University of Tennessee's 1949 Barber & McMurry-designed engineering building, situated near the former Blount Hall site where eight Union Civil War soldier graves were unearthed in 1900; students report apparitions of soldiers reviewing a map on the adjacent lawn.
1506 Middle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access to campus grounds and exterior of building.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved campus walkways; building is an active academic facility with interior elevator access
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1949 · Barber & McMurry architecture · Charles A. Perkins namesake (early UT engineering faculty) · Adjacent to 1900 Civil War burial discovery site · Knoxville National Cemetery reinterment connection
Perkins Hall is one of three principal historic engineering buildings on the University of Tennessee's Hill Avenue/Middle Drive engineering corridor. It was designed by the Knoxville firm Barber & McMurry and built by the V.L. Nicholson Company at a cost of $994,000 — a substantial investment for a postwar academic building. Construction completed in December 1949; the formal dedication took place March 6, 1950, in the Alumni Memorial Building, followed by guided tours of both Perkins Hall and adjacent Ferris Hall.
The building is named for Dr. Charles A. Perkins, who assumed duties as associate professor of physics and electricity at UT in the fall of 1892, served as chair of the Engineering Department in the era before engineering became a separate college, and served as the first director of UT's Engineering Experiment Station. Perkins is among the founding figures of modern engineering education at the university.
Directly adjacent to Perkins Hall once stood Barbara Blount Hall, named for the daughter of William Blount, the territorial governor of the Southwest Territory and one of UT's earliest namesakes. Blount Hall was a women's dormitory completed in 1900 and demolished in 1979. The Blount Hall foundation excavation in 1900 uncovered the remains of eight Union Civil War soldiers buried on what had previously been undeveloped land. The soldiers were reinterred at the nearby Knoxville National Cemetery, where Union Civil War dead from the Knoxville Campaign — including the Siege of Knoxville and the November 1863 Fort Sanders assault — were collected after the war.
The grassy area where Blount Hall once stood is now an open space between Perkins Hall and adjacent campus buildings, identified on UT campus walking guides as the former Blount Hall site.
Sources
The legend of the Perkins Hall Union soldier apparitions originates from a documented historical event: when workers excavated the foundation for Barbara Blount Hall in 1900, they uncovered the remains of eight Union Civil War soldiers. The bodies — likely battlefield casualties from the 1863 Knoxville Campaign that had been buried in ad-hoc field graves — were exhumed and reinterred at the nearby Knoxville National Cemetery, where the bulk of the Union dead from the Knoxville Campaign rest.
According to UT Daily Beacon student journalism and the Southern Spirit Guide regional ghost-lore project, the spirits of those eight soldiers were believed to haunt the corridors of Blount Hall during its 79-year lifespan as a women's dormitory. When Blount Hall was demolished in 1979, the haunting reportedly migrated to nearby Perkins Hall and to the open lawn that now occupies the Blount site.
Students and ghost-tour participants describe seeing a group of eight men in Union uniform standing on the grass, reviewing or conferring over a map — sometimes interpreted as searching for their original burial site or for the building that had stood over it. The apparition pattern is unusually specific: same count, same posture, same activity, across multiple reports. UT's Halloween-season campus ghost tour includes the Perkins Hall lawn as a designated stop.
The historical anchor for this legend — the 1900 unearthing of eight Union soldier graves at the Blount Hall site — is supported by university historical records and is the rare paranormal claim with a verified factual foundation. The interpretive question is whether the apparition reports represent residual loop phenomena anchored to the soldiers' disturbed burial, the kind of folkloric pattern an old campus accumulates, or some combination.
Notable Entities
Media Appearances
Walk past Perkins Hall on UT's Knoxville campus and stop to view the grassy area adjacent to the building — the former site of Barbara Blount Hall (1900-1979). It is in this lawn that students and ghost-tour participants have reported apparitions of a group of Union soldiers in uniform reviewing maps. UT's Halloween ghost tour route includes this stop.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
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