Miller Hall, Shepherd University

Miller Hall stands on the west campus of Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, a small historic town in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia along the Potomac River. The university magazine describes the need to build Shepherd’s first dormitory in 1915; the 1916 catalog said it had just been completed. It now houses graduate students and the Residence Life office.

A persistent piece of misinformation holds that Miller Hall served as a Civil War hospital. This is incorrect, and the correction is well established: the building did not exist until 1915, decades after the war. Before 1915, female students at the institution boarded with local residents and male students lived at Ramsey Hall, the building now known again as the Entler Hotel. It was the Entler — not Miller Hall — that was used as a Civil War hospital, and the Entler now operates as a museum. This distinction is documented in Shepherd University's historic-tour and campus-legends materials.

Shepherdstown itself is among the oldest towns in West Virginia and promotes a strong heritage-tourism and ghost-walk tradition. Shepherd University's library maintains an online 'Legends of Shepherd University's Campus' collection that documents the stories attached to Miller Hall and other buildings, and the student newspaper (the Picket) has reported on the legends and on residence-life responses to them. These institutional sources, alongside regional folklore writers, make Miller Hall one of the better-documented campus hauntings in the state — even as they take care to separate verified history from legend.