Kent State

Kent State University is a haunted college campus. According to legend, Stopher Hall is haunted by the ghost of a young man who took his own life in one of the dorm rooms.

In Kent State University, there is a building on campus named Stopher Hall. They say that, in the early 1970s, a young soldier came home from the war in Vietnam and enrolled in the college. His experiences in combat had left him mentally and physically scarred and he was very depressed.

He lived on the top floor of one of the dorms, but he didn’t have many friends and never socialized with his fellow students. He spent most of his time hiding in his room, reading books and playing games of chess and marbles with himself. The other students thought he was an oddball and pretty much left him alone.

One night, all of the other students on that floor were awoken by a horrible screaming sound. It was coming from the young man’s room. The other students were freaked out and began banging on his door, but he didn’t answer.

After about an hour, the screaming finally stopped and the young man emerged from his room, pale-faced and soaked in sweat. He ran down the hall to the bathroom and immediately jumped into the shower. His fellow students assumed he must have had a night terror or a flashback, so they just shook their heads and went back to bed.

A few days passed and nobody had seen the young man since that night. They never paid much attention to him, so his absence didn’t worry anyone. A week later, they all noticed a terrible smell that was permeating the corridors. At first, they thought it was a burst sewage pipe or a broken toilet, but as the smell grew worse and worse, they started to get worried.

After investigating the source of the stench, they realized it was coming from the young man’s room. When they received no reply after knocking on his door a few times, they alerted the administrator and got him to come open the door.

They got the worst shock of their lives.

Hanging by the neck from an overhead pipe, was the dead body of the young man. A thin wire was wrapped tightly around his throat and his face was purple and bloated. An overturned chair lay on the floor beneath him. He had taken his own life.

The incredible stench of rot and decay hit them and most of the students ran from the building, unable to bear it.

For years afterwards, the young man’s room was kept locked and none of the students were allowed to stay there. At night, people who stayed on that floor would hear giggling laughter and horrified screams coming from the empty room. Many reported hearing odd things in the corridor, like the sound of a chair being kicked over and the noise of marbles clattering against the ground.

Many students on the floor developed health problems and they blamed it on the ghost. After hearing the story, most people chose not to live on the floor and asked to be moved. They said they often saw items move of their own accord and some students claimed that, at night, they could hear a mysterious creaking sound, as if something heavy was swinging back and forth.

Once, an curious students decided to break into the room and have a look around. He forced the lock with a screwdriver and was shocked to see that the whole room was the same as it had been when the incident happened. The chair was lying on its side, pieces of police tape were hanging from the walls and the very wire that the young man had used to hang himself was still attached to the ceiling, just hanging there.

The student picked up the chair and slid it back under the desk and walked out. No sooner did he take a step outside, than the door slammed shut behind him and he heard the sound of something being dragged across the floor, followed by a crash. He tried to open the door, but it was locked. using the screwdriver, he unlocked it again and when the door swung open, he saw that the chair was lying on its side again, directly under the noose, as if it had just been kicked over.

They say that if you stand outside Stopher Hall at night and look up at the windows, you can see the silhouette of the young man hanging from the pipe and swinging back and forth in his bedroom window. According to the legend, the poor young man is condemned to reenact his suicide for all eternity, continually kicking the chair out from under himself and swinging back and forth from the pipe where he hung himself.

In 2002, they reopened the young man’s room, but quickly had to close it again. Everyone who stayed in the room attempted to commit suicide. In 2004, the building was torn down.