In Brief
The Longstreet Theatre at the University of South Carolina has been a chapel, a Civil War hospital, and a morgue. Beneath it run tunnels where students say a silver-suited figure with a third eye still charges out of the dark.
The Full Story
A University of South Carolina police officer walked up on a man in April 1950, on the loading dock behind the building now called the Longstreet Theatre in Columbia. He wore a silver suit, and he was standing over two mutilated chickens. When the officer's flashlight found him, the figure turned, and there was a third eye set in the middle of his forehead.
Students had been reporting him for months. The first sighting ran in the campus paper, The Gamecock, on November 12, 1949: a student named Christopher Nichols watched a silver-clad man lift a manhole cover near Longstreet and climb down into the sewer. Nichols called him the Sewer Man. After the chickens, the campus had a better name for him. The Third Eye Man.
He was supposed to live in the service tunnels that run beneath the campus. Fraternity pledges who went down into them told the same story for years: a figure that charged them out of the dark swinging a lead pipe. Nobody agrees on when it happened, and the accounts land somewhere in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
The tunnels are only the bottom layer. The building above them has had six lives since it went up in 1855, and one of them left something behind. During the Civil War it was a military hospital, and the dead were kept in brick catacombs beneath the front steps, chosen because it stayed cold down there. That space is a student lounge now. Officers still describe a cold feeling on the steps directly above the old morgue, and say they have seen figures standing there.
The rest of the haunting is quieter. A theatre professor has described what the building does after dark: doors slamming with no one near them, floorboards creaking under no weight, the elevator opening onto an empty car. Apparitions turn up in the late hours too, though no one has ever put a name to any of them.
The building never worked the way it was meant to. It opened as a chapel and lecture hall in 1855, but the acoustics were so bad it could not be used for either, and they packed moss and hair between the floorboards trying to fix it. Nothing did. Not until 1974 did an engineer hang an upside-down plaster dome from the ceiling to scatter the sound; the first play staged under it was *Waiting for Godot*.
Chapel, hospital, armory, classrooms, gymnasium, theatre: six uses in a row, each one meant to put the building to ordinary work. Students lounge in the old morgue today, and the tunnels where the Third Eye Man is said to live run directly beneath them.
