Mary Mayo Hall

Mayo Hall was built on the former site of facility row, a collection of buildings intended to house early faculty members of the Michigan Agricultural College. Forensic anthropology graduate student Monica Nares said CAP excavated the area in 2008.

“During the excavation, CAP found early construction materials, including wood plumbing pipes, bricks made of clay sourced from the Red Cedar River and fires on campus,” she said. “This shows the members of the AC population relied on local materials to construct early buildings.”

Mayo is also supposedly the most haunted building on campus, according to forensic anthropology graduate student Rhian Dunn.

The “Red Room” on the fourth floor is marked by a row of darkened windows and is rumored to have been painted bright red and used for Satanic rituals early in the building’s history. Dunn said some say a young woman died in the Red Room and unexplained lights and figures can be seen through its windows. According to Dunn, a Campus Archaeology intern once worked as an RA in the building and that she once heard strange noises while doing laundry.

“She used her key to investigate the noise, assuming students had broken into the room,” Dunn said. “But the room slammed behind her and the light shut off. When she tried to use her key to get back out, it was stuck and wouldn't turn. Finally, it worked a few minutes later and the lights turned back on, but a woman's voice echoed softly through the darkness telling her to go.”

Beaumont Tower

In MSU's early days, the sloping lawns and patches of trees around Beaumont Tower were considered the heart of the campus, according to CAP director Stacey Camp. The university is less centralized now, she said, but the area remains sacred.

“​​Whenever there's a shovel put in the ground in this area of campus, we are here to monitor to make sure they don't hit any artifacts because there are a lot of historic sites,” Camp said.

However, a collection of apparitions still treat the landscape as common ground, anthropology sophomore and Paranormal Society member August Race said. Couples in “old-timey wear” can be spotted strolling the grounds in the morning, and at night a man wearing a stovepipe hat and a tailcoat is said to make an appearance. Race also said some claim to have heard the tower’s organ-like carillon instrument being played late at night.

Arts, cultural management and museum studies masters student Emma Creamer said archaeology conducted west of the Tower uncovered an archaic Native American campsite dating between 3000 and 500 B.C.

MSU Museum 

In the '80s, according to student and Paranormal Society member Mad Curley, a janitor at the MSU Museum described a man they had held a conversation with in the museum. The description of the man matched the museum’s first curator, Dirk Gringhuis, down to his appearance and first name. Gringhuis died in 1974.

Before the museum was built, the first Williams Hall stood on the site. It was the second dorm building on campus, built in 1869 – but it burned down over winter break in 1919 archaeology doctoral student Victoria Schwarz said.

Since the fire occurred over winter break, it did not result in any deaths, but students were not able to retrieve their belongings. Curley said the area is prone to sightings of students of that era searching for their lost belongings.

Saints' Rest

Saints' Rest, the first dorm building on campus, didn’t acquire its name until it, too, burned down during winter break in 1876. In 2015, the MSU Anthropology Department conducted an excavation of the privy – the bathrooms – of the site.

“In those bathrooms, the interesting thing about it is that's typically where you dump anything that you wouldn't want found by someone who's going to get you in trouble,” anthropology graduate student Clara Devota said. “You have 100 guys packed in a dorm, that becomes the dumping ground, so lots of alcohol bottles, lots of pipes for tobacco smoking.”

The excavation also uncovered a ceramic doll’s head that the campus archaeology lab has named Mable.

“For some godforsaken reason they decided to replicate her and model her and she's become the unofficial mascot of campus archaeology,” Devota said. “We don’t really know why in an all-male dorm someone from that dorm would, number one, have a ceramic doll's head, and then see to hide it or throw it away.”

English senior and Paranormal Society co-president Katie Burkhardt said college-aged men dressed in 19th-century clothing are often seen walking in the area, searching for a dormitory that burnt down over a century ago. 

“People also see someone they suspect to be a maintenance worker, since he's wearing overalls and work boots, walking around, perhaps trying to put out the lamp that started the fire in the first place,” Burkhardt said. “Or maybe there was a fatality in the fire after all.”

As for Mable?

“Ever since she was taken back to the campus archaeology lab, things have been happening, objects are found out of their place, some people describe feeling very uncomfortable in her presence,” Burkhardt said. “So her former owner may have thrown her into the privy for a very good reason.”

At a recent investigation of the site, Paranormal Society members set a flashlight on the ground and asked aloud if any spirits wished to communicate with the club. Burkhardt said the light flickered until it was moved again.

Beal’s Lab

Through the gates of the W.J. Beal Botanical Garden lies William James Beal’s nearly 150-year-old outdoor botanical laboratory. At night, the garden is still and shadowy – until the calm is allegedly split by screams.

“Those who hear the screams and wander into the garden to see where they're coming from, they report seeing tall shadowy figures,” education senior and Paranormal society member Kat Farmer said. “And then when they go to approach them, they disappear into thin air.”

The area was also the site of Beal’s laboratory building, which burned down in 1890, according to anthropology doctoral student Holly Long.

“Legend has it that incompetent grad students accidentally set the fire in the attic,” Long said.

In 1879, Beal buried 20 bottles of seeds mixed with sand around campus. The bottles were to be retrieved one by one over many years. The last bottle will be excavated in 2100. Beal hoped to understand how long local plant species could survive in neutral conditions, and the experiment is the longest continually monitored scientific study, Long said.

Beal may still be monitoring his experiment, according to Farmer.

“Students and faculty who work in and around the library and the music building have reported seeing a tall male apparition dressed in clothing from the 1920s," Farmer said. "We speculate that it is probably Professor Beal coming back all these years later to check on his seed experiment as well as his beloved garden that he worked so hard to establish and maintain.”

Farmer said the Paranormal Society visits the garden each year before the Apparitions and Archaeology event to gather evidence. The society brings a spirit box, a device that scans AM and FM radio frequencies and allegedly allows spirits to manipulate the box to communicate with listeners. The device jumps radio frequencies, assembling snatches of speech from these frequencies into coherent words and phrases. Farmer said the club has commonly heard growling, strings of explicit words and calls for help from their spirit box.

“We started joking that maybe it's those grad students who potentially burnt down the lab originally,” Farmer said. 

Farmer said some Paranormal Society members have also had their full names repeated back to them through the spirit box.