Yes. Well, that may be overstating things a bit. There are ghost stories on campus, but for a place as old as Dartmouth, they are rather few and far between.
The oldest story known today dates from the 19th century, when several students supposedly conjured a demon on the third floor of Dartmouth Hall. Afterward a ghost was seen there occasionally, but there have been no contemporary sightings, so perhaps the spirit was set free when the original Dartmouth Hall burned in 1904.
Stories of ghosts in Baker Library turn up now and again. In the 1940’s, the Library Bulletin reported that an employee was surprised on the third floor of the stacks by a specter dressed in gabardine. In 2002, a student reported a shelf of books on the seventh floor disappeared practically before his eyes. And there are rumors that the room below the spire is prone to eerie noises.
Panarchy is an undergraduate society whose house, a grand Greek Revival building at 9 School Street, is said to be haunted. At the turn of the century it was owned by a physician who was thought to have hid his schizophrenic daughter in the attic, where she committed suicide. Some students have reported seeing the apparition of a young woman in the attic, others have refused to stay there due to a strange feeling in the room.
9 School Street, Hanover, NH (photo by Panarchy)
Theta Delta Chi fraternity’s house on West Wheelock Street has its share of ghost stories. Laundry moves of its own accord, and refrigerator contents are unaccountably scattered now and then. Students have seen doors and rooms in the basement that disappear and gatherings of men in antique clothing. Some link these odd occurrences to the 1934 tragedy of nine young men who died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning at Theta Chi House on North Main Street. That house was leveled in 1940; perhaps the ghosts moved south a few blocks?
Northern New England folklorist Joe Citro documented these stories and a few others in this 2004 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article (.7 MB, PDF).
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