Rockefeller College (Rocky)

Princeton's 1913 Collegiate Gothic dorms, where ghost tours say bones were sealed into the archway wall and a couch shifted position all spring.

When Italian stonemasons broke ground for Princeton's Collegiate Gothic expansion in 1913, the story campus ghost tours tell is that the first spadefuls came up with human bones. The site sits on a patch of campus near the old Nassau Street burial ground. The bones, according to the ghost-tour version, were sealed into the wall of the archway leading into the quadrangle rather than moved anywhere. The residents, such as they were, did not stay quiet.

Rockefeller College, "Rocky" to everyone who lives there, is a residential college for Princeton undergraduates. It was organized in 1982 around a cluster of 1913-era Collegiate Gothic dormitories, including Holder Hall and Blair, funded in part by a gift from John D. Rockefeller III. The gothic arches, the dim stone corridors, the narrow stairs, the high vaulted ceilings of Rockefeller common room, all of it contributes to a building that was essentially designed to look old. So when Princeton sophomores tell freshmen that the dorms are haunted, the architecture is doing half the work for them.

The specific stories cluster in Holder Hall, which predates Rocky's reorganization by nearly seventy years. Holder is where students report footsteps in the hall when nobody is on the floor, doors that close themselves in empty common rooms, and a figure glimpsed through a dorm-room transom, standing in the corridor, too tall for a student. The ghost tour lingers here. One recurring Holder story involves a married-student couple whose upper-archway room had a couch and a wall painting that shifted position on their own, independently of each other, for an entire spring semester. Tour guides recite the construction-era bone-discovery story as if it's established fact. It is not established fact. The university has no record of remains being found when Holder went up. What exists is folklore, handed down through the same ghost-tour culture that produced the Aaron Burr legend at the cemetery two blocks away.

That doesn't make the reports worthless. It means the reports are about the experience of living inside a building that was designed to look haunted, on a campus that has been telling itself ghost stories since the 1750s. Students report them anyway. The temperature on one Holder landing drops ten degrees between a closed stairwell door and the open corridor beyond it, and nobody has found a draft. A student writing about Holder described the sense of being watched in the library reading room after midnight as "like sitting for an oral exam you don't know the questions to."

The likeliest ghost here, if there is one, is somebody whose name nobody bothered to record. The Nassau Street burial ground was used for decades before it became Princeton Cemetery in 1757. Some of the graves were moved. Some weren't. Some of the ones that weren't are now probably under dorms, walkways, or the mathematics department. Generations of Princeton students live on top of them without knowing whose quiet they are disturbing.

Rocky sits on the western side of campus, across from Mathey College, and its common room is one of the most beautiful gothic interiors in Princeton. The architecture was designed to make visitors feel like the building might be haunted, and almost a century of students have obliged.