Hampden-Sydney College is a small all male liberal arts
college steeped in history and tradition. It was founded
in 1776 and is nestled away outside of the rural town of
Farmville, Virginia.
The school grounds are filled with
old brick dorms and school buildings that are surrounded by
the thick woods commonly found in central Virginia. I
graduated from Hampden-Sydney in 1997, and in my four years
there heard quite a few ghost stories based on the school’s
history. What follows is my only fist hand experience with
the bizarre events that have been reported there for over
200 years.
In late Fall of my senior year I was stuck on campus
over a weekend, working on a paper due first thing Monday
morning. The grounds were quiet, as there were no big
events planned and most of the students had headed off to
other Virginia colleges. Around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday
evening I quit working and headed out to see if any friends
had stayed on campus. Hampden-Sydney has a small “walking
campus” with black-topped trails running between all of the
buildings. Within 10 minutes I’d caught up with a few
friends who were bored and planning to walk down to an
abandoned school building just outside of campus. With
nothing better to do and after having stared at a computer
for most of the day, I agreed to go.
The building to which we headed was an old four bedroom
house built in the mid 1800’s that had only been abandoned
within the last ten years or so. The house had served
various uses for the college over the years and was listed
in the national registry of historical buildings. The
college has a large endowment and I found it strange that
such a historical building had been boarded up and left to
rot. We walked through the woods and arrived at the house
just after 12:30 a.m.
The house was set about a quarter mile off from the main
campus. The windows and doors had been boarded up, but a
little prying to some of the plywood over a downstairs
window allowed us to slip indoors. It was immediately
obvious that no one had been inside for a very long time.
We crawled into what had been a living room with a few beat
down pieces of furniture and dust covering everything.
Having only one flashlight held by my friend, our
exploration of the house was a group activity. We walked
around the foyer and living room, making a good bit of
noise on the old wood flooring. Everything about the house
had the same abandoned appearance. After about five
minutes, we decided to go upstairs and look for evidence of
previous occupants.
The stairs up were even creakier than the first level
floorboards. We reached the top of the stairs and walked
into the first bedroom on the right. The second story
windows were not boarded up and so the room was partially
lit from moonlight. My friend turned off the flashlight
and we were quietly poking around when we heard footsteps
downstairs. We each froze and listened to the floorboards
as they creaked under someone’s weight below. Despite
being in this eerie old house, I remember being less scared
about a ghost and more scarred that campus security was
about to catch us. The college had made it very clear that
any trespass in the building would be severely punished.
The noise from downstairs was quiet momentarily and then we
heard the stairs up to us begin to creak. The old wood
made a distinctive sound and we could clearly hear one
person slowly approaching step by step. I stood there
hardly breathing with a sinking feeling from my throat to
stomach. I didn’t know what to think, other than a
security guard probably would have called out if he
suspected we were in the house. After the creaking reached
the top of the stairs all noises stopped. We, of course,
stood perfectly still. Not even looking at each other, but
standing in the exact position we were in when we first
heard the noise down stairs.
Seconds and then minutes went by, but still no noise since
the creaking reached the top of the stairs. I began to
wonder if the noises had been in my head, but the other two
guys were also frozen in silence and we hadn’t said a word
to each other. After a long few minutes, we each walked to
the doorway and at the top of the stairs. No one. Walking
around the top of the stairs we realized there was no
direction anyone could walk without making some noise.
Something had come to the top of the stairs a disappeared.
There was no real conversation at this point. The sinking
feeling in my stomach had turned to a sharp chill and
adrenaline pulsed through my body as I quietly
whispered “We need to leave!” Two serious nods were the
only response, but no one wanted to walk down into the dark
from where the noise had originated. I walked along the
second floor hallway and found a narrow set of stairs
leading to the back of the house. It seemed like a better
idea to go down those stairs, so I headed down first with
the flashlight.
The narrow back stairway spiraled and as I reached the
halfway mark a sharp “Crack!” rang out from below. The
claustrophobia of being stuck in that awful stairway with
who know what at the bottom and two guys blocking my path
to the top almost paralyzed me with fear. I simply turned
and pointed back up. There really was no need to have done
so, as we scrambled to the top.
Getting out of the house was the only thought pulsing
through my head. We went back to the main staircase and
quickly descended with no interruption. At the bottom we
be-lined for window from which we’d entered and crawled out
one at a time.
Climbing out of the window head first, falling onto the
grass and breathing the cool night air was an enormous
release. But there was one final surprise for the night,
which has always been the strangest part for me. Standing
in front of us - barefoot, in boxer shorts and a bathrobe -
was a student whom I recognized, but whose name I couldn’t
place. As the last guy crawled from the window he just
stared at us and we stared back.
Of course our first question we asked was “Did you just go
in that house?” He looked at us with almost no expression
on his face and said “No. There’s no way I’d go in that
house.” One of my friends who knew him as an acquaintance
asked him what he was doing out at 1:00 am on a cold night
barefoot and in his bathrobe. His response gives me chills
even as I write this. He told us in a very calm voice that
he had been sound asleep in his bed all the way on the
other side of campus. He had awoken knowing that someone
was in this house and that they needed to get out. He
couldn’t really explain it. It wasn’t a dream as much as
he just woke up and knew that he had to come over
immediately.
The entire situation was overwhelming and we all quickly
parted ways down separate paths. The house itself was
severely damaged in a fire less than two months later. The
county fire department listed the fire as electrical, which
is absurd because there couldn’t have been electricity
running to the house. In a controversial move the college
bulldozed the remains of the building to make room for two
new dorms. I would love to know the history of the
building as it provided my only brush with the
paranormal.
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