5 of the World's Most Haunted Universities

Spaces that once bore witness to terrible acts of violence can exude an uncanny malaise – a sense that something’s not quite right… Such is the case of Gettysburg College, America’s most haunted college and also the site of the bloody Battle of Gettysburg.

As Jon, a 2004 graduate of the college, comments in the The Gettysburgian, “Everyone here has their own ghost story […] Students or teachers, they have some kind of experience with a ghost or weird occurrence like that.”

The spectral energies at the site are perhaps unsurprising, given its history as a war hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg, part of the American Civil War. Famous ghosts who continue to stalk the passages of Penn Hall include the armed lone sentinel and the ‘blue boy’, an orphan tragically frozen to death.

While the University of Toronto is widely known for its strong academic reputation, it’s also another of the most haunted universities around – at least according to its student publication, the UofT Magazine.

Christie Mansion, a building on the university campus, was apparently the site of an illicit love affair and untimely death, circa 1870. The mansion’s owner, Robert Christie, was a rich businessman who kept his mistress hidden in a secret chamber behind his library: the infamous room 29.

After much despair, Christie’s mistress hung herself from the rafters with her bedsheets. The subject of many books, including John Robert Colombo’s ghost map of the Canadian city titled Haunted Toronto, the poor captive’s fate continues to inspire tales of hauntings and mysteriously locked doors…

Based in the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University is one of the oldest colleges in the country. Once run by Jesuit priests, the university was converted into a military camp at the time of the Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

Reports of unnatural phenomena include nocturnal sightings of mythical creatures resting by the mango tree at the high school oval and mysterious apparitions of Japanese soldiers smoking rolled up cigarettes in the Cervini Dormitory.

The University of Alabama became a military academy in 1860 to train Confederate soldiers during the American Civil War. A few buildings dating back from the period have survived, and harbor, according to some, much paranormal activity.

Alleged ghosts of the University of Alabama include a tall confederate soldier lurking by the Roundhouse, or ‘Jason’s Shrine’, which was used as a cadet guardhouse during the war.

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