The Haunted Dorm of Berkley College of Yale University
Chrystyne McGrath, our guide, reported the following: “The school’s well-known spirit resides in Berkley College, known as North Middle dorm, at 205 Elm Street, commenced at the start of the Civil War. Students when students volunteered to serve in the Union Army. They would describe the paranormal manifestations they’d experienced there.
At the nearby training camp at Criscoulo Park (Chapel and James Streets), Union soldiers (29th Colored Regiment C.V. Infantry) reported. “A strange light” which was they detailed in the February 13, 1867 issue of the Yale Courant, the student newspaper. The column explained that this glow “does not seem to be the blaze of an ordinary lamp” and was seen wavering in one of North Middle’s padlocked, “uninhabitable, desolate” garret apartments.
Later, in an essay, “Is North Middle Haunted?” appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine during October 1870. “Many are the weird tales that are told of nocturnal visions and phantom visitors” inside the murky recesses of North Middle.
During the closing years Mauve Decade one student’s reminiscence, the Ways of Yale in the Consulship of Plancus (1895), recalled discovering the dorm’s nocturnal phantom. Reporting an archaeological dig that took place on the former site of North Middle nearly a century after the Ways of Yale was published, the Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut commented that the dorm was haunted.”
Ghosts of New Haven Blog 23 The Haunted Dorm of Berkley College of Yale University © 2019 by Philip Ernest Schoenberg, Ghost with a Blog # Ghost