Plant Hall (University of Tampa)

At Plant Hall in Tampa, Florida, the long-serving faculty pass new arrivals a rule on their first week: if you pass a tall man in an old-fashioned brown suit standing alone in a corridor, do not make eye contact. Students call him the Brown Man, and most who tell the story believe he's Henry Plant himself.

They describe him the same way each time. Brown three-piece suit, a wide-brimmed hat, long white hair, and red eyes glowing under the brim. He turns up on the staircases and landings of what is now the university's primary academic building — a hall students cut through to get to class. The warning, repeated across student papers and ghost tours, holds that if you acknowledge him, he rushes at your face and vanishes just short of contact. No record documents that behavior; it's the thing people tell each other, not a logged incident.

The building wasn't built for any of this. Railroad magnate Henry B. Plant opened it in 1891 as the Tampa Bay Hotel, a 511-room Moorish Revival palace that cost over $3 million and was the first fully electrified building in Florida. Its designers, after reading things like *Arabian Nights*, crowned the roofline with six silver minarets and crescent moons. The hotel closed by the early 1930s, and in 1933 a junior college moved in, renamed the place Plant Hall, and turned the old guest rooms into classrooms.

The students who walk those halls now report the rest. Doors that open and close on their own. Footsteps in empty classrooms. Cold spots, and the steady sense of being watched. The activity clusters at the spiral staircase in the science wing and a long curved hallway lined with windows, where some say they've felt a hand push them or tug at a leg. Hotel-era servants are said to linger near the same stairwells.

So the rule stands, handed down hall by hall. Don't look at the man on the stairs. They'll tell you he was the one who built the place.