About This Location
A residence hall at Keene State College named after Harriet Huntress, with a long history of unexplained activity on the upper floors.
The Ghost Story
The ghost of Harriet Huntress rolls her wheelchair across the attic floor of the dormitory that bears her name, and she is especially displeased when students misbehave in the rooms below. Huntress Hall was erected in 1926 on the campus of what was then Keene Normal School (later Keene Teachers College, now Keene State College), and was named in honor of Harriet Lane Huntress, who served as the school's Board of Education Director from 1860 to 1892. Huntress was far more than an education bureaucrat -- she was the treasurer of the New Hampshire Equal Suffrage Association, a prominent clubwoman, and a pioneering advocate for women's education in the Granite State. Born in 1860 in Center Harbor, she spent the last years of her life confined to a wheelchair due to spinal cancer, dying on March 14, 1922, at the age of sixty-one in Concord, New Hampshire. She was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Huntress Hall originally served as an all-female residence hall, and the building's first decades were uneventful. The haunting reportedly began during World War II, when the U.S. Navy commandeered the dormitory to house male naval trainees. It was then that residents first reported hearing strange sounds emanating from the attic: the unmistakable creak and squeak of a rolling wheelchair, moving back and forth across the floor above. Staff investigated and found Harriet Huntress's actual wheelchair, which had been stored in the attic after her death. No one could explain how it was moving on its own.
The legend that developed around the wheelchair evolved into a more complex ghost story. Harriet's spirit is said to disapprove strongly of two things: men in her building and promiscuous behavior. When the Navy men first occupied Huntress Hall, the wheelchair sounds became constant -- as though Harriet was pacing the attic in agitation, unable to tolerate the presence of male strangers in her dormitory. The activity reportedly intensifies when students engage in intimate encounters in the dorm rooms, with the wheelchair rolling more frantically overhead and doors slamming of their own accord.
Skeptics have raised a significant objection to the legend: Harriet Huntress died four years before the building was constructed in 1926, and she was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts -- not Keene. She never set foot in the dormitory that bears her name, never sat in the rooms where students now sleep, and had no direct connection to the physical structure. A 2024 investigation by The Equinox, the student newspaper, formally debunked the legend on these grounds.
But the debunking has done nothing to stop the reports. Students who know nothing about Harriet Huntress or the legend's history still describe hearing wheelchair sounds from the attic, still feel sudden cold spots in the hallways, still find doors that refuse to stay closed. Huntress Hall was completely renovated in 2009 and continues to serve as a first-year residence hall on Fiske Quad. Whether the ghost is really Harriet, or something else entirely that has adopted her name and her wheelchair, the attic of Huntress Hall has never been quiet.
