In Brief
A fieldstone castle sits at the dead end of Gimghoul Road in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the boulder out front is said to hold the blood of a student shot in a duel. Locals say his ghost still waits by the rock for the girl he died over.
The Full Story
At the end of Gimghoul Road in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a coffee-table-sized boulder sits in front of a stone castle, and the story is that it's stained with a dead man's blood. Locals say two ghosts keep coming back to it. One is Peter Dromgoole, a UNC student. The other is the woman he loved, known only as Miss Fanny. People describe them near the rock, waiting for each other in the dark.
The legend goes like this. In 1833 Dromgoole enrolled at the university and fell for Miss Fanny. A rival wanted her too, and one moonlit night the two men met near this spot for a pistol duel. Dromgoole took the shot. He died on the rock, his blood soaking into the stone, and they buried him underneath it. In one telling Fanny returns each night and dies of a broken heart. In another she reaches him just as he's hit, and his blood stains her nightclothes. Either way she keeps coming back, and so does he, and the rock is where they're said to meet.
The stain is real. The duel almost certainly isn't.
The real Peter Dromgoole did come to UNC in 1833. Then he failed his entrance exams and quietly left for Europe. No duel, no Miss Fanny, no body under a rock. The story seems to have been borrowed decades later from his uncle George, who fought an actual duel in 1837, and grafted onto the nephew's name. The two men got tangled together until the wrong one ended up dead in the telling. As for the rock, UNC geologists looked at the red staining and called it iron oxide. Rust in the granite, not blood. The thing the whole legend rests on is the one part that's easiest to check, and it doesn't hold.
None of which stopped the legend from getting a building.
In 1889 five UNC undergraduates founded a secret society around the tale, steeped in Arthurian knights and chivalry. They called it the Order of Gimghoul, and they took the dead student seriously enough to want his ground. They started buying the land in 1915. By 1926 they'd raised a medieval castle on the supposed murder site, roughly 1,300 tons of rough stone, around \$50,000, laid up by stonemasons from Valdese whose ancestors came from the old country to do exactly this kind of work. The plans called for a three-story battlemented tower and a great meeting hall. Some accounts put the finish at 1924.
The castle is theirs alone, closed to the public, set behind a stone wall at the end of a quiet residential street. You can walk to the gate but no further. The Order doesn't say what goes on inside, and the lore never really followed them in there. It stayed outside, at the boulder, where Peter and Fanny are still said to wait for each other in the dark. And the ghosts, by every account, settled in right behind the masons.
