Every student at Longwood has heard by now about how haunted our campus is. Stories about spirits and ghosts spread like wildfire, especially around this time of year. The first story I heard was move-in day my freshman year when my R.A. told me about how the fourth floor of Moss is haunted, and the elevator will mysteriously stop on that floor. To be fair, I did experience the elevator stopping on the fourth, but I couldn’t say if that was really a ghost or just someone
messing with residents.
I decided to do a deep dive on some of the stories of the ghosts. How many of these
legends had actual information to back them up? What’s been spun in the stories by the
generations of students passing these tales down to the next?
I did some research on the elevator story. The story I’d originally heard was that a year
after Moss opened up, a freshman boy had a mysterious medical emergency and sadly passed
in the elevator.
Supposedly he had been discovered when the elevator he was in stopped on theourth floor and opened up, and that was why he haunted the floor (and the elevator).
After some digging, I could only find one story online related to Longwood elevators. Supposedly, it
actually happened in Johns hall, and had absolutely nothing to do with the fourth floor.
According to the legend, a young boy was riding his bike in Johns when he fell into the elevator
shaft and passed away. Supposedly he haunts mainly the tenth floor, but legend has it if you
take the elevator directly from the tenth floor to the basement, you’ll see a little boy riding his
bike around the basement.
One of the other stories I came across is the bell story. For those who didn’t know, when Longwood was an all-girls college students were dependent upon the bell ringing to know things like when to go to class, their dorms, and when it was time to get food. One year, the school was getting a new bell. The administration had taken too long to pick it up from the train station,
so a group of girls decided to grab a wagon and haul it to campus themselves.
During their trek back to main campus they hit some kind of obstacle, and the thousand pound bell fell onto one of the girls, causing her to pass immediately on impact. Supposedly the bell is now in the
rotunda building, and every so often it will skip a beat, reminding everyone of what that student went through.
A more popular legend is about the haunting of the Stevens building. In 1945 professor
Edith Stevens was doing an experiment with her students when the experiment went very
wrong. The experiment caught on fire, and the building began to as well. In order to save the
building and her students, professor Stevens carried the experiment out onto the lawn where she passed away from her injuries. Now, professor Stevens had been good friends with a woman named Mrs. Wheeler (also who the Wheeler building was named after).
When Mrs. Wheeler died, her students had a stone placed in her honor. According to the tale, if Mr.
Wheelers stone is not kept in good condition, flames will quickly burst in the Stevens building. If
professor Stevens is content, a light will appear in the attic of Stevens. Nobody has access to
the attic, so it really is a phenomenon.