In Brief
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that "Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts," and the line is now carved into Harvard Yard's Meyer Gate. He meant it as metaphor. Four centuries of campus lore took him literally, and the named ghosts keep specific addresses.
The Full Story
There is a line carved into the brickwork of the Meyer Gate, on the north side of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It reads: "Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote it in his journal in 1836, Class of 1821, and he meant it as a figure of speech, a thought about the long procession of scholars and statesmen who walked the Yard before him. Nearly four centuries of campus lore took him at his word, and the ghosts that turned up keep specific addresses.
One of them lived in Massachusetts Hall, the oldest surviving building on campus. The students who roomed in B-entry knew him as Holbrook Smith, who said he was Class of 1914. He looked entirely human except that he walked through the walls and never opened a door, and during the first weeks of each term he liked to chat. No alumnus named Holbrook Smith appears in any record. The man who finally moved him out was real: Dean William "Burriss" Young, Class of 1955, who lived in the hall for nearly four decades and one day told Smith to leave. Smith went with sad eyes. "You've ruined a perfectly good thing," he said.
At Widener Library, the story goes that Eleanor Widener still wanders the stacks, mourning a son who went down with the Titanic. Harry Widener was Class of 1907, and his mother built the library in his memory after he drowned. During renovations in the early 2000s, his portrait came down and plywood went up in its place, and plaster began falling from the ceiling onto the circulation desks below. Someone taped a photograph of him over the boards, over the fireplace where the portrait had hung. The plaster stopped.
Memorial Hall went up in 1874 for the Harvard men who died fighting for the Union, and the author Sam Baltrusis calls it the campus's most haunted building. The legend there has a phantom student returning to a classroom above the dining hall to finish an exam he never completed, working alone at a desk over a room full of the living.
Down at Wadsworth House, built in 1726, a figure in a tricorn hat and cloak is reported descending the stairs. The house was George Washington's first headquarters in Cambridge; he lodged there for two weeks in July 1775, before riding out to the Common to take command of the troops. As the story is told, a woman vacuuming alone one early morning looked up and saw the man in the tricorn hat come down. Baltrusis, who collected all of these, has a refrain for places like this one. "A ghost," he says, "is history demanding to be remembered."
