Transylvania University - Old Morrison

Rafinesque cursed Transylvania in 1826. In 1969 Old Morrison burned, but his crypt survived, and firefighters saw a man standing inside it.

When Old Morrison burned on the night of January 27, 1969, the fire was so intense that only the Greek Revival exterior walls were left standing by morning. The interior collapsed. The roof was gone. The crypt of Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, set into a wall on the ground floor, was untouched. Firefighters working the scene said they watched a man standing in the doorway of the crypt with flames moving around him, and nobody was in the building.

Rafinesque had been dead for 129 years by then, and he had cursed the place in 1826. In three sentences, that covers roughly the whole Transylvania story.

Transylvania University was founded in 1780 in Lexington, Kentucky, the first university west of the Alleghenies. It educated Henry Clay, Jefferson Davis, and Stephen F. Austin. In its early decades it was considered one of the best schools in the country, which is how it ended up hiring a Constantinople-born polyglot naturalist to teach botany, Italian, and French. Rafinesque was brilliant and very strange. He named thousands of new plant species and hundreds of animals during his seven years at Transy, including the big-eared bat that still bears his name. He also skipped classes, insulted colleagues, and, according to campus gossip, had an affair with the wife of university president Horace Holley.

Holley fired him in the spring of 1826. On his way out, Rafinesque stopped in the doorway of the building where the current Old Morrison now stands and laid a curse on the school. He later wrote in his own memoirs, more dryly: "I took lodgings in town and carried there all my effects: thus leaving the College with curses on it and Holley." Campus tradition holds that he promised something terrible would hit Transylvania every seven years.

Holley resigned within a year and died of yellow fever shortly after. The main campus building burned. Cholera and influenza tore through the student body. The original Transylvania hall burned to the ground, and its replacement, Old Morrison, designed by Gideon Shryock and completed in 1834, burned on that January night in 1969. Exterior walls survived. Rafinesque's tomb survived.

There's a catch that makes the whole thing stranger. In 1924 the university had Rafinesque's remains exhumed from a pauper's grave in Philadelphia and reinterred in the crypt inside Old Morrison. A research project decades later concluded the bones they dug up probably belonged to a woman named Mary Passimore, which means whatever's in the crypt might not be Rafinesque at all, and whatever firefighters saw in the doorway in 1969 might not have been Rafinesque either.

In 1961, a Transylvania student named Betty Gail Brown was found strangled in her car parked in front of Old Morrison. The case has never been solved. People crossing the quad at night sometimes report a woman crying near the building.

The university has fully embraced the whole business. The campus cafe is called the Rafskeller. The unofficial mascot is Raf. Every October the school holds Raf Week, which wraps up with a raffle to determine which student gets to spend Halloween night sleeping in the tomb. The plaque on the crypt door names Constantine Samuel Rafinesque. The bones behind it may belong to Mary Passimore. Transylvania sells Halloween tickets to sleep next to both of them.