Huntress Hall

Keene State students hear an antique wheelchair rolling across the Huntress Hall attic. Harriet Huntress died four years before the dorm was built.

The wheelchair in the Huntress Hall attic isn't a rumor. It's a real wheelchair, and for decades it was bolted inside a metal cage up there. The legend is that you can hear it rolling across the floorboards at night, and that it belonged to Harriet Huntress, who used it in the last years of her life. The skeptic's problem is that Harriet died in 1922. Huntress Hall wasn't built until 1926.

Harriet Lane Huntress was born in Center Harbor, New Hampshire in 1860 and spent her career as an education administrator for the state Board of Education, a position she held from 1885 until her death. She was also a suffragist, treasurer of the New Hampshire Equal Suffrage Association, and a working clubwoman in Concord, where she lived. Spinal cancer put her in a wheelchair in her last years. She died in Concord on March 14, 1922, and was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Four years later, Keene Normal School named a new women's dormitory after her. She never set foot in it.

The haunting traces back to the Second World War. The U.S. Navy commandeered Huntress Hall to house male pilot trainees, and that's when residents first started reporting the wheelchair sounds from the attic: a creak and a squeak, rolling back and forth across the floor, directly above the top-floor bedrooms. Somebody climbed up to look. Harriet's actual wheelchair was up there, stored after her death. The story hardened into a rule: she doesn't like men in her building, and she doesn't like what students get up to after dark.

A 1984 account described a woman in a long dress walking the third-floor hallway at 3 a.m., checking doors. A 1985 graduate remembered the attic as cavernous and nearly empty, except for the wheelchair. A local paranormal group investigated in 2008 and found nothing. The Equinox, the student paper, has debunked the legend more than once, most recently in 2024, on the reasonable grounds that Harriet had no relationship to the building.

None of that has made any difference. The 2009 renovation gutted the interior and updated almost everything. Freshmen who've never heard of Harriet describe the rolling sound overhead within their first semester, along with doors that won't stay shut and cold patches in the third-floor hallway. The wheelchair is long gone from the attic. The creak-and-squeak above the top-floor ceiling is not.