America’s Most Haunted Campus

Ghost stories were very popular with college students at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. They still are today. As a college president, I sometimes told ghost stories to students on Halloween. One student wrote, “The next time that the darkness closes in, the wind blows through the trees, rustling the crisp dry leaves, and the owls come out, screeching into the clear and starry night and soaring through the darkness to grab its prey from under the leaves, think twice about the spirited haunting that seems to frequent our stately campus.” As the tales of campus hauntings grew, we concluded that our campus surely was America’s most haunted campus. I assured the students that these were only stories. It was not the ghosts that aroused their fears; it was their fears that aroused the ghosts.

About the Author

Detail from artist Dean L. Pauls official portrait of Pres. William A. Kinnison, Wittenberg University archives. William A. Kinnison was the eleventh president of Wittenberg University, serving from 1974 to 1995. He grew up six blocks north of the campus in Springfield, Ohio, and graduated from the school in 1954. After military service at the US Army Language School at Monterey, California, and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and the Ohio State University, he served Wittenberg for thirty-eight years in the admissions office as vice president and as president. He married Lenore Morris, class of 1959. They have three children and ten grandchildren and live just over a mile north of the campus in retirement. He has written extensively about higher education and Wittenberg. Publications include a centennial history of the Ohio State University, a history of Springfield and Clark County, Ohio, and a two-volume history of Wittenberg.

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