see the root in modern Romance languages today; in Spanish and French dormir and in Italian dormire are all verbs that mean “to sleep”. Dormitories are specific-purpose buildings constructed to house residents of a certain institution—they can be military, as in the case of barracks, but also house employees, or students.

[Image: A person stands between two twin-sized beds that are lit by overhead, horizontal bar lamps. Source: nrd via Unsplash]

You might hear dormitories referred to as “dorms”, “halls” (especially in the UK), “residence halls” or “residences” (or “res”, particularly in Canada) or student accomodations. In India they may be referred to as student hostels; in France “chambres universitaires” or “university chambers”; in mainland China “宿舍” or student housing. A scholastic institution might have a “residence college” on campus, that is a building which functions both as a residence for students, as well as housing faculty offices and lecture halls. In boarding schools, especially in the UK, individual dorms might be referred to as “houses”. Historically, dormitories had supervisors—houseparents “mothers” or “fathers”, adult staff who lived in the residence or nearby and were there to provide moral instruction or act in case of emergency. In university dorms, there are often slightly older student advisors—sometimes called Resident Advisors, shortened to “RA”—who provide an orientation to the residents and will handle any minor disputes or kerfuffles on site, or alert institutional authorities.

Dorms can be single-gender or mixed sex, depending on the organization of the institution running them. In the early 1900s in the UK, women were not permitted to attend college or university, and thus dorms were exclusively open to men. In the 1940s during and after the second world war, some women were permitted to pursue a higher education and women-only dorms were constructed, although the women who lived there were under incredibly limiting restrictions that dictated what they wore, who they could socialize with, and when they were to return to their lodgings. Similar movements in the United States allowed for more women at university and college to live on-campus, and in the 1960s many students were involved in public protests against gender and racial segregation.

There is evidence of Black men attending Oxford and Cambridge—Oxford even commemorated the first Black man to graduate with a self-congratulatory plaque. His name

was Christian Cole and he came to Oxford from Sierra Leone in 1873 to take his degree in Classics (when you could still get a job with one), and he was called to the bar in 1883. However, like many other institutions, higher education in Canada, the US and the UK are rife with systemic racism—that is, racism embedded at an institutional level; and regardless of their historical admittance policy, the academic institutions in the UK financially benefited from the transatlantic trade of enslaved Black people. In the US, nearly all post-secondary institutions held policies, even after the Civil War, that prohibited Black people from attending or residing on college and university campuses. Historical Black Colleges and Universities (commonly referred to with the acronym HBCUs) were the first higher education institutions that admitted Black students. Established after the American Civil War and before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these are public and private institutions largely concentrated in the southern States.

Dormitories are more than a place for students to rest—they are a place where young people socialize, share meals, study, convene, party, network, daydream, fraternize and learn about life outside their small towns and their family homes. For many young people, dorms are where they learn to manage their own timetables and responsibilities, do their laundry (or at least gather it up to bring home in a bag for their parents to wash on the weekend) and feed themselves. When I was getting ready for my first year of undergrad, I hopefully filled out a brief “personality style” quiz sent to me by the admin of the residence I had been admitted to, in order to ensure that they’d done their level best to match me with compatible roommates. I ended up sharing a room with only one other girl, rather than the two that had also been assigned to the same room, when one of the girls dropped out. My remaining roommate was funny, charming and smart and made my time in first year more exciting than it otherwise would have been. But what might happen when your roommate is something otherworldly that demands to share your space?

Canada’s Haunted Dorms

In Wolfville, Nova Scotia, one residence building on Acadia University’s campus has a

haunting history. The university was built on traditional Mi’maq hunting and fishing grounds and was, upon its foundation, a Baptist seminary. It was open only to male students until the late 1800s, when a residence for female students was built. Today the building still stands and functions as a dormitory for co-eds of all genders, though it is referred to as the Seminary Building, from its original designation as the “Ladies’ Seminary”. The building has its own “hanging lady” ghost. If you remember from the Unearthing Edmonton episode, we touched on the female spirit supposedly haunting the Princess Theatre on Whyte Avenue; well, here is a similar story from a university on the other side of the country. According to legend, an unnamed woman found herself pregnant while attending the Ladies’ Seminary and to spare herself the social humiliation and exclusion, she hanged herself in the area between a banister and back staircase of the building, known to students today by the chilling moniker “the Well”. Residents of the building have seen her pale, blonde figure crossing hallways and closing doors behind her, only to find there’s no one there. Students have seen lights flickering on and off, felt a cold breeze ruffling their hair as they descended to the basement to do their laundry, or heard her footsteps going up and down the stairs at night. By all accounts, this ghost is friendly, polite and demure, bringing a calming rather than frightening presence to the dormitory.

A more dramatic story of haunting comes from the history of University of Toronto. King’s College was one of the first colonial colleges opened by decree of King George VI in the 1820s, under the auspices of Church of England, on settler-occupied land traditionally stewarded by the Huron-Wendat, Seneca and Credit Mississauga First Nations. In the late 1840s, the university severed its ties to the Church under a reformist government and was thus renamed University of Toronto. University College was its first constituent college, taking on resources and faculty while U of T administered exams. University College’s modern function is as a home for several specialist academic programs and as a residence for fellows (visiting lecturers or researchers) visiting the college.

The story of University College’s construction involves the legend of a ghastly conflict between two of its stonemasons, called Diabolos and Reznikoff. The two men laboured on the imposing, Gothic structure of the University College building; Diabolos, with the skills and fine touch of a sculptor, and Reznikoff with less finesse. There were rumours he pulled heavily and often from a flask he kept in his shirt, even while on the job. Both men were vying for the affection of the same woman (whom history seems to have forgotten, perhaps sparing her some embarrassment). It seems Reznikoff had pledged his troth to her with a ring, only for Diabolos to seduce her right out from under his nose. The two men faced off in a deadly confrontation on the empty University College worksite. Reznikoff came at Diabolos with his workman’s axe, burying it in a heavy oak door above Diabolos’ head Looney Toons-style. Diabolos ducked, managing to wrench the door open, and fled up the stone steps to the second floor, pursued by the steady, heavy steps of Reznikoff. Boxed in by masonry tools and building materials, Diabolos had no choice but to stand and fight. Their final face-off ended with Renznikoff dead on the ground, rent by Diabolos’ dagger. The murderous mason disposed of his rival’s body by dumping it unceremoniously down the stairwell, where it was concealed by the circular staircase winding up to the roof of the tower.

Reznikoff’s body would not be discovered for another 40 years, and in that time his restless spirit was said to have been sighted wandering the campus grounds. But the wildest account of all is how his body was finally found--according to one version of the story, it was Reznikoff’s own ghost who gave it up. According to a widely circulated bit of campus lore, a student who attended University College in the 1870s was walking home one night in the cold when he came across a another man walking on his own. “Cold night,” the student remarked, to which the stranger replied ominously, “It’s always cold with me.” The student, taking pity on the stranger, invited him up to his room for a cup of wine to warm him. As the two men sat by the fire, the stranger related the most bizarre tale, of how he and another stonemason who were hired to work on the University College building during its construction, only to fall in love with the same woman and quarrel, until the other stonemason killed him and threw his body down the stairs. Before the student could react to what he was hearing, the man sitting in front of him disappeared into thin air, leaving only the untouched glass of wine where he’d been sitting.

Our next story is from British Columbia’s Brentwood College. This boarding school on Vancouver Island is located on the traditional and unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples, today known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations, Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke, W̱SÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) peoples, the K’ómoks First Nation, including Sathloot, Sasitla, leeksun, Puledge, Cha’chae, and Tat’poos Peoples, Snuneymuxw, Snaw-naw-as, Quw’utsun, and Tla’amin First Nations. It was established in 1923 as a private boarding school, enrolling only white male students. The original campus burned down in the 40s, and relocated to its current 77-acre complex in the 60s. In the early 1970s, Brentwood became the first all-boys boarding school in Canada to allow female students to enroll (presumably just the white ones); though today its student body reflects slightly more modern diversity. Over 30 countries send their children to study and live at Brentwood from all over Canada and abroad.

[Image: A black and white photograph of the original facilities of the Queen Alexandra Solarium in Mill Bay, British Columbia from a distance. Trees are visible in the background and some figures can be seen standing or sitting on the front steps leading up to the extremely wide, two-story building. Source: Toronto Star Photograph Archive]

The site of the new school grounds was once the very place on which British Columbia’s first hospital for children was built. Children were sent to convalesce and receive treatment for tuberculosis, polio, scarlet fever and other ailments at the Queen Alexandra Solarium from the time it opened in 1927, until it moved to a large location in the late 1930s. Many children have happy memories of their time there, although some suffered a terrifying separation from their parents, the other patients and staff as they were quarantined with infectious diseases. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Canada in the late 1800s, and poliovirus presented a deadly risk to children, with even mild cases capable of causing lifelong difficulty breathing or paralysis and motor difficulty until the vaccine for polio was invented and made widely available in North America in the mid-1950s.

[Image: A black and white photograph of the nurses' residence as it originally appeared when it was used by the Queen Alexandra Solarium, before it would become the first girls' residence at Brentwood Boarding School. The building is a two-story white-washed Tudor-style residence set back behind a large tree. Source: Mill Bay/Malahat Historical Society]

The first girl’s dormitory on Brentwood campus was Alexandra House, a dormitory where the nurses of Queen Alexandra Solarium once stayed. The residents of Brentwood’s Alexandra House (sometimes referred to with the affectionate diminutive Alex House) have reportedly been disturbed by a male visitor in the night. Some girls, rising in the middle of the night to use the facilities, claim to have caught sight of the pale, small face of a little boy in the bathroom. The ghost is sometimes referred to as “Little Boy Blue” and doesn’t seem to be in any way malicious, although he certainly presents a fright when spotted in the middle of the night. Could the little boy in blue have been one of the solarium’s patients who met an untimely end due to a ravaging bout of illness in his childhood?

Another spirit said to be haunting Alex House might have been a former staff member or groundskeeper. In the basement of Alex house is a windowless passage that some residents believe functioned as a makeshift overflow morgue when the solarium was first opened. Students store their suitcases and belongings there, in anticipation of being moved into larger rooms as they enter their upper years. With no windows and no decor, the crawlspace was an eerie setting. Some students claimed to have seen the ghost of an old man in a brown suit wandering among the profusion bags and boxes, attending to some business only he can know.

Haunted Dorms Around the World

UNITED STATES

A resident advisor posting on Reddit in March of this year had their own experience with an unexpected guest in their dormitory. As a first year, they were sharing a room with another student and both of them noticed their belongings had been moved around, and that the closet in their room seemed to exude an unnerving energy--like something was watching them from inside. In an attempt to do something about it, they went to the local Cahtolic church and obtained some holy water to spray down their room (really hoping they didn’t take it from the font, those things are basically petri dishes growing an unholy bacteria cocktail). The RA returns home and decides to wait for their roommate before doing the spraying; in the meantime, they take a nap and when they wake up, they find they’ve turned over and are now facing the closet. Unsettled, they roll over to turn on the lamp--and see the figure of a woman dressed all in black looming over their bed--just for a second before she vanishes.

The next year they are made RA of the very same building, and right away the creepiness continues. They hadn’t told their former roommate about the experience with the woman in black--choosing just to stick to vague discussions of unease. Part of their duties as an RA this year was to check the building for damages before the new crop of student residents moved in. Upon entering the building (with some trepidation), they go room to room, noting that the 70-year-old building’s cooling system is malfunctioning and each room is stuffy and too hot; otherwise, no obvious issues. Then they come to a particular room. The RA finds that their phone battery and the flashlight they’ve equipped with new batteries have both died. They go in to check that everything is alright and find the room is freezing cold--in the middle of August.

Move-in day arrives and the RA is onhand to help. While first-years lug their baskets and bags into their new rooms, the RA chats with other advisors and staff about the building. One of the other RAs tells the story of how her friend, who also lived there, woke up around 2 one morning and got up to use the bathroom. When she opens the door to the hall, she sees a woman in black walk down the hall and turn into the bathrooms. The RA gets to the bathroom and the stalls are empty. Another advisor pipes up that she woke up early one morning in time to see a shadowy figure cross from one side of her room to the other and disappear, leaving the room freezing cold in her wake. The group decides to investigate further, and learn that a woman had died from a drug overdose in that very building, presumably before it was converted to student housing. Although unclear whether this was the woman in black haunting the building, the group addressed the woman and asked her to leave them alone, and no further incidents or experiences have happened since.

Flagler College in St Augustine, Florida has its own lady in black. St Augustine is the oldest colonial settlement in the US, invaded by the Spanish in the 1500s, where they appropriated land to establish a fort and found the city, eventually displacing the Timucua people and other Native Americans living in the region. Flagler’s Ponce de Leon Hall for resident students was built over the site of the former Ponce de Leon Hotel, built in 1888 by Henry Flagler. Among sightings and reports of other ghostly activity, many students have reported waking up in their dorm room to find a woman dressed all in black standing at the foot of their bed. She may be the ghost of Flagler’s mistress, or perhaps the spirit of his second wife, Ida Alice, who has reportedly been seen in the women’s wing. According to some accounts, Henry committed Ida to a mental asylum and immediately took up with his mistress. Henry himself died in the hotel, and some believe that he haunts the premises of the college residence along with his late wife and lover.

Northampton Massachusets’ Smith College has so many ghosts that its website hosts a continually updating page of student-reported encounters, including a popular one about a pair of ghostly paramours. One of the residences on campus, Sessions House, was built in 1751 by a lieutenant in the American Army. During the Revolutionary War, a general of the British Army named John Burgoyne was taken as a prisoner there. The lieutenant’s daughter, Lucy, and the general fell in love despite their conflicting loyalties. As the story goes, the star-crossed lovers conspired to meet on a secret staircase hidden within the house in order to escape, when a battle broke out that distracted Lucy’s father and his men. The fate of the lovers is unclear, but they are said to haunt Sessions House, their spirits perhaps finding their way back to each other in death. While the inexplicable ghostly activity remains inconclusive, the stairs are real, and still intact; it is a Sessions House tradition to recite the tale of the lovers and have new residents search for the stairs on Halloween every year.

While full-bodied apparitions are less common than knocking and noises in the night, or inexplicable temperature drops, the University of Notre Dame’s “Washington Hall” has its own horse-riding spirit. The football star alumnus George Gipp brought home a triumphant victory in his senior year, 1920, and coming back to campus after curfew, found he was locked out of Washington Hall and couldn’t find a way to sneak back in. He fell asleep in the freezing cold of the December night and eventually succumbed to pneumonia. His spirit has since been seen sitting astride a white horse, making a mournful passage up the stairs and through the halls of his former dormitory.

UNITED KINGDOM

From the 1990s into the early 2000s, several instances of full-bodied apparitions were reported at a university in Scotland—and no, I’m not talking about St. Andrew’s. Its famous white lady ghost didn’t quite fit the brief for this episode (and neither did its many other haunting residents. Incidents recorded on the Paranormal Database.com detail ghostly figures encountered at Aberdeen University’s hall of residence, particularly Hillhead Hall.

One student said they heard the sound of someone pacing along a corridor; when they investigated the sound, the hallway was empty. They woke later that night to the sound of someone saying their name over and over in a room they were sleeping in alone. One student reported seeing a tall, dark figure which vanished; another said they woke in the middle of the night only to see the empty chair next to their bed was suddenly occupied. When the student saw there was a man sitting in it, they screamed, and he disappeared. Another student in the neighboring room was peering into a mirror when they caught sight of a dark shape, which moved quickly out of sight. Accounts from TheShadowLands.net include seeing cloaked figures on campus and one incredibly tall man dressed in black and wearing a large dark hat, sometimes seen with a black dog at his side.

The University of South Wales’ College Newport Caerlon campus has a rather tragic story about the spirit that still roams its halls. Bertha Ramsey, called “Big Bertha”, is a ghost purported to appear as she did in life. Students and staff have said they’ve seen the six-foot tall matron dressed in a shabby (if respectable) brown smock and a severe bun wandering the halls near her former room on the ground floor. Bertha died mysteriously in the early 1960s. Her body was found at the bottom of the stairs by those returning after the Christmas holidays, where she apparently ended up after somehow falling from the second floor walkway. Did she fall, or was she pushed over the bannister? Perhaps her spirit won’t leave the premises until the mystery of her death is unravelled. Various stories give it that there was no death certificate issued and no grave for poor Ms. Ramsey; others say that on the day of her funeral, her identical twin sister, known to no one else at the time, appeared by her graveside to stare silently as her sister was laid to rest. To this day, security guards have reported seeing pictures knocked askew by invisible hands and hearing strange sounds at night and, early in the morning, the elevator descending of its own accord, only to open and reveal that it’s empty. Residents theorize that it’s Big Bertha’s spirit, still performing her matron’s rounds after all this time.

Durham University in England has an astonishing history of otherworldly occupation. The castle residence on campus was incorporated into the university in 1832, but it’s over 800 years old, and apparently some of its original inhabitants have been around since that time.

A grey lady ghost is said to appear on the Black staircase, the site of her death, her spectral form hovering above the steps and mournfully ascending and descending the stairs. Her identity has been linked to Bishop Van Mildert, who owned the castle before it was sold to the university; his wife Isabel fell from the top of the staircase to her death. She is not the only denizen of the Castle whose spirit lingers near the Back staircase; Frederick Copeman, one of the university’s first students in the early 1800s, supposedly lived in the topmost room of the castle residence, at the top of the cursed stairs. As the story goes, Frederick went with the rest of the students in his class to check exam scores and couldn’t find his name printed anywhere on the notice boards--thinking he had flunked out so badly, he went back to his room and in a fit of despair threw himself from the top of the tower to his death. It turned out his name had been covered by another page pinned to the board; Frederick had scored so well on his exams, his name was at the top of the First Class degree list. His footsteps can still be heard by residents below his old room, pacing. His former room is no longer let by the university, and has been the subject of paranormal investigations, due to many reports of poltergeist activity.

INDIA

Vacant rooms are rarer during school time, but it seems that school administrators keep some students from letting rooms for a reason. In an incident recounted by an Indian student in Cuttack, Odisha, the hostel they were staying in during school was a converted hotel with one room that stayed perpetually empty, avoided even by the cleaning staff servicing the other units. The student made inquiries and was told invariably by staff and other students to stay away from the room. Of course, the student didn’t listen and went to check out the room for themselves. It seemed perfectly ordinary, but soon after their visit, odd things began happening; the sound of heavy breathing in their empty room at night, turning the lights in their room off to go out only to come back and discover the room is all lit up; and one night, they turned over in their sleep, only to discover a dark figure lying next to them in bed. The student screamed and the spectre disappeared, but the incident prompted them to share their spooky experience with their flatmates, who confirmed that they had stories of their one, including one student who claimed to see a figure in the courtyard of the hostel one night, which vanished when he approached it.

A student living in another Indian student hostel was baffled by warnings from staff and other students to avoid the idyllic river running behind their residence building. The room they stayed in at the hostel had a perfect view of the glittering water, tempting them away from study...until the evening they saw a strange man sitting on its banks. After ten minutes or so of observing the stranger, the student saw his form begin to change until he rose off the ground and hovered above the water. He seemed to make eye contact with the student before he floated silently to the back door of the hostel and disappeared inside.

[Image: Main building of St. Bede's Women's College in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, India, an ivy-covered brick building with yellow-framed windows and a domed turret. Source: Collegedunia]

At the women’s college St Bede’s in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, many students have reported hearing inexplicable sounds emanating from the dining hall in the middle of the night. Further fostering an eerie atmosphere are the stories of a hitch-hiking woman dressed in a white saree who is often seen beside a body of water a little ways down the road from the campus, who will stop drivers and ask them for a lift before disappearing.

Bodies of water seems to be a draw for some spirits. Numerous areas in the Bengali capital city of Dhaka are plagued with paranormal activity, including the pond that adjoins Shahidullah Hall at the University of Dhaka campus, the oldest university in modern Bangladesh. The pond is said to be haunted by the people who have drowned in the lake, perhaps due to an unnatural force exerting an influence over even the strongest swimmers, pulling them under. Several people have drowned there in the last fifteen years, prompting the administration to post signs around the pond advising students to stay out.

GERMANY

Sharing space with the spirits of those who have died as a result of some traumatic event can make for terrifying bedfellows—quite literally. In Schwalmtal, Germany, the Waldniel Hoster/Kent School’s dorms are said to be haunted by the screams and wails of those victims of the eugenic Nazi regime. Ghosts have been seen wandering the grounds, shades of those poor souls who lost their lives.

CHINA

In China, Peking University opened its doors in 1898, becoming the first comprehensive national university. Some 91 years later, the protests at Tiananmen Square took a violent turn, with the Chinese military killing some thousand civilians and wounding thousands more. The spirits of those who died in this massacre have been seen by PKU’s students and staff, who’ve seen wandering ghosts, experienced strange scents, and heard unexplained screams within dorms and classrooms.

AUSTRALIA

Downlands College, a private boarding secondary school in Toowoomba, Australia, has a host of horrifying hauntings. The grounds were commandeered by the Australian military during World War II, leaving its mark on the campus. Reports of ghosts include sightings of a man who appears to be engulfed in flames, the ghost of a woman that haunts the administration building, and a chapel where a spectral priest roams. In 2015, a group of ghost hunters even published an old class photo which supposedly captured the blurry figure of a little ghost boy.

Unsettling and inexplicable sounds can be another sign of unwelcome cohabitation. In a post dated to June 2012, a teenaged user on Your Ghost Stories described living in a house with 70 other girls in an Australian boarding school they believed was haunted. Several girls woke in the night to the sound of the double-doors to the small, disused courtyard at the back of the house opening—even though they were kept permanently locked. The poster experienced the sensation of something grabbing their foot, which they’d left uncovered by the blanket when they were laying in their bed, and reported waking to an audible tapping on the little window beside their bed. Experiences among the residents ranged from eerie feelings to hearing glasses clinking in the middle of the night.

PHILIPPINES

In a series of posts from 2008 concerning a boys’ dormitory in Quezon City, Philippines, one student was reading comics in his bedroom when he heard the distinct, metallic sound of coins hitting the floor of the room above him, as though someone was tossing them across the floor. Intrigued, he headed up to the room to investigate--only to find that the room was sealed up and unoccupied. He stayed alone in the halls over Christmas break, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of something scratching insistently at his locked bedroom door. Comparing notes with his former floormates, he found that the sounds had been experienced by other students, and in some instances were even accompanied by a soft knock.

Another account from Cebu City, Philippines is even more disturbing. The poster was a nursing student living in a dormitory by the Memorial Hospital in order to complete his degree. He was spending some time in the girls’ quarters of the dorm when one of the occupants lost her phone. The others assisted her by calling the phone—only to have an unknown woman answer. She sounded elderly and commented that she thought the girl’s hair was beautiful, as though she was able to see her. When the girl went into her bedroom, her misplaced phone was lying in the middle of her bed. In another incident, a group of students were spending time in an unoccupied room to circumvent the restrictions about boys not being allowed in girls’ rooms (and vice versa). The group recorded their conversation and were disturbed to hear the quiet but clear sound of a small child’s voice, singing in bisaya. The student’s terror culminated one night, when he saw a demonic figure with glowing red eyes and tangled hair in the Acacia tree outside the dormitory window, which disappeared upon the student holding his cross necklace and reciting a prayer.

MEXICO

The Philippines are a majority Christian country, with the third-largest population of Roman Catholics globally. Not all terrifying accounts of otherworldly encounters at boarding schools are so cut and dried as identifying the ghosts whose lives might have had some historical intersection with the premises; some seem to be the result of suspected demonic activity. In May of 2020, Vox published an article about an incredible incident from 2007 at a Catholic boarding school for girls in Chalco, Mexico, where hundreds of students suffered from a mysterious affliction that caused stabbing pain in the lower limbs, along with nausea, fatigue and fevers. Testing for contagious conditions, health workers found nothing that could explain the symptoms or the way the illness spread, rapidly and with worsening effects. Then the girls started describing something else—a feeling of dread, of extreme fear, visions of demonic spirits, the corpses of dead infants and a little girl who appeared in a white dress, bleeding from the mouth. Some of them were convinced a veiled, shadowy figure they’d seen in these visions was actually the Virgin Mary.

[Image: Black and white photo of a cross against a cloudy sky, with an antenna on top. Two birds are perched on it, likely crows.]

A psychiatrist who studied the case discovered that one of the girls had gotten ahold of a magazine article instructing the reader on how to make a spirit board and planchette, about a year before the “outbreak” started. The girl, whose mother had a reputation as a witch and a devotee of Santa Muerte, created a board and introduced other students to using it. Not long after, the students found themselves contending with strange noises and visions, until the truth was revealed to the nuns running the school and the girl was expelled. But not before one last strange occurrence—the girl’s finger caught in a door, shearing off the tip of her finger, and, as she was being led away bleeding, she cast a curse on the occupants of the school, declaring they should suffer sickness and a horrible pain in their legs for their ill treatment of her.

After a year of study, the psychiatrist concluded that the experience of the girls was a case of “conversion disorder”—that is, a shared experience of hysteria, with psychological distress provoking a physical reaction. Spirit or “Ouija” boards have been around since the 2nd century CE in Asia, and exploded in popularity in the late 1800s and early 1900s when they were commercialized in the United States. Known as a way of communicating with the dead or channeling another spirit, users accomplish this by passing a planchette or indicator over a board inscribed with letters to convey a message. In 2016, India Times reported on an incident involving a Ouija board where children at Elsa Perea Flores Boarding School in Peru fell into fits and described seeing “a tall man in black” who was going to harm them. A video that went viral in 2018 showed children at another Peruvian boarding school suffering from ‘hysteria’ and ‘convulsions’ after a student brought a Ouija board to school and used it with her classmates.

[Image: A dark room with a ouija board and planchette set on the floor on a carpet, next to several lit candles.]

DENMARK

At a boarding school in Denmark in the late 2000s, students attempted to use a board to communicate with the entity they believed might be haunting their school, based on rumours they’d heard, resulting in two students having an unexplained experience where they heard bells ringing and felt an incredible cold sweep through the library where they were studying.

At another Danish boarding school, this one in Velling, a student reported their encounter with a spirit that triggered physical pain similar to what the girls of the boarding school in Mexico experienced. The school had a number of locations that were whispered about by staff and students, stories of hauntings and supernatural activities spreading like wildfire. One room, where the light bulbs flickered on and off at random and emitted a high-pitched whine, was identified as the place where the school electrician supposedly took his own life; a room where they kept the sewing machines was said to be haunted by a force that would turn the machines on and press the pedals, making them run by themselves; and another room housed a shadowy figure that was often visible at night through the windows, lit by the light of outdoor lamps as it paced the room. Students experienced all of the above, as well as hearing the ghostly laughter and sounds of rapid footfall and balls being thrown in empty corridors as if the spirit of children were playing and running up and down the hall.

But most terrifying of all was a small room that was always kept locked. On one occasion, the student was allowed access to the room...and the figure of a small girl with liquid black eyes resolved out of the shadows in one corner of the room. Since then, the student has reported seeing shadowy figures in the periphery of their vision and experiencing sharp pains in their chest, back and legs.

It seems that no matter the type of apparition or experience, there’s one thing many dormitories have in common—some of their occupants just aren’t ready to move out, even long after their tenancy has ended.

Outro/Acknowledgements

This episode was a bit of a reprieve for those of you who only listen for my half-crazed history rants, but I enjoyed it. What’s not to like about a good ghost story? Reading these accounts made me kind of sad that I missed out on being spooked myself when I was doing my undergrad. I’ll admit to being unsettled whenever I spent time alone, late at night on campus, whether I was turning in a paper late or staking out a carousel in the library trying to finish up a paper (probably also late). There’s something about a place that’s normally so busy, with so many people moving through it every day, that just seems wrong once everyone turns in for the night and you’re left with these big, empty rooms, dark corners and dusty shelves. It’s almost a miracle that I never saw a figure lurking in the periphery of my vision, waiting for me to turn and see them...

As always, I’m totally fascinated by the threads of similarity between some of these ghost stories and ones that I’ve already featured on the show. The “unwanted pregnancy” suicide was, as I said, sort of similar to the story of the woman who supposedly took her own life after she’d had a baby out of wedlock with the lover who jilted her. Another story I didn’t touch on was the pregnant woman ghost at the Ponce de Leon Hotel—now the Flagler Ponce de Leon dorm—another supposed suicide because of jilted love. The story of Reznikoff’s encounter with the student at University College in Toronto has the classic trappings of a ghost story—an encounter between a living person and a ghost, where the former doesn’t realize what the latter is until the culmination of the story. The tragic death of George Gipp, who froze to death locked out of his dorm, is very similar to the story of the Dalton Hall ghost from the Canadian University of Prince Edward Island, where a student met the same grave fate. It’s said that sometimes student residences will hear a knocking on the door where the student died, only to open it and come face to face with a fading apparition.

I especially wanted to include the story of Girlstown—the girls’ Catholic boarding school in Mexico—because the perspective was so different from the other ghost stories, but gives insight into how these areas’ reputations for being haunted can become self-sustaining, and take on a life of their own for lack of a better way to describe it. There’s something interesting in the idea that, if you’re expecting to see something or experience something, it can prime how you think about what happens. For example, if I walk into a room in my house and the light bulb flickers, maybe I know that the bulb is old and needs changing, or we had an inspector come around and they told us the wiring in that room is faulty. So when I see the bulb flicker, it doesn’t register as anything weird.

But say someone is house-sitting for me, and they’ve just watched a scary movie and maybe read a web article about the different ways you can tell if there’s a spirit nearby. They get up to turn on the light in the same room, without knowing any of what I just said, and the light flickers. And they’re thinking, oh my god, didn’t that article I just read say that lights flickering could mean there’s a ghost nearby? And especially if you’re in a group of people who can ramp up your fears by corroborating them—say our housesitter has a friend over who goes, “You’re right, lights flickering means ghosts, and so does a temperature drop—can you feel how cold it is in here, all of a sudden?” Nevermind maybe it’s been cold for an hour or so because the furnace is set to turn off overnight but they’ve only just noticed it now, so it seems significant.

Anyway I’m not saying I don’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural; I think whatever the case may be, there’s always room to ask questions. I’d also love to know what you think about it—are ghosts real? Are they imagined? Am I spending too much time wondering about these things and not enough time folding my laundry? The answer to that last question is probably ‘yes’, so don’t worry about that one.

If you’ve made it this far and you want to support the show—you have so many options! You can check out smalltownspooky.wixsite.com/home and find the link to the Small Town Spooky Ko-Fi account there. You can leave a five-star review on the podcast streaming app of your choice. And if you have any of your own ghost stories you want to share, email them to smalltownspooky@gmail.com! You can write me a lil story or record a voice note and I will feature it in an upcoming episode.

MUSIC CREDITS

Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.

It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); Meekness and Smoldering by Kai Engel; Running Waters and Autumn Sunset by Jason Shaw; Clusticus the Mistaken by Doctor Turtle all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Nocturne by Kai Engel licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International 4.0.

Reveille Variation/Drum Call/Slow Scotch/Quick Scotch/Yankee Doodle/Montezuma's Revenge by The United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps and “Farewell To Tarwathie” by JuliusH, along with all sound effects (courtesy of Freesounds.org) licensed under Creative Commons 0.

Sources & Further Reading

Alam, Helemul. “The ‘Mystery’ of Disappearing Water.” The Daily Star, 9 Aug. 2017.

Banerji, Rishabh. “Peruvian School Kids Claiming to Be Possessed by a Demon Have Got the World Completely Baffled.” IndiaTimes, 30 May 2016.

"dormitory, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, Sept. 2021.

Fletcher, Richard. “Durham Ghost Stories to Tell on a Cold Dark Night.” ExplorAR Digital Heritage, 30 Jan. 2019.‌

Galeazzi, Linda. “Canada’s Five Haunted Universities.” STUDY Magazine, 31 Oct. 2013.

Harris, Leslie M. “The Long, Ugly History of Racism at American Universities.” The New Republic, 26 Mar. 2015.

Hernandez, Daniel. “The Haunting of Girlstown.” Vox, 20 May 2020.

Mohdin, Aamna. “UK Universities Are Institutionally Racist, Says Leading Vice-Chancellor.” The Guardian, 28 Apr. 2021.

Pitargue, Ali. “What’s the History of the Brentwood College Site?” The Discourse, 16 June 2020.

Rahman, Khaleda. “30 Children Suffer ‘Hysteria’ after Playing with a Ouija Board in Peru.” Daily Mail Online, 25 Sept. 2018.

‌Tomlinson Asha, L. Mayor & N. Baksh. “Being Black on campus: Why students, staff and faculty say universities are failing them”. CBC News (Fifth Estate), 24 Feb. 2021.

“Top Ten Haunted Universities.” The Telegraph, 31 Oct. 2011.

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“Mystery of Big Bertha’s Ghost.” BBC News, 21 May 2003.

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