Have you ever felt a cold breeze move through you in Angel’s Roost? Swore you saw a ghostly body falling past your window? Heard moo-ing coming from your toilet?
If so, you’re not alone. With a school as old and as esoteric as King’s, ghost stories abound. Here are our favourites.
The Jumper
Back in the 1960s, King’s had an initiation ritual in which freshmen would run across the roof of the Bays while older students stood at the end to make sure no one fell. One student, though, did fall. As the story goes, he was the last student to do the stunt and a bit of a loner. The older students had already left and the freshman, who didn’t see the end of the roof, inadvertently launched himself into the gap between Chapel Bay and the Gym. Whether or not he died, well, depends on who you ask. Mark DeWolf, a King’s grad from 1968, told King’s archivists that in his day, there had been an infamous story about a student who fell off the roof but did not die.
“A fellow named Don Ferguson — better known as ‘Fergie’ — fell off the roof one night and broke oh-so-many bones,” recalled DeWolf, “but was hale and hearty the last time I saw him at an alumni function.”
Paranormal activity, however, points in the other direction. In the 1990s, students reported hearing phantom footsteps running across the roofs of the Bays, and in September of 1988, a student living in Chapel Bay woke up in the wee hours of the morning to a scream. Looking out his side window, which faced the gym, he saw someone “roll off the roof” and plummet to the ground below. Panicked, he ran out to the Quad, but it was empty; the jumper was nowhere to be found.
The Janitor
In 2010, the Halifax Institute for Paranormal Research, led by Nathan Stone, spent a night in the Pit. Using spectrum cameras, electromagnetic field readers and infrared detection alarms, they searched for the spirit of a janitor, who allegedly died in the Pit while working at King’s. The janitor seemed to continue his work posthumously: in 1997, a member of Patrol claimed to have seen an old man in a rain coat picking up garbage in the Pit. Patrol asked the man what he was doing, but he simply continued to pick up garbage, ignoring them. Stone and the other amateur ghostbusters, however, reported that their instruments didn’t pick up any paranormal activity.
The Maid
During the Second World War, King’s was used as a naval training ground. Many of the officers who lived on the campus had maids, who lived in what is now Angel’s Roost. After a secret love affair with a soldier, one of these maids found herself pregnant with his child. Whether the soldier was killed in duty or left her, refusing to marry her because of their socioeconomic differences is a mystery; but the maid, distraught and alone, hung herself in the stairwell of Angel’s Roost. This stairwell no longer exists — it was destroyed in 1999 to install the elevator. But according to residents of Angel’s Roost, the maid is still there. In the late 1990s, a student reported hearing a female voice singing 1940s songs. Other students claim that their lights flicker, their walls shake and that they often feel a cold breeze moving through them. Whether this is the maid or simply Angel Roost’s shoddy infrastructure, we’ll never know.
The Cow
Perhaps the most famous King’s ghost story — and, according to archivists, the most dubious. According to the legend, there was a student who was universally hated by his peers. We don’t know why — perhaps he was a tutorial chatterbox or a notorious cigarette moocher. When he was out of town, his fellow Chapel Bay residents procured a cow, led it to his room and murdered it. When the student returned, he found its “stinking, fetid remnants in that very room, organs, meat and bones alike,” states the library archives. The student left King’s permanently, but if you listen closely, you can still hear the footsteps of cloven hooves in the hallway, a haunting moo-ing coming through the toilets and a distant cow bell, clanging in the night.
