HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
Carroll College's 1909 founding building, where a 1960s dorm-bathroom death became campus legend
1601 N Benton Ave, Helena, MT 59625
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to view from the surrounding campus grounds. St. Charles Hall is an active residence hall; its interior, including the sealed fourth-floor bathroom, is not open to the public.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved campus walkways; the residence hall itself is not open for public touring
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1909 · Carroll College's Founding Building (1909) · Cornerstone Laid by President William Howard Taft · Source Stone for Montana's Oldest Astronomical Observatory
Bishop John Patrick Carroll founded the school as Mount St. Charles College on September 27, 1909, with the goal of training Montana men for the priesthood alongside professional degrees in law, medicine, teaching, and engineering. St. Charles Hall, named for St. Charles Borromeo, was the first structure built on the new campus, and in its early decades it effectively was the college — the same building held dormitory rooms, classrooms, a dining hall, a library, and faculty offices.
President William Howard Taft laid the cornerstone that September, telling the crowd the college "will be a blessing to Helena and the whole state of Montana." The school was renamed Carroll College in 1932 in honor of its founding bishop.
St. Charles Hall took damage in the 1935 Helena earthquake, which knocked stones loose from the southern gable wall. Rather than simply patch the damage, the college reused the fallen sandstone blocks to build an astronomical observatory elsewhere on campus — now recognized as the oldest observatory in Montana.
The four-story hall still functions as a residence hall today, housing more than 200 students across its Main and South wings, alongside continued administrative and academic use. It remains one of the most recognizable buildings on the Helena campus.
Sources
The story dates to the mid-1960s, when a student blacked out while brushing his teeth in the fourth-floor bathroom and struck his head on a sink. Accounts of what caused the fall differ — one version circulated among students points to drinking, another says he'd taken a hit during football practice and lost his footing leaving the shower. He was hospitalized and died of pneumonia roughly a week later.
Afterward, students living on the floor began describing a presence in the bathroom. The most repeated version of the story, passed down through Carroll's student newspaper The Prospector and campus tour guides, holds that students saw a young man's reflection standing behind them in the mirror, that the faucet would run red when turned on, and that a bloodstain kept reappearing on the floor no matter how many times it was cleaned. The college eventually sealed the bathroom and boarded it up.
The sealed room has become a fixture of Carroll's Halloween campus ghost tour, and current students still report hearing scraping sounds from behind the boards.
View St. Charles Hall's 1909 sandstone facade and the rest of Carroll College's compact Helena campus on foot. The building is a working residence hall — the interior, including the sealed fourth-floor bathroom at the center of the campus's best-known ghost story, is reserved for students and not open to visitors.
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