South Caroliniana Library

The ghost of former USC President J. Rion McKissick, the only person buried on campus, is blamed for footsteps in the stacks, objects moving on their own, and emergency call boxes activating near his grave. The 1840 building, designed by Robert Mills, was the first freestanding college library in the United States.

The emergency call boxes near J. Rion McKissick's grave go off throughout the week. Campus police respond. No one is there. Facilities has checked the equipment multiple times. Nothing is ever wrong with the boxes.

McKissick is the only person buried on the University of South Carolina campus, interred just to the left of the South Caroliniana Library's front doors. He died suddenly in 1944 while serving as university president, and his coffin lay in state in the lobby of the museum that now bears his name. Students and staff have been blaming him for strange occurrences ever since.

Mark D. Smith, collections manager at McKissick Museum, has worked in the building since the 1980s. He heard footsteps in the stack area one night while studying for his master's degree, walked down to investigate, and found nobody. "I go, 'Oh, let's see who it is.' I walk down the steps, and there's nobody there," Smith recalled. Over the years, he's experienced knocking sounds, objects getting moved, and labels falling off displays without explanation. "When some little strange things happen, we always say J. Rion McKissick did it," Smith said, calling him a "friendly ghost."

The library where McKissick's ghost supposedly wanders is worth knowing about on its own. Built in 1840, it was the first freestanding college library in the United States, predating Harvard's by a year, Yale's by six, and Princeton's by thirty-three. Robert Mills designed it, the same architect behind the Washington Monument. Mills originally envisioned something grander: a building raised on a pedestal where you'd enter the Horseshoe through a Roman triumphal arch eighteen feet high. Budget won. The final cost came in at nearly $24,000, and what was built was elegant but restrained, with four white columns and a Reading Room modeled after the room that housed Thomas Jefferson's personal library in the second Library of Congress.

The building served as USC's main library for a full century before being rededicated in 1940 as a repository for South Carolina historical materials. That collection has grown into a major archive of state history, holding manuscripts, photographs, maps, and rare books that trace South Carolina from the colonial era forward.

McKissick was one of USC's most popular presidents. He served from 1936 until his death eight years later, and his devotion to the university and its collections was well known around campus. The legend goes that when the library lights are on late at night, it means McKissick is in there, going through the books the way he did when he was alive. Officer Eric Grabski, who responded to the call box activations near the grave, noted that the malfunctions were frequent and completely unexplained.

The University Ambassadors run annual ghost tours every October that start at McKissick Museum and wind through the Horseshoe, covering not just the library but also Longstreet Theatre, which served as a Civil War hospital and morgue. Students in the early 1970s claimed to have seen a figure they called "Mr. Third Eye" near the theater, who allegedly charged at them with a lead pipe through the underground service tunnels. There's also the legend of Ms. Black, a Confederate nurse who poisoned occupying Union soldiers with tainted wine during the Civil War and then drank it herself. Her ghost is said to wander the Horseshoe offering glasses of wine to people she encounters.

But the library ghost has the best pedigree. A beloved president, a campus burial, a building designed by America's first federal architect, and decades of staff quietly attributing every unexplained footstep and relocated coffee cup to the same man. McKissick ran this university for eight years. If Smith and the other staff are right, he's been looking after it for eighty more.