Miami University

Helen Peabody ran the Western Female Seminary in Oxford for thirty-three years — from 1855 to 1888 — and she did not care for the boys from Miami University who kept wandering over to bother her students. 'Miami men are always troublesome,' she said, more than once, and she meant it. When she died, the legend formed almost immediately: Miss Peabody still patrols Peabody Hall, protecting the female residents and haunting the men, and generations of male freshmen have tested the rule and reported the results.

Miami's other ghost is a disappearance. Ronald Tammen was a sophomore living in Fisher Hall in April 1953 when he walked out of his dorm room one night — leaving his coat, his car, his money, and the lights on — and was never seen again. It is one of the most famous unsolved missing-person cases in Ohio history; theories range from amnesia to a CIA recruitment gone wrong, and women have reported seeing a man matching his description near campus decades later. The dorm is a conference center now; the mystery is still open.

The university leans into it — the 'Ghosts and Gears' bike tour rides a four-mile loop through the haunted campus every Halloween: Peabody Hall, the Pines sanatorium, Reid Hall's bloody handprint, the ghost biker, Kumler Chapel. A student-written play called 'Echoes of Miami' staged the legends as theater. The lore is codified enough that the school itself teaches it — Helen Peabody, who spent her life keeping the sexes apart, is now the most famous person on a coeducational campus.