10. Hollins University
Students reportedly find themselves temporarily locked in practice rooms in Presser Hall, home to the Hollins music department. Chairs supposedly roll themselves violently across the floor, too. And late at night, when no one is inside, music is said to emanate from the building. Legend blames a long-dead girl with an unconsummated crush on her piano teacher. The Hollins Theatre also has a ghost, “Elizabeth.” And a spectral nurse was said to check the foreheads of students at Swannanoa Hall when it was a dorm. The building houses the English department now, though. So, it’s hard to know what that ghost is doing now.
11. United States Military Academy
The lore of the United States Military Academy includes at least one exorcism and an Irish cook named Miss Molly who likes to make bread in the superintendent’s house. The most notorious spirit at West Point is said to reside in Room 4714, where in 1972 a handful of cadets swore they saw the ghost of a shimmering, white-eyed, 19th-century soldier with a handlebar mustache. Cadets also reported that the room became strikingly cold. About a decade later, a West Point professor theorized that the apparition was merely the product of sleep-related hallucinations. Maybe, but doesn’t that sound suspiciously like a massive government cover-up?
12. University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame is said to be haunted, naturally, by gridiron legend George Gipp. The story goes that The Gipper, who frequently partied past curfew, was locked out of his dorm. He slept on the steps of Washington Hall through a blustery Indiana winter night, caught pneumonia and died. The building could also be vexed by a fallen construction worker or a dedicated music student who met an untimely end. Whatever the case, unexplained events proliferate and strange sounds echo through Washington Hall. Other campus ghosts include Father Sorin, Notre Dame’s founder, and Canute Lardner, a ghost with an Irish brogue.
13. California State University Channel Islands
If you’ve seen the opening sequence of the movie “Halloween,” you know how frightening insane asylums can be. They are very dark, the weather is terrible and deranged people wander the grounds. Repurposed insane asylums are even scarier, though, because they are filled with the ghosts of those deranged people. California’s newest public university opened in 2002, in a location that had been a mental hospital until 1997. Reports of creepy occurrences are already rife. Lights flicker, mysterious voices cry out and strange rustling sounds abound all over campus.
