Ghostly Hill

They were warned: Spring Hill House is haunted.

“You will notice things immediately,” someone said.

On the first day Stephen Sumner went to work two years ago at the ancient two-story house on NC State’s portion of the old Dorothea Dix Hospital property, those warnings were confirmed.

“When I started two years ago, I went in early on my first day of work and went up to my office upstairs,” says Sumner, director of the North Carolina Japan Center, whose office is located in the former plantation home of Theophilis Hunter Jr. “I sat down at my desk and, suddenly, I heard someone putzing around in the kitchen.”

He ignored the noises.

Until they got louder.

And closer.

Curiosity, as it always does, got the best of him. He went exploring. He found nothing in the kitchen. Nothing in the stairwell. Nothing in the hallways.

“I went down to say hello, and there was nobody there,” Sumner says. “That went on pretty much every morning for the first week I was in the office.”

As Halloween arrives, ghost stories abound on the oldest parts of NC State’s campus, which was built mostly from large plots of family-owned farmland. You know that Holladay Hall is haunted, right? Most everyone who works there does.

New Chancellor Kevin Howell, who spent decades working in the building that opened in 1889 in previous positions, reportedly has long told new employees not to work there past 5 p.m. or on weekends. Vice Chancellor Brian Sischo has named one of the ghosts Meredith.

As for Spring Hill House, there are many stories of motion detectors going off in the middle of the night, automatically summoning security guards who report finding nothing but dark and empty hallways. Those empty calls are only exacerbated by the creaking steps that amplify phantom footsteps and the blood-red loose sand under the stairs in the basement.

Scott Koempel, a project manager for facilities, remembers the time he was in the house alone, repairing some mysteriously broken window panes on the second floor. His work partner was on the outside. Both were on ladders.

Koempel heard plodding footsteps on the staircase. Then shuffling steps in the room. The air turned cold and the hair on his arms and neck stood up.

“I was covered in goosebumps, and there was heavy static electricity in the air,” he says. “It was a bright, sunny day, so it wasn’t like we were getting ready to have a storm or anything. It was just weird.”

“You look pale,” his co-worker said from the other side of the window.

Like he had seen a ghost or something.

Apparently, one of the Spring Hill spirits is an early riser.

“I don’t hear it much at night,” Sumner says. “It’s really in the morning that the spirits seem most active.”

Eventually, Sumner worked up the courage to ask some of his new co-workers if they had had any similar experiences with paranormal activity.

Of course, they said.

The facilities folks most often hear the noises. Some of them refuse to go back in if there is no one else around.

“One day, I was up on the second floor fixing something with one of the women I work with,” says Doug Lynn, engineering architect technician. “I was on a ladder, and we could tell someone was coming up behind us in the room. We both turned around, and there was nobody there with us.

“We went outside and got in the truck.”

There are some suggestions to mollify the spirits in the house: Say good morning. Be nice. Acknowledge their presence. Go about your business.

“I did all of that, and things began to settle down,” Sumner says. “I stopped noticing the sounds as much. Every once in a while, though, I’ll hear the same noises.”

The stories from Spring Hill caught the attention of at least two television shows devoted to paranormal activity. One set up cameras to try to catch something on video. If it did, the ghosts never signed the release form, because that footage never aired.

It’s not unusual, of course, to think about an old plantation home, with the tragedies of its former enslaved workers and the memories of the Union Army soldiers that once occupied the grounds, being the forever home of unsettled spirits.

Theophilis Hunter Jr., the house’s original owner, buried his dad on the grounds of the family plantation in 1798, the earliest marked gravesite in Wake County. In 1815, the son built a two-story home, which still stands in its original location, near his father’s grave.

The younger Hunter eventually grew the plantation to more than 5,000 acres, much of it divided into smaller farms through the years as he sold off tracts of land to pay off debts and poor financial choices that haunted his later years.

Maybe some of the spirits are there to discomfit the memory of Wake County sheriff William Henderson High or William Grimes, a longtime slave owner and land baron during the Reconstruction sharecropping days. Both of them owned the house and property during the 19^th century, until Grimes’ widow sold everything to the state of North Carolina in 1908 to expand the Dix Hospital complex.

NC State acquired the home and 128 acres in 2001 as part of a property exchange for the expansion of Centennial Campus.

For a city — founded near the tavern of Isaac Hunter, the son and brother of the Theophilises — where both the Capitol building and Executive Mansion are said to be crawling with spirits, why should the grounds of the state’s largest university be any different?

Sumner said the spirits were particularly active a few weeks ago, though he was not concerned.

“Now, it’s part and parcel of inheriting the Spring Hill House as our office,” Sumner says. “We just try to roll with it and make everybody feel welcome.”

Even foreign heads of state. Fortunately, none of Spring Hill’s spirits interrupted the visit of Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida last spring.

Still, spirits and curses abound on campus. At Winslow Hall, site of the school’s infirmary during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic — where more than a dozen students and nurses died during the pandemic. At the old chancellor’s residence, now home to the Gregg Museum of Art & Design. In the steam tunnels and the former Yarbrough steam plant. In the basement of Thompson Hall, on the site of the school’s first swimming pool. In the parking lots of Carter-Finley Stadium.

People wonder if they will be out on Halloween.

Of course they will.

Why should it be any different than every other day?If you are interested in a Red Terror Tour or Hallowed Places Tour of campus, contact Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.