Centenary University

Kitchen worker Tillie Smith was murdered near Centenary's Taylor Library in 1886. Students still see her in the theater and among the oaks.

Tillie Smith was eighteen when someone raped, beat, and strangled her in a field outside Taylor Library on April 9, 1886. She worked in the kitchen at what was then Centenary Collegiate Institute, now Centenary University in Hackettstown. The case rocketed a small Warren County town to national headlines, and the coverage was vicious. Reporters flip-flopped Tillie between innocent farm girl and harlot, while her accused killer, school janitor James Titus, swung between upstanding citizen and predator in the same week's papers. Titus was convicted. Whether he actually did it is still an open question more than a century later.

Students see her among the tall oaks near the old academic buildings. They hear organ music drift through Whitney Chapel when no one's playing. The dorms get the strangest reports, but the theater is where she seems to spend the most time. There's a back room behind the stage where people have watched a thin figure in an 1880s servant's dress stand still and then walk into a wall. One often-retold incident involves a repair man sent to the sound room to fix a hanging light. He reached for his tool. The fixture started swinging on its own, and a voice inside it said, 'Get me out of here.'

The students have names for her. Tillie. Matilda. The girl from the field. Centenary's theater program has staged plays about her, and the Centenary Stage Company hosts public events that walk audiences back through what the yellow press did to her name. Reader's Digest put Centenary on a list of the ten most haunted colleges in America, which is flattering in a specific kind of way.

Her grave sits at Union Cemetery, across town from campus, under a tall monument that reads, in part, 'She died in defense of her honor.' The line was chosen by the town to push back on the papers that had trashed her. It's a strange, defiant epitaph, paid for by people who mostly didn't know her.

When you walk past Taylor Library at night, the oaks are the loudest part.