Le Mans Hall - Saint Mary's College

Freshman Julie Galvin saw a greenish profile at 2 a.m. in Le Mans Hall room 274. An alumna later confirmed her roommate had died there.

Freshman Julie Galvin woke up at two in the morning to a profile in the corner of her eye. Greenish tint. A woman's face, just at the edge of vision, visible only if she didn't look directly at it. When she eventually moved her head, the figure was gone. Galvin was living in room 274 on the second floor of Le Mans Hall at Saint Mary's College, in a corridor students call Queen's Court. Later, an alumna in her eighties visited Galvin's floor and told the current residents that 274 was the room where her college roommate had died.

The ghost in Queen's Court has a name. Students call her Mary. The campus story is that Mary was a student who died by suicide in 274 sometime in the twentieth century, and successive generations of 274 residents have described the same things: the profile at the edge of vision, footsteps on the carpet in rooms above Queen's Court, furniture shifted by morning, a drop in temperature near the closet. At a Heritage Week ghost-story session a few years back, one student described what had happened to her in the room and another student from the year before chimed in with nearly the same story. A third confirmation came from a graduate who lived there years earlier.

Le Mans Hall is Saint Mary's College's main building, not the University of Notre Dame's. The two schools share a town and some coursework but they are separate institutions, and Le Mans is the women's college's iconic brick landmark with the bell tower. The hall was dedicated in 1926 and is the second-oldest building on campus. Three alumnae, Shelly Houser, Veronica Kessenich, and Kristen Matha, published a book on the campus hauntings called Quiet Hours in 2002 after interviewing hundreds of current and former staff, faculty, and residents.

The bell tower is the other hotspot. Campus lore says two people died by suicide in it, in the late 1800s separately from the building's 1926 dedication (the suicides occurred in an earlier tower on the site). Students late at night looking up at the tower report seeing a hanging silhouette against the dark. That part is easy to write off as architectural suggestion, except Lisa Schmidt-Goessling, who became residential director for Le Mans Hall in 2004, called campus security multiple times during her first months in the building over unexplained footsteps directly above her quarters. Security never found a source.

The building has layers of individual incidents on top of the two named hauntings. Resident assistant Anastasia Hite closed all three stalls in a bathroom, walked out, and found all three doors wide open a moment later. Toilets flush on their own. Unplugged old telephones ring in rooms nobody has checked into in months. Locked doors swing open. Building services once photographed a small child's handprint on a window that nobody could account for. Security officers describe sudden chills in rooms with no air vents. One RA reported seeing a man run past her and through a solid wall.

Campus lore also carries two deaths that don't turn up in any news archive: a baby said to have died in the building in the 1970s, and a student said to have been found in her room in 1990. Neither has a confirmed public record, but both stay in circulation among residents, and the house log doesn't argue with them.

There's also a gentler presence. Students and staff report a calm, protective feeling near the chapel that they've attributed to the spirit of a nun. The chapel sits above Queen's Court, and the architectural fact that Mary's floor is directly beneath the chapel is a detail students notice and talk about at three in the morning.

Maintenance supervisor Hambling is on record offering the most boring possible explanation: old pipes, old heating, heavy steel doors that swing from pressure changes. A fair amount of what students report probably is that. But old pipes don't explain a handprint on the inside of a sealed window, and they don't explain why successive residents of 274 keep describing the same figure in the same corner at the same hour of the night.

Mary's floor is directly beneath the chapel. Students who've lived in 274 have all noticed. They talk about it at three in the morning when nobody can sleep.