John Galen Howard's 1907 Beaux-Arts engineering hall, tied by folklorist Rosalie Hankey to a ghost-soldier campus legend and to the deadly 1931 scaffolding collapse at the adjacent materials lab.
2113 Hearst Mining Cir, Berkeley, CA 94720
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Active university academic building — exterior viewing and atrium are typically open during business hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved campus paths; building has elevators
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1907 · John Galen Howard Beaux-Arts architecture · Funded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst · Memorial to Senator George Hearst · California Registered Historical Landmark · Early major U.S. base-isolation seismic retrofit (completed 2002)
The Hearst Memorial Mining Building opened in 1907 as one of the first major buildings completed in John Galen Howard's master plan for the UC Berkeley campus. Phoebe Apperson Hearst commissioned the building as a memorial to her late husband George Hearst, the U.S. Senator and mining magnate whose Comstock Lode, Homestake, and Anaconda holdings funded the Hearst family fortune.
The building is one of the finest American examples of Beaux-Arts academic architecture. Howard organized it around a three-story Memorial Vestibule and atrium that opens to a glazed roof; the space is among the most-photographed interiors on the Berkeley campus. The building was designated a California Registered Historical Landmark and is contributing to the campus's National Register district.
The building suffered significant damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and underwent a major seismic retrofit completed in 2002. The retrofit installed a base-isolation system, one of the first such installations in a historic building of its size in the United States.
Adjacent to the main building is the Engineering Materials Laboratory, the site of a fatal scaffolding collapse on April 8, 1931 that killed three workers — Americo Cabrol, James Riley, and R.V. Farrall — and seriously injured others. The accident was reported in the Daily Californian and is the documented basis for one strain of the building's ghost lore.
As of 2026 the building continues to house the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and is in active daily academic use.
Sources
The Hearst Mining lore reaches farther back into the published record than most UC Berkeley ghost stories. Rosalie Hankey's 1942 article 'California Ghosts' in the California Folklore Quarterly is the earliest known printed source. Hankey reported that students described an apparition of a soldier said to have either been killed in the building or to have died there by suicide during World War I; witnesses described footsteps, voices, and moaning, particularly at night. Hankey added a careful note that she had checked Berkeley city records for the 1914-1919 window and found no matching incident — a caveat that distinguishes the Hearst Mining ghost from many less-disciplined campus tales.
A second, better-anchored strand of the lore relates to the adjacent Engineering Materials Laboratory. On April 8, 1931, scaffolding on the building under construction collapsed, killing workers Americo Cabrol, James Riley, and R.V. Farrall. The Daily Californian reported the deaths. Later campus tradition holds that one of the three men walks the materials lab at night; the Multo (Ghost) blog 'Ghosts of UC Berkeley Engineering' (August 2024) traces this thread.
Reports from contemporary engineering students are sparse and informal — passing references to footsteps in the upper galleries and to a sense of being watched in the basement workshops. The building's atmospheric Beaux-Arts interiors, with their cast-iron stair railings and skylit atrium, lend themselves to this kind of lore.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk through the Beaux-Arts atrium of the 1907 building during posted university hours. The Memorial Vestibule and reading room display engineering artifacts and Phoebe Apperson Hearst's memorial inscription. Active classrooms and laboratories are restricted to affiliates.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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