In Brief
Students in Huntress Hall at Keene State College say they hear a wheelchair rolling and squeaking across the attic at night. The story names it Harriet Huntress's chair. But Harriet died in 1922, and the dormitory named for her didn't open until 1926. She never set foot in it.
The Full Story
Students who live in Huntress Hall at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire say they hear a wheelchair at night. It rolls and creaks and squeaks across the attic floor above their rooms, and the story has a name for whose it is: Harriet Huntress, the woman the building was named for. The sound clusters on the top floor and the third floor, in the ceilings directly below the attic.
There's a problem with the story, and it's the best part of it. Harriet Lane Huntress died in 1922, at her home in Concord. The dormitory named for her wasn't dedicated until 1926. She never lived in it, never owned a room there, never wheeled anything down its halls. She's buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in another state entirely. The chair the legend assigns to her may never have been hers at all. The documented record says only that she'd been absent from her job since February 1922 on account of illness, no cause given and no wheelchair anywhere in it. The wheelchair belongs to the ghost story, not to her life. The student paper has pointed all of this out more than once. Freshmen describe the rolling sound overhead anyway, usually within their first semester.
The real Harriet was no recluse. She was the first woman in New England appointed deputy superintendent of public instruction, and a suffragist who sat on the advisory board of the state Equal Suffrage Association. The legend remembers someone else: a prude who hated men, the story goes, and who woke up during World War II, when the Navy moved male pilot trainees into what had been an all-women's hall. The gender shift is the lore's explanation for why she stirred. The pioneering administrator and the prudish ghost share nothing but a name carved over a door.
The chair itself has a strange detail attached. A former Keene State cleaner said it was kept in the attic inside a metal cage, bolted to the floor. Other residents report a woman in a long dress walking the halls and checking doors, a woman in white roaming the grounds, taps turning on and off, whispers, doors slamming in empty corridors. The lore says she takes revenge on students who mock her, especially the ones who dress as her for Halloween in a gray wig and a wheeled chair.
The building was gutted and rebuilt in 2009, in two phases, and it's modern and co-ed now. The attic was emptied out. Students who arrive knowing nothing of any of this still report the sound above their ceilings.
