Evan Faulkenbury: “It’s Halloween season here at Carolina — crispy air, crunchy leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, jack-o’-lanterns — and with the season comes spooky tales and haunted histories.
“With that, welcome to Remembering the Days, where we explore the stories and talk with the people who are part of the rich history of the University of South Carolina. I’m Evan Faulkenbury. Today, we’re exploring the history of ghost stories at USC. Most students and alumni have heard versions of these stories. But how did they originate? Where did they come from? Is there any truth to these tales? While we did not uncover hard proof for the existence of any ghosts on the Horseshoe, we were able to explore many of the stories — some well-known, and others more obscure.
“One quick note about our evidence: These ghost stories have been chronicled in the Gamecock student newspaper. Starting around the mid-1980s, student journalists began covering these tales with some regularity, repeating earlier versions and adding some more flair with each new telling. Googling these stories today will bring you to blogs and ghost hunter-type websites, but these are what a good lawyer might call ‘hearsay.’ While we can’t find proof for the existence of these ghosts, we did find proof for when USC students began telling these ghost stories.
“One of the first stories we found was from 1936. An unnamed sorority house was the home for Mr. X, a friendly ghost who was generally well-behaved. On winter nights, Mr. X would play the violin, according to a write-up in the Gamecock newspaper. ‘Weird strains of melancholy music floats around making sleeping coeds snuggle down lower under the covers,’ reads the article.
“Another lesser-known story involves the old Columbia Hotel. Opened in February 1931 on the corner of Gervais and Sumter, the 12-story hotel was a city hotspot for decades. In 1966, USC purchased it and converted the building into a residence hall, but that era was short-lived. The city demolished the building in 1971, but a ghost story endured.
“A housemother for the students who lived in the old Columbia Hotel, a Miss Bell, apparently would not let any students live in a certain room on the 9th floor. ‘An icy presence filled the room,’ according to the Gamecock, ‘and a window refused to stay closed. Sometimes running water could be heard, after which the presence seemed to leave for a while.’ Rumors spread of a man in the 1940s who fell from his ninth floor room — or was pushed. Just before the building was demolished, student photographers explored the building and photographed what they believed to be a ghost. See for yourself in the October 31, 1984, edition of the Gamecock, accessible through USC Libraries’ Digital Collections. A photographer for The State newspaper snapped a photo at the moment of demolition on November 21, 1971. The story goes that you can see a ghostly figure in a window in this photo. Look yourself: The image is available online through the Walker Local and Family History Center at Richland Library.
“OK, let’s get to a story you have probably heard. Rumors persist that Longstreet Theatre is haunted. The story goes that during the Civil War, College Hall (which was the original name for the building) was part of the Confederate hospital that operated on campus. That part’s definitely true: Most of the campus served as a Confederate hospital. But rumors persist that in the building’s basement — what’s now the green room, where actors get ready — a morgue held the bodies of the dead during the Civil War and that up to two dozen soldiers are buried underneath the foundation.
“There’s no evidence anyone was buried under Longstreet, but people have reported eerie things in the building. People report the elevator doors open at odd moments, and cold spurts can be felt at random. In 1985, talking to the Gamecock newspaper, Patricia Ower, the theatre department’s business manager, said, ‘My bookkeeper was alone on the fourth floor pulling an all-nighter to get work done before Christmas break last year when he felt suddenly that there was someone else there. He also experienced a cold chill.’
“So to understand more about Longstreet’s haunted history, I talked with Lauren Wilson. In 2025, Professor Wilson, a faculty member in the Department of Theatre and Dance, wrote and codirected a play based, in part, on Longstreet’s haunted history called The Seeing Place. And the play was performed inside Longstreet. I asked her how she first learned Longstreet might be haunted.”
Lauren Wilson: “So when I visited as a candidate for the job, I was given a tour of Longstreet by Andy Mills, who was the technical director in the theatre and dance department for, I want to say, 25 or 30 years. He’d been here for quite a long time, came here as a young man, and just retired last year. So he took me on a tour, and the first thing he did was take me down to the basement and tell me, in his very offhand way, that it had been a morgue and this is where the dead bodies were, and you see this whitewash on the wall, it’s the same whitewash that was there when the morgue was there.
“And it was this just very cold place. I don’t know if you’ve been — I know that you’ve been down there — with the, kind of, arched brick, little, almost caves set back into that hallway on the lower story. I believe there’s a story below that that I’ve never been to that has kind of a locked grate, and only certain people are allowed to go down there under certain circumstances. Andy did not take me there, but he showed me what we call the catacombs, where the morgue was, and told me the history as a hospital during the Civil War. And he also mentioned the swimming pool and other more modern configurations, but my imagination was really caught by that. And I remember asking him, ‘Andy, have you ever seen a ghost?’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, but, you know, other people have.’ He was very offhand about it.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “So then, naturally, I asked Professor Wilson if she had personally ever experienced anything supernatural while working in Longstreet Theatre.”
Lauren Wilson: “Well, yes. And I would say, Edith Wharton has a great quote about ghosts, which you may be familiar with, which is, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts, but they scare me.’ So I sort of feel like that. I feel like my rational mind really does not think there are ghosts in the building, or more people would have encountered them and that we would have some body of evidence of some kind, that we don’t. But they do scare me, and I think I’m susceptible to a feeling of discomfort, maybe, when I’m alone. I’ve been alone in that basement area a couple of times, one when I was helping a student from another department work on a film. And all the cameras were set up, and he was in another part of the basement, helping get the actors ready. And I was there more as an advisor/support. And I just remember this feeling of just real discomfort being alone, and all the lights were out. The only lights that were on were the film lights that they had brought in, and just feeling like I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t want to be there by myself anymore. So I just walked out and found where they were. And who’s to say? I think I probably convinced myself of that to some extent, too, that there’s some part of us that wants to believe, you know, that some part of me that wants to believe.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “And eventually, Professor Wilson got the idea to write a play about Longstreet Theatre and its haunted past. The Seeing Place ran last year during the fall 2025 semester. If you missed it, well, too bad, but maybe you’ll get another chance one day. During rehearsals, Professor Wilson told me, strange things kept happening.”
Lauren Wilson: “Well, we were in the theatre for about three weeks total, in rehearsals and technical rehearsals and then performance. And during technical rehearsals — well, I’ll back up and briefly say that there was a theme in the play of the ghosts messing with the lights — so lights would suddenly go out on the student characters who were rehearsing their play. In the middle of a rehearsal, lights would go out. And then sounds would happen, knockings and other kind of classic ghost manifestations: a sense of cold, things being moved from one place to another. So that was a theme in the play that we created, but then during the technical rehearsal week, suddenly lights were going on and off. So some of the students were warming up, and all the lights just went out for no reason. And then we reset them. Our stage manager went to the booth, reset them. It was fine. And then during the final scene in one of our last technical rehearsals — there are safety lights in each of the voms, which are the entrances that are at stage level that come from below the audience. There are safety lights at the edge of those that should come on in an emergency, and one of those came on during the final scene. As soon as the lights cut out for the final blackout, that safety light came on. But those emergency lights over the voms felt like a different matter somehow, that that was one thing we couldn’t really fix in the moment. So take it or leave it, but we kind of had a little frisson, a little enjoyment of thinking, ‘Oh, they’re here, and they're paying attention.’”
Evan Faulkenbury: “So there you have it: the haunting of Longstreet Theatre continues.
“Another common tale is that J. Rion McKissick haunts campus — in particular, the building that bears his name, as well as the South Caroliniana Library. J. Rion McKissick was the popular president of USC from 1936 to 1944.
“McKissick, the 86-year-old building at the head of the Horseshoe named in his honor, is claustrophobic and has a mechanical room in its basement that produces all sorts of weird noises. Former McKissick Museum director Lynn Robertson told the Gamecock newspaper in 2004 that people think McKissick haunts the building, but that it’s just normal sounds in an old building. But the museum staff had fun with the story over the years, hosting haunted houses for kids and placing an old mannequin in random places around the building affectionately named ‘Delta Dawn.’
“Mark Smith, a former archivist at McKissick Museum, told the Gamecock in 2024, ‘When I first heard footsteps in the ’80s, I was studying here on my master’s. And I heard somebody walking in our stack area,’ Smith said. ‘This is at night. Just like a cheap horror movie, I go, ‘Oh, let's see who it is.’ I walk down the steps, and there’s nobody there. I go upstairs. Then I started thinking about it, and I said, ‘I’m leaving.’’
“Perhaps the most controversial ghost story at USC involves a certain Dr. Black and his daughter. There are several different versions of the story, depending on which account and year you read about it in the Gamecock. But here are the essentials. A man referred to as Dr. Black was one of the medical professionals overseeing the Confederacy’s hospital on campus during the Civil War, and he had a daughter. Soon after General Sherman’s forces had marched through Columbia in February 1865, a handful of Union troops raped Dr. Black’s daughter. There’s no mention of her first name in these accounts. Exacting her revenge, she poisoned wine and served it to these men, killing them. She was hanged for treason. In the years since — sometimes in DeSaussure, sometimes in Harper — her ghost has been spotted with a tray of glasses and a bottle of wine, visiting students’ rooms at night.
“So, there are some major red flags with this tale. I asked Dr. Christian Anderson about them, who, along with John Wesley Lowery, has written an essay exploring this particular ghost story from USC’s past.”
Christian Anderson: “She is seeking revenge for Union intrusion upon the South. And so if you’re a Northerner, she’s going to offer you water, seeming to be friendly, seeming to be welcoming. But in the end the water is poisoned, leading to the visitor’s demise. So that’s, that’s the basic setup of the story.
“But as you look at the various versions that are published — and, of course, there’s no definitive origin of when this started, or where it started or who started it — but the main elements are the same: that, that she’s seeking some kind of retribution, that she had some role at the college during the war and then has lingered on as a sort of protector or haunter, you know, in the years beyond. I think it’s a classic example of the Lost Cause version of the of the Civil War, the Lost Cause being, of course, the idea that the South believing, the former Confederates, believing, ‘Yes, we lost the war, but our cause was just. It was a just cause, but we lost, and so we still have to find ways to defend it.’
“And Gone With the Wind brings out these elements. Certainly the movie from 1915, Birth of a Nation, which was filmed, you know, much of it right here in Columbia, depicting the Reconstruction Era — Legislature does the same thing of depicting — Reconstruction Era was a degenerate era, an illegitimate era. You have to do that because, otherwise, how can you claim that the cause of the Civil War was just? And the fact that it’s on campus in a building that still exists during a period of history that is real, I mean, it makes it very tangible. Like, you know, it’s not some Stephen King story of a place you’ve never been. It’s a place that you literally walk past, if not every day, certainly, you know, every semester, or every week or whatever.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “Ghost stories can be entertaining this time of year, but as Dr. Anderson makes clear, it’s important not to perpetuate the myth of the Lost Cause.
“And finally, we come to the story of the Third Eye Man. As the tale goes, in 1949, a strange-looking creature wearing silver clothes and with a third eye in the middle of his forehead was spotted near what’s now Longstreet Theatre. The next year, a police officer also apparently spotted him, along with chicken carcasses he had been eating. Tales are told of how the Third Eye Man lives in the tunnels or catacombs below campus. Over the years, fraternities sent pledges to hunt for the Third Eye Man. It remains a popular legend today, told and retold to students on campus and on websites.
“So to get to the bottom of the catacombs — uh, I mean the story — I spoke with Marc Minsker. Marc is an assistant principal now at a school in Washington, D.C., but in the 1990s, he was at USC earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He and his friend Chris Nichols began exploring tunnels underneath USC’s campus.”
Marc Minsker: “Over the course of our three or four visits in the spring of ’91, we did make our way to the older part of the network, some of which was blocked off at the time, including the tunnels that go underneath the Horseshoe, which, based on the construction of those tunnels, were really the oldest tunnels, I mean in the sense that there was brick down there and concrete versus the more well-lit system that was underneath Gambrell. So, probably on our fourth trip, which was probably my last trip down there, I remember it was, like, a school night because the next day I was still, like, kind of reeling from the trip, we were chased by someone down there. And this is a 100 percent true story. We were in a part of the tunnels where there was not electrical. We actually brought a flashlight with us because this was, like, pre-cell phone days. We didn’t have lights on our phones. And we got chased. Chris was ahead of me. I was behind Chris. But whoever was chasing us, we thought maybe it was a student at first, but it was dark down there, and I’m not going to claim that I saw a third eye on the person, but the figure that was coming towards us was angry, was shouting, and it wasn’t even like, ‘Get out of here. This is private property.’ And so we were scared out of our minds. We made our way out of there.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “They returned one more time, armed with a camera, but they found the tunnels empty. That might’ve been the end of it: a couple of brazen students having one too many adventures exploring forbidden places on campus, but Minsker has an active imagination. This frightening encounter inspired Minsker to have a bit of fun — and so he completely invented the Third Eye Man story around 1998.”
Marc Minsker: “One of the things that I did after all this happened is I wrote down, when I was in graduate school — so, I got my undergraduate degree in ’94 and then I started graduate studies in English, and I worked in the English department — and I was working in the graduate office and the English department, is I wrote down, kind of, the story of the Third Eye Man based on several things. First of all, in that article, I provided misinformation where I said a student named Christopher Nichols in 1949. That was an inside joke because my friend was Chris Nichols. So that part of it was totally fabricated.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “Minsker combined a few different elements into a new story, including part of one that a friend who worked for the Gamecock told him about involving someone spotted near what’s now Longstreet Theatre dressed strangely in silver clothes from a story back.”
Marc Minsker: “One of the things I did when I wrote this piece when I was in graduate school about the Third Eye Man was, kind of, combining whatever that Silver Man/Longstreet Theatre story was with what Chris and I named the Third Eye Man. And I will tell you where that came from. Specifically, at the end of one of the tunnels — I believe it was the one that went down to the Welsh office building — there was a door, a concrete — I mean a metal — door, that was locked, and on that door was a triangle with a dot in the middle. And it was there in ’91. I don’t know if it still exists or down there. So for us, we actually said, ‘Oh, that’s got to be where the Third Eye Man hangs out. That’s the third eye lounge,’ which was the name of our band. We named our band Third Eye Lounge, which we played in Columbia ’92, ’93, ’94. And the third eye lounge was this place, this magical place under the university where we said the Third Eye Man existed, or lived or hung out.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “Finally, the Third Eye Man evolved based on interactions Marc and Chris had with another friend of theirs, a custodian who worked in Thomas Cooper Library also named Chris.”
Marc Minsker: “There was something about Chris that — ’cause we asked him about it, and he told us some stories. So that was part of the, you know, oral history, the mythology, was based on that. And then Chris Nichols, my friend, and I kind of morphed the silver figure, the silver alien figure, from Longstreet Theatre — the Third Eye Man — with this custodian who worked there because the custodian seemed to have inside information. He actually gave us, at one point he gave us a photocopy of, like, a blueprint that showed where the tunnels were. I mean like, this guy seems to know a lot about the tunnel system. He’s a custodian, so that would make sense. And in Thomas Cooper on one of the lower levels, maybe on, like, sublevel one or two, there is a custodian shop that connects to that. And so he even — Chris — even showed us where that was. And we were like, ‘Oh, that’s the third eye lounge because that’s where Chris hangs out.’ Chris the custodian. And again, over time we kind of morphed these legends into Third Eye Man. And again, we had a band called Third Eye Lounge, which was celebrating, you know, the mythology behind this mysterious figure under the university.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “From there on, the story of the Third Eye Man took on a life of its own. Minsker and his buddies shared the story, and their band reveled in the urban legend that they had concocted. Now, search online, and there are tons of stories about the Third Eye Man. I asked Marc what he thinks about how the legend has kept on growing since he first started it.”
Marc Minsker: “I think it’s great that the story continues and that people have added to it and that it’s still ... and it’s part of the legend. For us it was, I don’t know if it’s so much a matter of pride, but for us it was, you know, we celebrated this mysterious figure through our music, through the Third Eye Lounge. I think it’s great. I mean, I think it’s, you know, the power of the oral tradition, right? Because there wasn’t a lot written down. I mean, I did write that piece, but I love the fact that it lives on, that maybe people have embellished it, that there’s this, like — people have a tendency to gravitate towards myths, and, I think, these stories of the unknown. So yeah, I mean, I’m happy that we are connected with it. The band, it’s not like we got a record contract out of it or anything, but hey, it’s exciting, and I’m glad that people are still talking about it.”
Evan Faulkenbury: “And there you have it: the true story of the Third Eye Man.
“Over the years, there have been other ghost stories about our campus: Ouija board games gone wrong in Burney and in the old Honeycombs, ghostly apparitions appearing and disappearing near the President’s House, the deathly cries of an antebellum-era student on the third floor of Elliott, faint echoes of the organ playing music from Rutledge College at night when it’s all locked up. Even Williams-Brice Stadium was said to have been influenced by the supernatural, so much so that in the fall of 1992, an exorcism was performed outside its gates. Yes, that’s true. For more on that, check out Alan Piercy’s 2024 article called ‘Of Witch Doctors and Old Curses in the Shadows of Williams-Brice.’
“That’s all for this spooky episode. On the next one, we’re going to learn all about Carolina’s first sports championship. That’s next time on Remembering the Days.”