There’s a particular tale of murder and vengeance that can be found in the tome Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, collected by reporter Charles M. Skinner at the beginning of the 20th century. In Haverford’s early years, students were forbidden to leave campus without permission—but one young man wasn’t about to let pesky rules keep him from the spirits at Henderson’s store in the middle of the night. When his dorm neighbor learned what he had done, he argued with the young man about possible expulsion, and the altercation took a deadly turn when the rule-breaking student, in a fit of rage, seized his adversary by the throat and strangled him. Panicked, the accidental murderer dressed the corpse in winter wear, fastened ice skates to his feet, and dragged the body to the duck pond, where he deposited the boy through a hole in the ice. When the body was discovered the next day, it was naturally assumed that the boy had drowned while skating on the pond.

The murderer breathed more easily—until the next night, shortly after midnight, when the unmistakable sound of ice skates clanking on the stairs outside his room pinned the student to his bed with terror. The clanking grew closer, followed by a pair of wet hands grasping the doorway…and then, the face of the slain student appeared. The horrified, guilt-stricken killer changed his room, but this didn’t prevent the apparition from appearing the next night, this time coming to loom beside the criminal’s bed. The student believed that a third visit from the ghost would result in his own death; therefore, he arranged to spend the night with a nearby friend.

He was found dead the following morning: eyes bulging, tongue protruding, marks of strangulation on his neck, and an expression of bone-shattering fear on his face. Had his victim exacted revenge?

When Skip Lawrence was Haverford’s Director of Development in the ‘80s, he was working late in what is now the Provost’s office on the first floor of Founders Hall. Caught up in post-event details, he was jolted by a peculiar sensation: “I had the very strong sense of the presence of a woman.” He heard the rustle of a long skirt as an unseen figure entered one of the office’s doors and passed by his desk, exiting through the door on the other side of the room. It was Lawrence’s only encounter with the spirit.

As he related this tale to members of the classes of ’36 and ’37, he heard a couple of theories as to whose skirts swished past him that night. Some spoke of a laundress from the turn of the century who was spending the holidays in her Founders room, and was found stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. Still others believe that Lawrence encountered the ghost of Mary “Ma” Ginder, the College’s former dietician and housekeeper. In December of 1935, “Ma” Ginder was hosting a gathering of family and friends in the waiters' dining room near her Founders apartment, when she received an unexpected visitor: recently discharged dishwasher Roy Crittenden, who carried a shotgun wrapped as a Christmas present. The 70-year-old housekeeper was shot dead, and Crittenden was subsequently arrested and sentenced to death (although this sentence was later commuted). That would seem to be the end of the tragic story, but there are many who claim that Ginder never truly left her Founders home…

In his 37 years as Magill Library’s maintenance manager, Joe O’Donnell has become accustomed to the building’s “settling” noises. But he’ll never forget those early mornings in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when, along with the library’s usual squeaks and groans, he heard the elevator make its way up to the fifth floor, where it came to a halt with a decisive “ping.” This wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary save for one detail: O’Donnell was the only person in the library at the time.
“I think it was the ghost of Jim Magill,” he says, “come back to watch over things.” The phantom rides stopped in the early '90s, when the elevator was reconditioned.

On another occasion, O’Donnell made a startling discovery underneath the oldest part of the library, the Philips Wing: a gravestone—or at least, something that strongly resembled a gravestone. “There was no writing on it,” he recalls. “It was just sitting there in the dirt.” O’Donnell found the stone in 1969; it remained in its hiding place until the ‘80s…when it mysteriously disappeared.

It’s never been seen since.