President's Park
Like many American universities, there are a few select dormitories which share similar haunted tales. Nestled on the outskirts of Presidents Park (The Park), Jefferson and Monroe Hall are claimed to be haunted by the ghosts of small children. The conjoined dormitories have three floors, with two bathrooms on each of the floors. While the ghosts are reported in a multitude of spooky encounters, they share a commonality in haunted bathrooms. Students share that the ghosts messed with them in the bathrooms and that the showers would turn on with no apparent reason [17].
The Park is a freshman residential neighborhood. Elizabeth Tuckers, Haunted halls : ghostlore of American college campuses, shares that freshmen are, “travelers from their homes to a new place where legends and rumors offer an important kind of learning” [20]. Given that college freshmen are away from home for the first time, they are attuned to the rumors around them and share their paranormal experiences in large circles. This bears weight on the amount of stories that arise from The Park. Still, the question remains: why Jefferson and Monroe Hall? An answer may be found in that these halls host the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) Residential Living Community (RLC). Many students within CHHS have a natural gift for storytelling, which would explain how stories from this RLC have spread from the student body to folkloric research.
Some stories from The Park identify the ghosts as deceased indigenous children. The 2000 Resident Director of The Park shared a common rumor of the time that, from the back of The Hub through The Park, there used to be an Indigenous Burial Ground [20]. Students believed that this graveyard was developed over and that the spirits of children buried there now haunt the buildings. The Resident Director shared that a Jefferson resident saw one of the children in her closet in 1999.
While there are plenty of cases of American developers building over Indigenous burial grounds, the idea that these places are haunted is a largely colonialist idea [2]. In fact, this can instead be traced to White filmmakers and writers who perpetuate this trope through Horror. For example, the hotel in The Shining is explained to be haunted because of it having been built on an Indigenous burial ground. As an extremely popular novel and film of the 80s, 2000s residents of The Park would be accustomed to this trope and be likely to include it in their ghostlore and spread a belief of it.
Another contributing factor towards the prevalence of ghost stories in The Park is age. Dr. Gary Anderson teaches 200-level horror classes within the English Program where students share their own ghost stories [2]. In his tenure, Dr. Anderson has found that, contrary to popular belief, haunted dormitory stories often center around newer buildings. In the case of The Park, these dorms were only built within the last 40 years. Similarly, the Hub, formerly known as Sub II, was opened to students in 1982 [11]. These were built to meet the demands of the rapidly expanding university–only 23 years after the University itself had purchased the land [12]. Given Dr. Anderson’s experience of Students sharing ghost stories of newer buildings over older ones, this may shed light on why The Park is more prone to paranormal tales than older dormitories on campus.
This being said, it is important to note that students to this day share new paranormal experiences within these buildings. A 2023 Monroe Resident shared they experienced a ghost who, “used to mess with you in the bathroom, close the common room doors, flicker lights and give you a chill. He was nice; he just liked to mess with us" [17]. With tales of benevolent trickster ghosts still afloat, who’s to say if there are indeed spirits within the Park?
