Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses (review)

This interesting book moves beyond previous book publications on the same topic by being not only an anthology of ghost story texts but also a reasoned discussion of what makes the genre such a widespread and vital part of collegiate culture. Many of the narratives presented are firsthand accounts of events that the tellers present as strong evidence for the paranormal, and Tucker prudently leaves a door cracked on the possibility that they may well be accurate accounts of genuinely mysterious phenomena. However, the main intent of her discussion is to define motifs and patterns that are present in campus legends from many geographical locations. These, she suggests, are common to many performances because they encode stages in the psychological development of young people that occurs as part of their move from adolescence to early adulthood.

Tucker served for many years as a “Faculty Master,” or resident faculty adviser, in one of the dormitories at Binghamton University, making her analysis especially perceptive in identifying the ways in which ghostly phenomena are embedded in the context of everyday college life. She includes not only verbal texts from archival sources, but also materials distributed in computer-mediated form through websites, e-mail, and, most interestingly, in “texted” versions sent, a line or phrase at a time, through AOL’s Instant Messenger. She is careful to provide necessary context, both by noting the wider distribution of motifs and tale types in noncollegiate folklore and also by filling out passing emic references to student culture that would be unfamiliar to outsiders.

Most of the specific narratives presented are not migratory in nature but are very specific to a particular campus or even building. Often they are unique expressions of personal experiences, supported with photographic evidence. Nevertheless, Tucker shows, they represent narrative structural patterns that are widely distributed. When adolescents arrive at college, she argues, they enter a cultural environment in which these patterns already exist. Rather than contacting stories, in the traditional folkloristic perspective, they instead observe a process of storytelling, as modeled by the older students they meet. The patterns exemplified by these (usually unique) narratives may not be visibly apparent to the new students, but they provide a platform through which new stories “come to the surface with subtle variations” (97).

The implicit patterns, not surprisingly, inspire stories that are subversive in more than one way. Most obviously, they suggest realms of physical experience—sights, sounds, feelings, and smells—that cannot be explained through science or common sense. More fundamentally, she suggests, following Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2004), that these narratives pass on “untold stories” that question accepted accounts of the history of the college or of the experiences of students. An especially interesting chapter discusses the common presence of Native American spirits in college legends (particularly the common belief that a “haunted” building was erected on an “Indian burial ground”). Tucker surveys the sad and little-known role historically played by colleges in the pacification of tribal nations and their often insensitive role in excavating sacred mounds, and she reasonably suggests that such narratives prompt their audiences to “question mainstream history” (181) in much the same way that revisionist historians are doing in the academic works they are reading (see Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, 2004). Similarly, common ghost stories that feature the screaming revenants of female rape/murder victims, Tucker suggests, embody the actual experiences of women, whose fates demand that “current students understand what happened to [them]” (135).

It is instructive to note that surveys show that the college experience seems to make students more likely to believe in the reality of ghosts than to be skeptical, and Tucker is not surprised by this trend. In this regard, she is similar to Andrew Greeley, who found a similar statistical link between higher education and belief in the paranormal three decades ago; he in fact suggested that the latter might...