Shepherdstown, WV

When I first began attending Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, WV, I loved the freedom I had from my parents. As my savings account dwindled down to nothing, I begged my parents for money so that I could come home for the holidays. They told me to get a job, and since my spending habits had much to be desired, I spent all holidays except Christmas in the dorm alone. I lived in Miller Hall, which housed the Resident Life Office on the ground level and only 5 student occupied suites. There were 3 or 4 empty suites, as this building was used to house the overflow of freshman girls.

The building was very old, at least 100 years or so, and was previously a men's fraternity house. It was really creepy and old and strange sounds were always heard and it really had a strange feeling to it.

There was a memorial marker outside for an old fraternity brother that rumor said had committed suicide by hanging himself in the attic. The attic was, of course, blocked off and locked so that none of us could get in there, although some people said that traces of rope were still hanging from the rafter.

One night, I was in my suitemate's bedroom with a friend of mine, Josh. We were stealing and eating my suitemate's oranges. We decided at one point that we were going to dispose of the orange peels outside so that my suitemate wouldn't notice that some of her oranges had been eaten. Apparently we were the only people in the building, there were no lights on and it was silent. After we chucked the orange peels outside, we went back inside and talked or listened to music or something.

Whenever my suitemate came back from returning movies to the video store, she screamed from out in the hallway. Our R.A. came down and Josh and I ran to the door to find that on all the dry erase boards on each door, someone had written, perfectly backwards and upside down, "Die you (expletives), I'm going to kill you". Our R.A. called the police and Josh and I got blamed for it! They took handwriting samples and everything! The thing is, no one was in the building and no one could get in without a key, because the building is locked all the time.

We never heard anyone come in or out nor did we ever hear or see anyone in the hallways while we were having our orange adventure. To my knowledge, the mystery was never solved.

Then a few days later, I started working at a local bakery for spending money. The bakery was very old and the building had been used as a hospital during both the revolutionary and civil wars (Antietam is a short walk away, just across the Potomac River).

On my first day they warned me about "the Colonel", but I just laughed it off. Shortly after I started working there, they changed their hours to 5am - 8pm, so I would be there sometimes until 9 or so cleaning up and counting money.

One night, I was there with the cake decorator finishing up. It was getting late, around 8:30, and I still had homework to do. I decided to come in early the next morning and mop the floor and such, so when I finished my money paperwork, I let the cake decorator out the back door and locked it, then walked through the dark kitchen up to the front room where people ordered and ate. There was a huge window in the front that looked into the kitchen so that people could watch the bakers working during the day. I was the only person there, and since all the light switches were in the back, the bakery was completely dark. I was leaning over, taking my CD's out of the stereo, when out of the corner of my eyes I could see someone standing on the other side of the window. Thinking it was the cake decorator, I looked up and asked "how did you get back in here?", but when I look up I looked right into the eyes of an elderly man with a white mustache in an old military uniform. I couldn't tell which war or what side, because I ran out of that place so fast I didn't even lock the front door. I returned later that night (around 11pm) with a friend to lock the door, and whenever I looked inside, I noticed that the floor had been mopped and all the dishes had been done, but no one had been there all night and I doubt a burglar would clean the place up.

That kind of thing began to happen regularly, I would come in to find someone else had taken out the trash, cleaned the floors, counters, and tables, and did the dishes, even though no one was there.

Things like this happened all the time while I went to school in Shepherdstown, and happened again when I moved there to live after college. I'm surprised that more people don't have ghost stories about Shepherdstown, WV and Harper's Ferry, WV. The two years that I lived there, I experienced more ghostly activity than the rest of my life combined. You could say that Shepherdstown made a believer out of me.