Customer Reviews

Haunted Halls of Ivy: Ghosts of Southern Colleges and Universities

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Daniel W. Barefoot has traveled far and wide to put together this collection of ghost stories from the American South. In his travels he, or more particularly his wife, may have had a first hand encounter with one of these school spirits whose story he was seeking to tell. Fortunately for them, it wasn't the ghost of old Ben Tillman who seems to still wander the halls of Winthrop University in South Carolina.

Barefoot is an accomplished writer of both history and ghost lore and this book is well written and the stories are told in a believable manner. There are parts of this book that seem to drag a little however and I can't really put my finger on the problem but these dry areas are few and far between and do not detract from the book much at all. The biggest problem is the lack of details given for some of the stories. The author often faces schools with several ghosts and he tries to cram all of the ghosts into three or four pages and in the process the story suffers. He could probably have doubled the size of this book without adding a single institution to his list.

Still, this is an interesting book and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The author even managed to include my old haunted alma mater in his book, which of course added to my level of interest. Best of all, most of the stories contain recent eyewitness accounts which are the key to a good ghost story book.

As one reads this book the old sense of what it was like to be a college student comes rushing back, the joy and angst, the anticipation and dread, and the feeling of being on your own for the first time. It is little wonder that many of the young people who have had their college experience cut short by death have decided to hang around campus for a little while longer. It also came as no surprise that William Faulkner is still hanging around his home on the campus of Ole Miss. I think that Faulkner, who loved ghost stories, would thoroughly enjoy this book, just as I did.