Technician Online

Issue date: 5/31/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: Matt Moore

Thousands of students have walked the grounds of campus since N.C. State was founded in 1889. According to a handful of the people who frequent campus today, some of those thought to be dead and gone might not be so gone after all.

At several locations across campus, strange events have led people to conclude that ghosts roam the buildings.

Erica Lezan, the assistant director of New Student Orientation, said a "ghost walk" is one of the events available for students during orientation. However, the tour emphasizes the University's history more than ghost stories, she said.

The tour does include a few ghost stories, though. The tour guides address the fact that many people believe the 1911 Building is haunted because, when walking through the building at night, people have reported hearing footsteps behind them, according to Lezan.

She said a few years ago a Campus Police officer who was escorting an orientation tour near the 1911 Building said certain officers refused to enter the building alone at night.

Campus Police Lt. Richard Potts said he has never heard of officers who are afraid of the building, or at least he'd "never met anyone who would admit to it."

Potts does admit, however, that he has heard rumors the Spring Hill House, a former plantation house on Centennial Campus, is haunted. The N.C. Japan Center now occupies the building, which the University acquired from the Dorothea Dix Hospital in 2000.

Potts noted that motion detectors have been set off when nobody could have been in the building, which leads some people to believe a ghost is present.

However, "that could be bad wiring, squeaky floors," he said.

According to Tony Moyer, the associate director of the N.C. Japan Center no one has ever had any personal encounters in the Center, though the motion detectors in the upper floor of the building were triggered often in the evenings soon after the center moved into the building in June 2001.

During the Civil War, Moyer said 40,000 troops camped out nearby, so "It's a fairly safe guess that the army might have commandeered [the building]" for use as a hospital or office.

The original owner of the land, Col. Theophilus Hunter Sr., is buried a few hundred feet from the house in the oldest named and dated grave in Raleigh. His son built the house though, so Hunter Sr. never inhabited it.

Continued...

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