In Brief
Potter Hall at Western Kentucky University has a ghost the staff have named three times in fifty years. She leaves pennies on office desks, answers alarms on command, and traces back to a student who died in basement room 7 in 1979.
The Full Story
Potter Hall at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, has a ghost the people who work there have named three separate times. In the late 1970s the students called her Casperella. In the 1980s, on a Ouija board, she gave the name Allison. The staff who share the building with her now call her Penny, because she leaves pennies on their desks.
The building went up in 1921 as a women's dormitory and housed students for more than seventy years before it was turned into offices in 1994. Penny works the ground floor, where the Office of Admissions sits now. People there report coins dropping into a vending machine that isn't running, and find pennies in offices they've just left empty. Across the decades she's also been credited with rattling drawers, locking and unlocking doors, whispers, and laughter. The director of Student Financial Assistance says he was alone in the building once when a woman's voice told him to go, with no motion sensor tripped. "She gets a little antsy," he said, "and I think wants the building to herself."
The story traces back to a basement room. On April 21, 1979, a student named Theresa Watkins, who lived in basement room 7, hanged herself from the steam pipes with a belt. The date and the room come from funeral records cited in a 1997 campus newspaper article, well-attested as campus lore if not independently confirmed. In the late-1970s Ouija sessions, the spirit gave a self-description that's been repeated nearly word for word ever since: an unhappy spirit who occasionally entertained herself by pestering the residents.
The school doesn't hide any of it. WKU is one of the rare American campuses that publishes its own ghost stories on an official university page, and in 2012 the Syfy series Ghost Hunters filmed a full episode here. In Potter Hall, the investigators said they got an alarm to switch on and off on command and in answer to direct questions, and concluded the spirit was a young woman.
A retired administrator who has spent years collecting these stories from witnesses, from people who lived and worked in the building across decades, describes standing in Potter Hall with a campus police officer, watching a door rattle in an empty room. "We stood there with a flashlight shining on it," she said, "and saw it rattle again, like someone was on the other side moving it."
Casperella, then Allison, then Penny. Same dorm, same restless presence, a new name for each generation that has to share the building with her.
