Salem College

A boarding student caught fire at Salem College's Single Sisters House in 1873. Students still see Sarah Tilkey in the attic windows.

On the evening of November 28, 1873, a sixteen-year-old boarding student named Sarah Tilkey was practicing piano in the Single Sisters House when an ember from a nearby stove caught her dress. She ran through the building engulfed in flames and made it down the stairs before Professor Lineback beat the fire out with his coat. The burns killed her that night. Salem Academy students have been seeing a young woman in a long Moravian-style dress through the Single Sisters attic windows ever since.

Salem College was founded in 1772 as a Moravian school for girls and is the oldest institution of women's education in the American South. The campus shares ground with Old Salem, the preserved Moravian district where cobblestone streets and eighteenth-century buildings still stand. The Single Sisters House, built in 1786 as a communal residence for unmarried Moravian women, is the heaviest building on campus. One admissions staffer working on the third floor in the early evening described a sudden chill at 5:30 and the absolute certainty that she wasn't alone. Others have described Sarah more vividly: a pale, faintly luminous woman with deep-set dark eyes, most often around two or three in the morning.

The campus's other famous ghost isn't a ghost. It's a painting. In the lobby of Babcock dormitory hangs a portrait of Mary Reynolds Babcock, daughter of tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds, who left Salem a major bequest after her death in 1953. Students insist her painted eyes follow you across the room, and campus superstition holds that anyone who walks past without greeting her, or worse makes an obscene gesture, will suffer for it. First-years get the rule their first week: hello when you come in, goodbye when you leave. A student who flipped Mary off was allegedly expelled shortly afterward. No one's produced a registrar's record to confirm it, but the story does exactly what campus ghost stories are supposed to do.

Clewell dormitory has its own pile of complaints. Construction expansion in the 1920s killed workers on the site, and the elevator there has a habit of running itself to floors no one called it to. Cold spots drift through the older buildings without warning. Footsteps echo down empty corridors. The sense of being watched is common enough in the Single Sisters House and Clewell that it's folded into orientation stories, not flagged as unusual.

Salem College's ground has been continuously occupied since the 1700s. Births, deaths, daily prayers, piano practice, and in Sarah Tilkey's case a single accident that took ten minutes to kill her. The buildings kept the accident. Students walking home past Single Sisters at night glance up at the attic windows, and every so often the report comes back the same: a pale face at the third-floor glass, dark eyes, gone by the time anyone else looks.