In Brief
Salem College in Winston-Salem keeps a ghost in the attic of its oldest building. Students report a pale woman in period dress in the Single Sisters House windows late at night — where a 16-year-old boarder burned to death in 1873.
The Full Story
At Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, students keep seeing a woman in the attic windows of the Single Sisters House. She turns up in the dead of night, pale and dressed in period clothes, looking down from the oldest building on campus. One witness described her in the far left attic window around 2 or 3 in the morning: "extremely dark, deep-set eyes," translucent, faintly glowing. The woman looked at her, then slowly backed out of sight, still facing forward. "I will never forget her face."
The Single Sisters House was completed in 1786, built by the Moravians who founded Salem in 1772 as the oldest school for girls and women in the country. There is one documented violent death in those 250 years, and it happened here.
On November 28, 1873, a 16-year-old boarding student named Sarah Tilkey was practicing piano in the building when an ember from a stove caught her dress. She ran — which only fed the flames — and made it down the stairs before a music professor named Lineback beat the fire out. She died that same evening. She was from Augusta, Georgia.
That single accident is the only record of anyone dying violently on the campus. The house was later used as an infirmary, so the figure in the window could just as easily be someone who fell ill there. Nobody can put a name to her. Students have reported women in period dress in those windows in the middle of the night, again and again, for as long as anyone can remember.
The building is the Admission Office now. A senior named Sam Thurman was working alone on the third floor one evening, felt a chill and the certainty she wasn't alone, and when the floorboards creaked she ran down the steps without clocking out. "I WILL NOT stay past 5 o'clock on the third floor ever again," she said. "I can't do it."
Sarah Tilkey is the documented one. The rest of Salem's ghosts are campus rumor, told and retold without a record to pin them to. Clewell, the first-year dorm, has a sealed elevator shaft and a story about a little girl who fell down it while it was being built; residents say stuffed animals go missing and turn up lined against the closed shaft. In the Babcock lobby hangs a portrait of Mary Babcock, and first-years are taught to greet it coming and going, on the understanding that snubbing her brings bad luck. A senior thesis on the subject found the administration unwilling to release the records that would settle any of it.
The college would rather you didn't hear any of this. Campus hosts are told not to raise ghost talk with prospective students. But the sports teams are called the Salem Spirits, first-years swap stories in the outdoor amphitheater at orientation, and the lore is older than most of the buildings. Telling it, in the student paper's words, is "practically a rite of passage."
