Salem College

Founded in 1772, Salem College is the oldest institution for women's education in the South and the oldest continuously operating educational institution for girls and women in America. The campus includes many historic Moravian buildings.

Salem College traces its origins to 1772, when Moravian settlers established a school for girls in the planned community of Salem, making it the oldest institution for the education of women in the American South. The campus shares its grounds with the historic Old Salem district, where centuries-old buildings still stand along cobblestone streets. Among these is the Single Sisters House, built in 1786 as a communal residence for unmarried Moravian women, where a documented tragedy gave rise to the campus's most historically grounded ghost story.

On November 28, 1873, sixteen-year-old Sarah Tilkey, a Salem Academy boarding student from Augusta, Georgia, was practicing piano in the Single Sisters House when an ember from a nearby stove caught her dress on fire. Engulfed in flames, she ran through the building and down the stairs in a panic. Professor Lineback managed to extinguish the fire, but the burns were too severe, and Sarah died that evening on campus. In the years since, students and staff working late in the Single Sisters House have reported seeing a young woman in period dress visible through the attic windows. One student working in the Office of Admissions on the third floor recalled that around 5:30 in the evening, she suddenly felt a chill settle over the room and became acutely aware that she was not alone. Others have described seeing a very pale and somewhat translucent woman with extremely dark, deep-set eyes who appeared to glow with a faint light, visible in the early morning hours between two and three AM.

The campus's most widely known supernatural tradition, however, centers not on a ghost but on a painting. In the lobby of Babcock dormitory hangs a portrait of Mary Reynolds Babcock, the daughter of tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds, who donated a substantial sum to the college after her death in 1953. Students say that her painted eyes follow anyone who crosses the room, and a firmly held campus superstition warns that those who fail to greet Mary when passing her portrait -- or worse, make an obscene gesture toward it -- will suffer misfortune. First-year students are taught to always acknowledge the painting with a respectful hello and farewell. According to campus lore, one student who made a rude gesture toward the portrait was expelled shortly afterward, and while no official records confirm a connection, the story has reinforced the tradition for decades.

Beyond the Single Sisters House and the Babcock portrait, students have reported unexplained phenomena across the historic campus. The Clewell dormitory, which saw construction-related deaths during expansion in the 1920s, is said to have an elevator that sometimes operates on its own. Cold spots, disembodied footsteps, and the feeling of being watched are common complaints in the older buildings, particularly after dark. Salem College, built atop centuries of Moravian history on ground that has seen births, deaths, and the daily rituals of communal living since the 1700s, carries the weight of that history in ways that extend beyond the pages of its archives.