Washington Hall

Phantom horns and footsteps started in Washington Hall in 1921, a year after George Gipp died. In 1926 a student saw Gipp charge in on a white horse.

In 1926, an international student at Notre Dame named Pio Montenegro told the school paper he had seen George Gipp's ghost charge into Washington Hall on a white horse. That is a specific claim. It is also the moment college football's most famous ghost story became attached to a building, and Washington Hall has carried the reputation ever since.

Gipp was Notre Dame's first All-American, a versatile halfback recruited by Knute Rockne who became one of the most dominant players of his generation. He died on December 14, 1920, at St. Joseph Hospital in South Bend, at age twenty-five, of pneumonia and strep throat. There were no antibiotics. Rockne later gave a 1928 halftime speech citing a deathbed request from Gipp, "Win just one for the Gipper," that became one of the most famous lines in American sports. Historians since have found no contemporaneous record that Gipp ever said it, or that anyone in his lifetime even called him "the Gipper."

The other famous Gipp legend, that he died because he got locked out of Washington Hall after a team celebration and slept on the cold stone steps, also doesn't check out. Notre Dame Magazine has looked hard at it and found no supporting evidence. Gipp lived primarily at the Oliver Hotel downtown during his college years, partially supported by gambling winnings, and was already sick with what was initially diagnosed as tonsillitis before any late-night lock-out could have mattered. The lock-out story is myth, not record.

The ghost story, though, predates Gipp being named as the ghost. It started in 1921, the year after he died. Scholastic magazine and the Dome yearbook both ran accounts of strange activity in Washington Hall: brass instruments playing at night with no musicians, footsteps in empty corridors, papers sliding under doors with no one in the hall. A 1921 piece mentioned "an eerie horn blow almost every night at midnight." Brother Maurilius, a brother at the university, was so rattled he demanded an exorcism of the whole building. Film, Television and Theatre emeritus professor Mark C. Pilkinton documented all of this in a book on Washington Hall's history.

So the pattern is: the building starts doing something weird in 1921. Students and staff report phantom horns and footsteps. The phenomena stay anonymous for five years. Then Pio Montenegro sees a horse. After that, every later sighting gets attached to Gipp, and the ghost has a name and a face and a jersey number forever.

The reports never really stopped. Students and performers in Washington Hall still describe phantom footsteps on the stage and in the balcony, horns sounding in empty rooms, stage lights flickering during performances, and the sensation of being watched from the empty seats when rehearsing alone. Notre Dame Magazine also records a second identified ghost in the building: Brother Canute Lardner, who died in the theater in 1946 and is seen by the east-side window on the first floor. Nearly every Notre Dame ghost story loops back to this one building.

Washington Hall went up in 1881 as the university's multipurpose performance venue. Theater productions, concerts, lectures, student shows, all of it. It's still a working venue. That means every few years a fresh cast of students spends hours alone in the house late at night running lines or checking lighting cues, and every few years a handful of them come back with stories that sound almost identical to what someone wrote down in Scholastic a hundred years ago.

The Gipper didn't really die on those steps. He probably never said the line he's most famous for. The ghost in the building may or may not be Gipp. But something about the hall keeps producing the same handful of incidents across a century, and a freshman theater major running a sound check at 11 PM tomorrow is maybe going to add one more to the list.