St. Anselm College

The Benedictines at Saint Anselm College made a video about their own haunted dorm. A monk fell from a fourth-floor window of Alumni Hall.

Saint Anselm College has a ghost story that the school itself will happily tell you, which is unusual. The Benedictine college in Goffstown even produced a video about Alumni Hall's haunting, narrated with dry amusement by monks who have been hearing students tell this story for generations.

The legend is simple. A monk fell, or jumped, from a fourth-floor window of Alumni Hall sometime in the building's early decades. Students say his ghost paces the upper floors, opens doors that should be closed, and shuffles through the hallways at night.

The building is worth the story. Alumni Hall went up between 1891 and 1892, built by the Benedictine monks and local contractors, and for decades it held just about everything: monk dormitories on the second floor, students on the third and fourth, classrooms and a library and a cafeteria on the lower levels. The fourth floor windows overlook a long drop to the stone paths below. It is easy to see why the story attached itself here and not to one of the newer buildings.

Did a monk actually die that way? The college has been Benedictine since 1889, and a community of brothers has lived on the hill continuously since then. If it happened, the record is quiet about it. The story has the shape of a legend polished by a century of retellings, which is different from saying it is invented. Places that have held the same community for 130 years tend to accumulate these stories for a reason.

Modern reports are the usual campus material. Footsteps in the empty upper corridors after midnight. Doors that rattle in their frames when no draft is moving. Gusts of cold air in rooms with windows shut. One faculty member moving bookshelves on the fourth floor late at night realized she was being taken for the ghost by whoever was downstairs wondering what the racket was. The college includes that anecdote in its own telling, which is the right kind of self-aware.

The more interesting thread is how the legend functions on a Benedictine campus. The monks are here, they live in the abbey, and they celebrate the liturgy every day. Whatever happened in Alumni Hall, if anything happened, is held inside a living religious community that has strong views about death, grief, and what the dead are doing. A fallen monk is not a neutral ghost. In Benedictine theology he is a soul whose story is being written.

Students pass the Alumni Hall legend down at orientation and during late-night study sessions, the way college ghost stories always get passed down. The difference here is that the people supposedly being haunted are the same people who would be praying for the monk in question. That changes the texture of the story. It is not just a campus spook. It is a 130-year-old community carrying one of its own, a fourth-floor window looking down on the same stone path it looked down on in 1892.