A tragedy for his friends and family, the disappearance became a celebrated legend for future students at Miami University who dubbed him “the Phantom of Oxford.”
While many argue that Ron probably lost his memory and is still alive today, others think he died and remains on campus as a spirit.
Fisher Hall was a creepy old place that already had a reputation for being haunted when Ron resided there. The enormous structure had been dedicated on September 3, 1856, as the Oxford Female College. Heralded as the finest college building in the West, the features included a dining room and a chapel, which seated eight hundred. There was room for two hundred students to live, and they were excited to have the luxury of hot and cold running water.
The building had many incarnations, including time as the Oxford Hotel and later as a mental asylum. When the university purchased the building in 1925, it came with a few forgotten artifacts that students stumbled upon over the years. They shuddered when they found the old straitjackets and imagined the troubled souls once confined within the brick walls.
Ron’s vanishing added to the mysterious ambience. When the leaves turned golden and began to drift from the elm trees, students were both thrilled and frightened to learn that a ghost had been seen in the formal gardens behind Fisher Hall.
When they heard the apparition singing, witnesses felt cold to the bone. Perhaps it was only another student playing a joke, but when skeptics gave chase, it eluded them, melting into the night as easily as it had appeared.
Some insisted that the figure had to be Ron’s ghost. He was, after all, a musician who expressed himself through song. Others smirked and said it was a prank.
Pranks were not unusual among the students. In fact, on the very evening that Ron vanished, he’d found his bed filled with dead fish. He was last seen when he fetched clean sheets before returning to his room. As he gathered the clean bedding, he’d mentioned that he was tired and was going to bed early.
What could have changed his plans?
Was there another practical joke the night Ron disappeared—a prank that went horribly wrong, with the popular sophomore ending up injured or worse? If a joke did indeed get out of hand, the perpetrators weren’t talking.
A few years after Ron went missing, the upper floors of Fisher Hall were deserted after they became so rundown that they were deemed unsafe, and the first floor became home to the university’s theater. The theater students insisted there was a ghost in their midst. Some were simply annoyed when items inexplicably vanished—a common occurrence in haunted places. Others were afraid to be in the building alone. Shadows darted past the windows, they said, and they were troubled by the sounds of muffled voices. No one could quite make out what was being said. Was it the Phantom of Oxford trying to tell them something?
Fisher Hall eventually fell into complete disrepair, and the once-grand building was used for storage. Those who walked by often felt eyes upon them and quickened their pace as they glanced up nervously at the black windows. Braver students sometimes broke into the haunted building, half hoping to encounter a specter. The story of the missing boy’s ghost became a favorite Halloween topic for the local media.
Ronald’s parents died without learning the fate of their beloved son.
Fisher Hall was demolished in 1979, the fine, pink dust from the bricks floating away on the breeze with old secrets. Today, the Marcum Conference Center occupies the spot.
Ronald Henry Tammen Jr. is still missing.
For more information on Ronald Tammen and other missing people, visit the Doe Network at www.doenetwork.org.
Ghosts of Miami University
With its forested landscape and silver streams, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is known as one of the loveliest college campuses in America. Lovely and spooky. Many of the grand old buildings are shrouded in mysteries and crawling with ghosts. Some say that the restless spirits originate from a century-old tragedy in Brice Hall. The girls were in tears, and the boys shook their heads in disbelief when a favorite teacher, Professor Henry Snyder, was found dead in his Brice Hall chemistry laboratory.
Students and teachers whispered about the “suicide.” What had driven Professor Snyder to ingest a fatal dose of potassium cyanide? The September 14, 1898, death raised suspicions, however. Some wondered if his flamboyant wife, Minnie, had murdered him.
The couple was a study in contrasts. He was the typical professor, while Minnie was a sexy siren who loved to dress like a gypsy and sing on stage. That, of course, is not enough to suggest someone is a killer, but the stain of suspicion darkened when she married her husband’s lab assistant, William Pugh.
Had the seductive Mrs. Snyder lured William into the murder plot? Had he administered the poison? Twenty years later, William mysteriously vanished and was reportedly never seen again.