When the Ghost Screams(5)
Did William’s ghost, realizing that he too was the victim of a black widow, return to the campus to commiserate with poor Professor Snyder’s ghost?
While she was not a killer or a victim, Helen Peabody’s ghost frightens some students the most. An outspoken critic of coeducation and the principal of the neighboring school, the Western Female Seminary, Helen was strict and formidable.
The boys who slipped onto her campus to meet girls knew they had to sneak past the stern woman who sent many of them racing back to their dorms. In Helen’s time, proper young ladies did not spend unescorted time with men. And she certainly did not want her female students attending classes with males. She surely would have been appalled when the two schools merged.
Seminary Hall, built in 1855, was once part of Helen Peabody’s campus and was renamed for her in 1905. Students insist that her ghost haunts Peabody Hall. An inexplicable low guttural sound is sometimes heard, and the shower is known to turn itself on.
Two boys living in the hall were literally shaken up when their entire room experienced an earthquake not felt anywhere else. They stared, wide-eyed, as their furniture shook and items spilled from their desktops.
Students often hurry past the big portrait of Helen in the building’s foyer. Her eyes, they say, follow them. And legend has it that when someone has done something of which Helen would have disapproved, the portrait’s eyes blink as the guilty party goes by.
Students say the ghost of Helen Peabody, once principal of Western Female Seminary, seems to be watching them. This antique postcard shows the magnificent building where the stern opponent of co-education lives on as a ghost. (author’s collection)
Some say that Reid Hall is also haunted. Students report phantom footsteps in empty rooms and a pair of bloody handprints on a door. The prints, they insist, will not wash away and were made decades ago by a student shot and killed when he tried to break up a fight.
A May 9, 1959, article in the Vidette Messenger verified the murder when it reported the death of twenty-year-old Roger T. Sayles from Gary, Indiana. Roger was entertaining his mother, who was visiting for Mother’s Day, when he heard a commotion in the hallway.
He left his room to find two men arguing over a girl they were both dating. Eighteen-year-old Henry Lucas from Springfield, Ohio, opened fire, wounding his rival and killing Roger with two bullets.
Police searched the campus, but the killer was not found until seven hours after the shooting when a student in Ogden Hall went to make a call and found Henry slumped over in a phone booth. He’d shot himself in the head. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition and later died.
Is it Henry or Roger who stalks Reid Hall?
Perhaps it is both of them, still trying to figure out what went wrong on that tragic Mother’s Day.
A Dark Premonition
The students in the Technological Institute huddled over their books, trying to ignore the odd noises that emanated from the walls. They did not have time to entertain the idea of ghosts or to discuss silly legends. They were, after all, serious pupils of one of the most selective colleges in the country, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago.
Sarah Bailey, however, managed to pry a student or two away from their books long enough to get the scoop for the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, in October 2004. Late-night studiers, she wrote, sometimes heard the sound of flasks and glasses clinking against each other. The noise was followed by a rattle and then an indefinable whisper.
The haunted Northwestern University is crawling with ghosts. (1921 yearbook)
More than one student reporter has speculated about the identities of the ghosts who inhabit the old college on the shore of Lake Michigan, entertaining various legends, such as the one that says the Tech Building ghost is a 1950s chemistry student who drank a tube of cyanide after his doctoral dissertation was rejected. Others believe that two female students committed suicide in the late 1800s after their fiancées deserted them. Witnesses swear they’ve heard the disembodied voices of the spirits weeping and commiserating with each other.
Another specter is said to be that of a heartbroken student who hung himself in the University Hall’s bell tower. And some say that Annie May Swift, an 1880s student who succumbed to an illness, still roams the campus and has a special attachment to the building named after her.
This writer, however, made one of her frequent forages into forgotten archives to finger an entirely different restless spirit. The sad story was buried so deeply that few on campus are aware of it. I found it by accident. I was researching another haunted location when a shocking news story surfaced. It chronicled the sort of death that often results in earthbound spirits. My investigation into the ghosts of Northwestern University was backward. First I found the death, and then I looked for ghosts where the tragedy had occurred.