Mills College at Northeastern University

The ghost lore at Mills College is not anonymous or recent — it has been collected and examined since 1933 in the campus newspaper, and history professor Bertram Gordon led documented ghost tours for decades. The stories represent a century of institutional memory.

Ethel Moore Hall, one of two twin residence halls on Prospect Hill, carries the most concentrated reports. Residents have described seeing two women sitting on the downstairs couch, absorbed in studying, who are not students of record. Unexplained piano music has played in the hall when no one is at the instrument. Two rooms in the building have been closed off over the years after the residents experienced acute psychological distress; the campus tradition holds that one student died by suicide over the end of a relationship and another died similarly after her family disapproved of her intended career in film. The documentation of these deaths is folkloric rather than archival — no contemporaneous records have been publicly cited.

Mary Morse Hall's associated legend involves the service road that runs behind the building. Campus accounts trace the story to an accident involving a horse and buggy on that road. Multiple people have reported seeing a woman in period clothing emerge from the forested hillside at night, or descend the building's exterior stairs. Some accounts describe a phantom carriage pulled by visibly deteriorated horses traveling the road before fading into shadow.

In 1996, two students in Mary Morse reported waking in a darkened room to find a man in period clothing sitting at their desk, reading a newspaper. He was gone when they investigated further.

Susan Tolman Mills, one of the college's founding figures, has been reported pacing the stage at Lisser Hall, the campus theater. Others attribute the footsteps to Louis Lisser, the former music director whose name the building carries. The accounts have not been resolved into a single attribution.