Avoid These 5 CofC Buildings if You're Scared of Ghosts
Here are five places on campus to avoid if you are scared of ghosts.
Who needs a haunted house when you can have a haunted campus? Being over 240 years old, the College of Charleston has its share of ghostly tales.
There have been reports of spooky encounters all over campus – from doors opening on their own in Towel Library to figures appearing in the mirrors at King George Inn to soap dispensers flying off the wall and across the floor at the Avery Research Center – but there are five places have been chilling spines time and time again for years.
RELATED: Listen to this podcast with Ed Macy ’91 (M.A. ’98) about the haunted places on campus.
Below are the Top 5 places to avoid if you are scared of ghosts.
Berry Residence Hall (80 St. Philip St.)
Joe E. Berry Residence Hall was built on the old Charleston Orphanage House site. According to records, its infirmary was overflowing with sick children during the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1918. The children who were not ill were sent outside to play in the yard.
One day, some children playing outside found oily rags and started a fire on the orphanage grounds. The fire quickly spread, causing the evacuation of the building.
Four orphans died of smoke inhalation.
Fast-forward to 1991, when the College of Charleston opened the doors of Berry Residence Hall. The hall was plagued by false fire alarms not long after students moved in.
RELATED: Read more about why Berry Hall is one of the spookiest places on campus.
Students then started reporting hearing distant voices and laughter of children late into the night. Some students also said they were awakened by the sound of marbles cascading across the floor, only to find none.
Perhaps the strangest thing is that some students report they heard children’s voices chanting “Ring Around the Rosie” in the early morning hours.
Guest House (12 Glebe St.)
The 12 Glebe Street house (circa 1855), which the College uses as a guest house, is noted for having the only authenticated ghost on campus.
The ghost – who is described as neither hostile nor threatening – is a gentleman of the post–Civil War era and has been sighted by quite a few responsible occupants.
In one account, for example, two people were reading books when they heard a noise at the foot of the bed. They both looked up and saw a ghost described as ”6 feet tall, well-dressed, wearing a fluffy tie.” The ghost moved his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. The ghost looked frustrated and soon left the room through a solid plaster wall.
The ghost typically appears in the central second floor bedroom during some nights and then disappears into a wall that leads to the attic apartment through an old abandoned stairwell that was sealed off during renovation.
When the College purchased the house in 1966, the workers discovered that the previous occupants had created confusing mazes throughout the home. They sealed up rooms, staircases and other locations, eventually turning the 15-room house into a single unit. People believe the previous owners constructed the maze to keep the ghosts out of their room.
Student Health Services (185 Calhoun St.)
Once the site of Brauer’s Bicycle Shop, Student Health Services is haunted by the ghost of Mrs. Brauer, who was murdered there after a botched robbery attempt in 1971.
After the College bought the building, it turned it into a bookstore. One day before the beginning of the semester, the staff had been working there all day shelving textbooks to sell to students. The next day, the first staffer to unlock the door discovered all of the books had been taken off the shelves and placed neatly in stacks on the floor. Some of the stacks were as high as 5 feet tall.
Nobody knows why or how this occurred.
Blacklock House (18 Bull St.)
Another ghost has been reported with some frequency at the William Blacklock House. A National Historic Landmark, this brick house was built in 1800 for a wealthy merchant and is one of the nation’s finest examples of Adamesque architecture.
The ghost allegedly lives on the top floor and appears late in the afternoon when people are alone in the house. There is eerily very little information about this spirit.
Blacklock House
Robert Scott Small Building (175 Calhoun St.)
There has been ghostly activity reported at the Robert Scott Small Building for years – especially on the third floor, where the Robert Scott Small Room is located.
Early one morning, for example, the Plumbing Shop was installing on ice maker line in the faculty break room when they heard a crash. When they looked out into the hallway, they found a mirror shattered on the floor.
“There was no obvious signs of where the mirror came from except the office across the hallway was open,” they reported, noting that they could tell where the mirror had been hanging in the office. “The mirror somehow picked itself up off the wall, turned 180 degrees and was thrown across the hall!”
The team fled the scene, but came back a few hours later to explain to the occupant of the office that they did not break her mirror. When they told her what had happened, “she laughed and said, ‘I don’t enter this office until I bless it each morning’ … and she just went back to work.”
The ghost is thought to be Robert Scott Small himself.
