Western Kentucky University

WKU sits on a limestone cave network with 25 haunted buildings. Theresa Watkins died in Potter Hall in 1979; the basement hasn't been quiet.

On April 21, 1979, a student named Theresa Watkins hanged herself from the steam pipes in the basement of Potter Hall at Western Kentucky University. Her room was Room 7. Her name, her dorm, her date of death, and the funeral records all match. WKU doesn't list her in the campus ghost folklore on their official site, but Potter Hall residents have been explaining the strangeness of that building to each other for forty-five years.

Western Kentucky is built on a network of limestone caves. The main campus sits on a hilltop in Bowling Green everyone still calls the Hill, and by campus count around 25 buildings on that hill have some kind of ghost attached to them. The university publishes its ghost stories on an official page, which is unusual, and hosted a Syfy Ghost Hunters episode in November 2012 called "Higher Dead-ucation." If there's an American college that has made its peace with haunted, it's this one.

The oldest story belongs to Van Meter Hall, an auditorium built between 1909 and 1911. During construction, a worker fell from scaffolding to the stage floor and died. One common version adds that he fell through a skylight after being distracted by the sight of one of the first airplanes to land in Warren County. His bloodstain, the story goes, still bleeds back through the floor no matter how many times the stage is refinished. Stranger than the falling worker is the underground hermit. The caves under the Hill are real, and according to campus folklore a hermit lives in them and enters Van Meter through tunnels with a blue lantern. People still see the lantern moving through the building after hours. The voices of his wife and daughter are said to sing in the auditorium when it is otherwise empty.

Potter Hall has more than one name for the same ghost. In the late 1970s the residents called her Casperella. In Ouija sessions in the 1980s, she spelled her name as Allison. She described herself through the board as "an unhappy spirit who occasionally entertained herself by pestering the residents," which is the most specific thing a dorm ghost has probably ever said about itself. Drawers rattle. Doors lock and unlock. Objects move. Everyone who has lived in the basement, where Theresa Watkins died, has heard something. A second Potter Hall ghost, nicknamed Penny, works the ground floor where the Office of Admissions now sits, and leaves small piles of pennies on desks.

McLean Hall is a co-ed dorm named for Mattie McLean, who served for decades as secretary to WKU president Henry Hardin Cherry. Students have heard footsteps where nobody is walking. The sound of coins dropping into a vending machine that nobody is using. One night three students using a Ouija board in a McLean room looked up and saw a woman made of three different shades of gray, lighter at her face and her outfit and darker at her hair, standing in the room with them.

The school runs the Hilltop History and Haunts Tour each October, which leaves from the Amphitheater and Colonnade and stops at McLean, Schneider Hall, Rodes-Harlin, the Kentucky Building, Van Meter, and Potter. For a state school without a particularly gothic history, that's a lot of stops on one campus. The buildings are stone, the caves are under the stone, and whatever the dead left on the Hill is still there in the basement of Van Meter and on the third floor of McLean.