Nassau Hall

A cannonball decapitated a portrait of King George II inside Nassau Hall during the Battle of Princeton. Aaron Burr Sr. still checks his office.

A cannonball fired at Nassau Hall during the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777, flew through a window of the faculty room and decapitated a portrait of King George II. Tradition holds that the gun belonged to the artillery company commanded by Alexander Hamilton, though that attribution has never been conclusively documented. What is documented is the window, the broken frame, and the fact that American troops drove the British infantry out of the building a few hours later, ending the Battle of Princeton and shifting the momentum of the Revolutionary War.

The story stays alive because the image is almost too good. A cannonball, the reigning monarch's head, and the building where the future republic would briefly house its Congress, all in the same afternoon. The attribution to Hamilton gets repeated because he's the famous name attached, not because a signed artillery return survives.

The ghost most often named at Nassau Hall isn't a Revolutionary soldier. It's Aaron Burr Sr., the Princeton president who died in 1757 and, per Princeton Alumni Weekly, "keeps mostly to the site of his old office, haunting Nassau Hall and checking up on the progress of his beloved college." Burr Sr. preceded his more famous dueling son by a generation. His office was inside this building. The sightings rarely come with a named witness, which is a Princeton habit. The campus has a long folklore of presidential ghosts without the tabloid detail.

The ghost stories about Revolutionary soldiers are vaguer still. British regulars had been quartered in Nassau Hall for weeks before the battle. During the fighting, American troops under Washington attacked the building with three cannons; two rounds connected, and the damage scars on the south facade are still visible almost 250 years later. Men died inside the classrooms and dormitories somewhere between the cannon fire and the British withdrawal. Security staff walking the building at night will tell you they've heard footsteps in corridors they've just cleared. No names. No photographs. Just the footsteps and the building.

Nassau Hall was completed in 1756 as a single Georgian structure that housed the entire College of New Jersey: classrooms, dormitories, dining hall, chapel, library, all inside one block. It burned twice, in 1802 and 1855, was rebuilt each time by Benjamin Latrobe and then John Notman, and stayed the administrative heart of Princeton through both reconstructions. Graduation is held on the steps. The president's office is still inside. The Congress of the Confederation met here from June 30 to November 4, 1783, which means for roughly four months after the war ended, this building was the United States capitol.

The ghost page is thin on specifics and thick on context. What the campus has instead is a building where 18th-century battle damage is still structural, where a continental congress met, where soldiers died, and where generations of night staff have heard the same unaccompanied footsteps in the same corridors.

A cannonball took the king's head off. The frame that held him is still there. The portrait hasn't been replaced.