Hollins University

Hollins is the college that kept its ghosts — the 1842 seminary on the old Botetourt Springs resort that became Virginia's first chartered women's college in 1852, and which the students have been reporting haunted for as long as there's been a student paper to report it in. The correspondence about strange dormitory occurrences goes back to the 1850s; the ghosts are part of the institutional record.

The ghosts have names and buildings — Presser Hall's piano student in three versions (each more dramatic, all involving the professor), the Little Theatre's Eliza who returns lost items, the Swannanoa nurse who checks your temperature at night, Tinker's Runner. The stories are old enough to be studied — a Hollins student's thesis traced them back through the archives and found they've been told continuously since the college began.

The school's survival is the story the ghosts are set against — Charles Cocke took over a failing co-ed seminary in 1846, made it a women's college when women couldn't get degrees, and kept it alive through the Civil War and epidemics and the financial crises that killed the other women's colleges. The ghosts of the resort and the seminary and the war years accumulated in the buildings that Cocke saved.

Hollins is the archive's haunted-campus file — the 1842 women's college on the old springs resort, the ghosts documented since the 1850s, and the buildings that have been occupied continuously through every telling of the stories.