Horses galloping through the Hollow. Radios turning on for no reason. Strange shuffling sounds sending shivers down students’ spines.

Such are the ghostly tales told by former residents of Myers Hall throughout the ages. Even today, admission tour guides recount the story of the Myers Hall horse, a horse that some say still haunts its Hollow and the hall.

Published accounts of the Myers’ horse legend differ, however. As with most legends, this one is fun to explore but difficult to document.

According to a 1977 edition of the Torch, for example, adventurous students led a horse to the cupola in 1863, not knowing that the horse would refuse the trip down. So the students looked for another alternative.

The Torch reports that “popular belief suggests that it was lowered on a platform,” but the Jan./Feb. 1968 Alumnus records that it was 1920 when the horse was led into the cupola, only to be “brought down in the form of salami.”

Then there is the account of the sickly Confederate general during the Civil War, who wanted to see his trusty equine friend before he died.

Because the general was too sick to be moved from Myers’ fifth floor, the horse was led up to him. Unable to get back down, the horse was eventually shot.

Some say that an apparition of the horse galloping late at night across the Myers Hollow can still be seen. Ken Dickerson, retired director of special projects and a Wittenberg historian, disagrees.

“It’s pure fabrication,” he said. “Myers Hall never was used as a hospital during the Civil War (1861-1865); it was used as a hospital during World War I.”

Another Myers Hall ghost story appears in a 1967 Torch. Reporter Bill Mann wrote that residents in room 403 reported being startled awake on two occasions after the radio suddenly blared.

Further investigation suggested that the only way such an incident could have occurred was if someone manually turned the switch, but both times the door to the room was apparently locked.

Mann also wrote about the experience of Myers’ roommates Kurt Heeps, ’70, and Clifford Bordner, ’71. Heeps was reportedly awakened after a nightmare at which point he felt the “presence of an uninvited guest.”

He pulled his covers up close to his head and, lying perfectly still, he claimed to have broken into a cold sweat.

Seconds later the blankets were removed from his body and placed at the foot of his bed by “something that was not visible to his eyes.” He also claimed to have heard a strange shuffling noise on the floor.

His roommate, Bordner, suddenly began whimpering in the dark and shivering — unable to speak or move his body as if he were paralyzed by some “supernatural force.”

Again, Heeps and Bordner's door was apparently locked.

Such reported ghostly happenings sparked a group of student believers led by Don Jones, ’71, to speak with the dean, but the dean refused to acknowledge any spirits in Myers Hall or on campus.

About a year after Mann wrote his article that created a ghost controversy on the Wittenberg campus, World War I veteran and 1929 graduate Willis V. Pond from Urbana, Ohio, added a new spin to the ghostly tales:

“Yes,” he wrote, "there are ghosts in Myers Hall; but they are friendly ghosts. Go up there some moonlit night and talk with them. They are lonely.” He also wrote:

“If you find your way up to the attic [of Myers Hall] you just might discover the source of that mysterious, lovely music.

It may be coming from an old phonograph, which could still be there beside a little window just east of the south portico. On that window sill you might even find some initials, such as ‘Sgt. WVP.’”

He continued: “In that long ago autumn of 1918, Myers Hall was a military barracks, and when the flu struck army cantonments, it did not spare Myers Hall.

I know there must be the echoed calls, whisperings, and murmured names like Hayes, Bailey, Colbert, Kunes, Altic, Leitz, Snyder, Moan, Maxwell, Knisley, Etter, Dorst, Kirby, Hallenleck, Fisher, Stackhouse, Wentz, Kyle and on and on; boys who were marked for the great allied offensive to come in the spring of 1919. It never came; but, the long-forgotten ghosts still wait.”

Dickerson notes that Myers Hall did serve as a hospital during World War I, which mainly treated the soldiers plagued by the Spanish Flu. Most cases resulted in death, according to Dickerson.

Rosemary Ellen Guiley in The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, even suggests that Earthbound spirits are most often linked to war casualties.

She claims that the spirit supposedly does not know that he or she has died, or it has unfinished business on Earth.

Although there is no proof that ghosts still haunt the halls of Myers or the Hollow behind it, the various stories remain popular among students and alumni.

— Justin B. Dilley, ’01
— Illustration by Emily Hillard, ’00