In Brief
Alumni Hall at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire is said to be haunted by a monk who fell from a fourth-floor window. The strange part is who tells the story: the Benedictine community on the hill leans into the legend itself.
The Full Story
The ghost in Alumni Hall at Saint Anselm College, in Goffstown, New Hampshire, is supposed to be a monk. The legend says he fell from a fourth-floor window of the building, or jumped, and never left. His presence is reported in the upper floors, where the high windows look down a long drop to the stone paths below.
The strange part is who keeps telling it. Most haunted colleges would rather you forgot. Saint Anselm made a video, "Is Alumni Hall Haunted?", and handed the narration to one of its own monks, Fr. Stephen Lawson, who walks the building sharing the story the way the college frames it: a legend that has captivated Anselmians for generations. The college's own telling even includes a time the ghost turned out to be a person — a staff member making a racket in an upper office, mistaken for the monk by workers elsewhere in the building.
Alumni Hall was the whole college once. The Benedictine monks and local contractors built it between 1891 and the winter of 1892, to a design by Patrick W. Ford, an Irish-American architect from Boston. For its first decades it held everything. The monks lived on the second floor, the students on the third and fourth, and the classrooms, library, and cafeteria sat below them. The fourth-floor window in the legend looked out from where the students slept.
The building nearly didn't survive its own construction. In February 1892, with the work almost finished, a fire most likely sparked by an open heating stove's grate burned the structure to nothing. The monks had only $55,000 from the state insurance commissioner to work with, so they rebuilt for less than they'd spent the first time, salvaging bricks from the ruin and cutting granite from rocks still visible on the quad. The fire pushed the first semester back a full year. The rebuilt Alumni Hall was dedicated on October 11, 1893.
Students still trade their own versions. The basement, some of them will tell you, is the haunted part, and seniors talk half-jokingly about making friends with the Alumni ghosts before they leave. None of it is anything you could put a date or a name to.
The monastic community on that hill goes back to 1889, when monks came up from Saint Mary's Abbey in Newark, New Jersey, and they have not left it since. Which is the quiet turn in the whole thing. The ghost is supposed to be a monk. And the people said to be haunted by him are the same Benedictine community whose prayers, by their own theology, are offered for the dead.
