Kendall Hall at TCNJ

Sigrid Stevenson was murdered at the piano in Kendall Hall on September 4, 1977. The case is still open. Students still report her ghost.

Sigrid Stevenson was practicing piano in the empty auditorium at Kendall Hall when she was murdered. She was a 25-year-old master's student in music from California. The date was September 4, 1977. The attacker approached from behind while she was playing, beat her repeatedly with a blunt object, and left her wrapped in a piano blanket on the stage. Her wrists showed symmetrical ligature marks that matched handcuffs. Despite substantial blood at the scene, police recovered no footprints and no fingerprints. The case has never been solved.

The building is now the Main Stage Theater at The College of New Jersey in Ewing. TCNJ kept the name when the school rebranded from Trenton State, moved the drama and music departments in, and kept the stage where Stevenson was practicing. Student workers and performers are the ones who pass the accounts down. A former student employee told Weird NJ he watched a paper towel lift off the dispenser on one side of a bathroom, travel across the room, and drop into a garbage can on the other side. The windows were closed. No vents nearby. He was alone.

A local psychic who asked not to be named walked through the building for Weird NJ and told them she saw the last minutes from the killer's perspective. He was watching Stevenson from the seats while she played. He was in uniform. Curly hair. Something metallic hanging from his pants, which the psychic thought were keys. She estimated he would have been in his late twenties or thirties at the time, which puts him in his seventies now if he's still alive.

The psychic's "uniform with keys" detail lines up with the suspect list investigators actually worked. Over the decades, police examined campus police (whose handcuffs were tested for blood), a theater troupe member named Chuck who had played a police officer in a production and had access to handcuffs and a nightstick, a lighting technician, and a maintenance worker. All four had building access. None produced conclusive evidence.

Sigrid Stevenson's murder is documented down to the hour. That isn't the usual college-ghost situation. Most campuses trade in rumor: the professor who jumped, the roommate who vanished, the dorm room nobody will book. Kendall Hall's ghost has a name, a photograph, a police file, a 1977 news archive, and a 2024 Netflix episode called "Murder Center Stage." The auditorium where she was practicing is the same auditorium where the spring musical rehearses now.

The paper-towel story is the one students tell each other first. But the detail people stop talking about is the piano blanket. A 25-year-old pianist was killed at her piano and wrapped in the cloth that covers it. Nearly fifty years on, nobody has been arrested. The building is still open for rehearsal.