Caraway Hall - Arkansas Tech

Arkansas Tech's Caraway Hall has a ghost named Gracie, a bricked-up window nobody can explain, and one 2010 RA quote every site recycles.

There's a window on the second floor of Caraway Hall that students will point at if you let them give the tour. Dead center of the front façade, between the Doric columns and the dormers. They'll tell you it's bricked shut because a girl named Gracie jumped from it. Or hanged herself in her closet on the same floor. Or got electrocuted by a hair dryer. Or none of that, because the dorm sits on a Cherokee burial ground.

Pick whichever version you like. None of them are documented.

What is documented is a 1992 National Register nomination form that describes the front façade in granular detail (nine-over-nine first-floor sash, six-over-six on the upper floors, three arched dormers above) and concludes that Caraway Hall "has remained substantially intact since its construction and has suffered few alterations of any note." If someone had bricked up the central second-floor window between 1934 and 1992, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program coordinator Kenneth Story would have flagged it. He didn't. The 2024 renovation didn't mention it either. So either the bricking happened in a window of time no record covers, or it didn't happen at all and the story needed a focal point.

Either way, the ghost has a name. Locally she's Gracie, sometimes Grace, and the campus has gotten comfortable enough with her that the Ross Pendergraft Library ran a haunted-campus event in October 2019 with Caraway as one of the three featured buildings. The promotional copy asked, plainly: "Have you felt a cold presence in Caraway Hall?" Guest speaker Amy Milliken from the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program walked attendees through it.

The building itself is worth the visit even if you're skeptical. Three stories of red brick, Colonial Revival, irregular H-shaped plan. Designed by A. N. McAninch out of Little Rock, built by J. H. Leveck and Sons, funded in 1934 by the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works. A $35,000 grant and a $100,000 loan that also covered a power plant, an athletic grandstand, and the president's home. The fifty-room women's dormitory cost $87,000 and opened in March 1935.

It is named, despite what you'll read in half the ghost-tour scripts, after Senator Thaddeus Caraway. Not his wife. Thaddeus died in office in November 1931, and the Arkansas Polytechnic College trustees named the new dorm for him because his support helped establish the state's four agricultural colleges. His widow Hattie spoke at the dedication on October 18, 1935. By then she'd become the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate, which is the reason people remember the name now and probably also the reason the attribution gets flipped.

The hauntings, almost all of them, trace back to one source. In December 2010, a student WordPress blog called techhauntings posted an interview with a former resident assistant named Brandy Cunningham. Cunningham described walking past a third-floor resident who was staring at a blank wall. She asked the girl what she was doing. The girl said "I'm talking." Cunningham called it "a little creepy."

That is the original quote. Every aggregator page about Caraway Hall (Haunted Places, Arkansas Haunted Houses, the recycled listicles) runs Cunningham's account, usually without crediting her or the blog. The Arka Tech student newspaper has no surfaced article about the haunting. The ATU Alumni Association ran a piece called "Caraway Hall Ghost!" that's since gone offline. So a single 2010 student blog post is doing most of the heavy lifting for fifteen years of campus folklore, and the rest is whisper-down-the-lane.

The phenomena, when residents discuss them, cluster around three things: footsteps on the stairs, noises in the attic, whispers in the hallways. A 2018 Only In Arkansas feature interviewed third-floor Caraway residents and got a delightfully flat response. Yes, those things happen, but we're the ones making them, and the building creaks because the building is ninety years old.

Which is the honest answer. Caraway underwent a $1.1 million exterior renovation completed in August 2024, funded by an $857,492 Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council grant plus a $218,730 commitment from ATU. WER Architects, Wagner General Contractors. Clay tile roof, masonry, flashing, windows, decorative railing. Ninety-year-old brick buildings settle. They drop temperatures in cold pockets near old single-pane windows. They carry footsteps through plaster walls. None of that requires a dead girl.

But the dead girl is the part the library puts on its event flyer, and the part Cunningham was willing to speak on the record about, and the part eighty-eight current residents across four sororities have to decide whether to believe. The dorm sits on the southeast side of campus, between Tomlinson Hall and the Alumni House. The first-floor lounge has hardwood and high ceilings. There is no recorded death attached to the building, no obituary, no Arka Tech archive piece. Just Gracie, who has no last name and no year and no documented window.

The library's October 2019 event flyer is still readable on the Wayback Machine. It listed Caraway alongside Tucker Coliseum's basketball-player ghost and Witherspoon Hall's piano ghost. The header on the Caraway entry: "Have you felt a cold presence in Caraway Hall?"