The Spook: College and University Ghosts

[wizrd79]

The Spook: College and University Folklore
http://www.thespook.org



The Spook is dedicated to collecting and analyzing college and university folklore. Any ghost stories, legends, local college lore, and greek life legends, I will post and analyze them in the coming months and years. Please feel free to post the stories that you have heard at your school or email them to me, thespook07@gmail.com. Through the months, as I collect the stories, I will analyze them with folklore to give you a better understanding of each story and their meanings. Furthermore, I will look at the different variations on the story and try to find the original history and story. I am dedicated to finding the truth. I will do my best to do updates weekly at least but the more you submit, the more I can update. Thanks for visiting and I hope you enjoy!

Story:

Mary Washington University
Mary Washington College:

Mary Washington’s ghost

Since the battle of Fredericksburg was the bloodiest battle in the civil war, there are many ghost stories about Fredericksburg. At the end of the war, survivors said that you could walk completely on bodies from where the College is at to the Rappahannock River (a distance of 3-4 miles). The trenches are still visible, cannonballs are still in trees, and many people talk hearing noises and finding doors shut in their houses.

I’ve been on many trail runs at dusk in Battlefield Park and felt the skin on the back of my neck creep, and I’ve walked upstairs when alone in my old house in downtown Fredericksburg to find a door shut that I know I left open. However, Fredericksburg also has many ghost stories predating the Civil War as George Washington’s boyhood home (and site of the cherry tree incident) is across the Rappahannock, and Mary Washington’s home is still preserved in Fredericksburg.
The area between the college and the downtown is known as Sunken Road area and contains neighborhoods and a park that I can’t remember the name of.

In the park is a small boulder in a wooded area that has come to be known as Mary’s rock. According to students at MWC, if you wait at Mary’s rock for an entire night you will see the ghost of Mary Washington wearing a long white dress walk past you just beyond the rock. I did attempt to catch a sighting at Mary’s rock, but did not wait the entire night. I didn’t see her nor did I meet anybody with eyewitness accounts of seeing the ghost.

[MsBlack]

While going to school at the University of Pittsburgh for Theatre Arts I became privy to a great story. There is a beauty of a Bronze Plaque in the William Pitt Union that is in the lounge off the sun room. It has a very lovely silhouette of Ms. Eleonora Duse /Doo-sah/ the Famous Actress of the last century. She was as adored as Sarah Bernhardt and performed many of the roles made famous by her in the Italian versions. She was so successful that she began touring with her shows which inevitably brought her to the Industrious city of steel. She stayed at the finest hotel of it's time, Hotel Schenley, but she was very unimpressed with the city and made her opinion quite well known.. Before one Performance, Ms. Duse was had some things to catch up on and decided she would go to the theatre after the rest of her group. However it had started to rain and when Ms. Duse made her way across the street to the Theatre the door that should have been left open had closed and locked itself. She caught a cold immediately that evening that escalated into full blown pneumonia. She died at the Hotel Schenley in Suite 524. Her last words were quoted to be "Please God, don't let me die in this place." Of course, she said it in a whispered Italian so it would have sounded much lovelier. The Schenley is now the William Pitt Student Union but that story has persisted within the Theatre Dept. Each year after that run of productions they host the Duse Awards otherwise known as the 'Doozies'. It's closest equivalent would be the Razzies and it's entire purpose is to blow off the steam of a year's stresses. There are t-shirts with Eleonora and her classic saying as each actor attempts to do just that, get the hell out of Pittsburgh. There have been sightings of her on occasion and some people have attributed it to a another woman who commit suicide in the building next door but it truly is Eleonora who lives on in the Schenley.

[wizrd79]

I remember my freshman year at Longwood University, then college, and according to stories I heard it was supposed to be haunted by two ghosts in the dorm I lived in called The Cunninghams. I lived in North. That part of the dorm, built in 19xx something, I can't remember for sure off the top of my head, was built over a grave yard and they only removed the head stones. The first ghost was called the wall crawler and creepy wall crawler. This was a mean spirit of a person who was still buried under the building and was mad that his sleep was disturbed. Supposedly he would craw along the walls at night in your room and get right in your face, you would awake to feel his warm breath on your cheek, and then once you opened your eyes, he would scream and kackle and terrify the students.

The other ghost you will just have to come back and see another day... he he he

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The Spook
Wizrd79