Haunted Homecoming | Ghost Stories from Schools, Football Fields & Prom Night
There’s something a little strange about homecoming when you really think about it. Once a year, people return to a place they haven’t belonged to in years, sometimes even decades. Former students walk through buildings they remember from when they were teenagers, old football players return to the stadium, and alumni sit in the same bleachers and walk the same hallways where they spent so much of their younger lives. The whole point of homecoming is to come back. But according to some school ghost stories, there are former students who never really left.
In this episode of the You Two Scare Me Podcast, we’re exploring a collection of hauntings that seem especially appropriate for homecoming season. There are ghosts associated with football games and athletic facilities, unexplained activity in old field houses, and even a mysterious girl who may have returned for prom long after her own dance ended.
Ghosts Who Come Back for Game Day
We begin at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, where Hollinger Field House has been part of campus since the 1920s. According to a longstanding university legend, a student known as Drutz died in a fourth-floor stairwell during homecoming weekend sometime in the 1920s. Over the years, people inside Hollinger have reported unexplained creaking and swinging sounds, along with the unsettling feeling that someone else is nearby when the building appears to be empty. The detail that makes the story particularly interesting is the claim that Drutz becomes more active during homecoming weekend. While living alumni return to campus for the festivities, legend says at least one former student may come back with them.
Our next story takes us to Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii, where the alleged ghost seems to have held onto a little more of his personality. Shawn Akina graduated from Punahou in 1986 after playing quarterback for the varsity football team as well as basketball. He was apparently a bit of a character and was known for causing mischief around the athletic facilities, including slamming locker doors and pulling clothes from washing machines and tossing them onto the floor. Later that same year, Shawn died unexpectedly from a heart attack at only eighteen years old.
Not long after his death, strange things reportedly began happening around Punahou’s athletic facilities. Locker doors slammed when nobody appeared to be nearby. Washing machines opened on their own. Laundry that had been inside somehow ended up on the floor. For people who had known Shawn, the activity was strangely familiar because these were exactly the kinds of things he had done while he was alive. Punahou even preserved an account involving one of the school’s campus ghost tours. As a teacher stood near the gym telling a group of students about Shawn, a loud metallic sound suddenly came from somewhere nearby. The teacher and students all heard it, but no one could find anyone who could have caused it. If Shawn really did return to Punahou, he apparently didn’t come back to silently drift through the hallways. He came back and picked up where he left off.
A much more mysterious football spirit is said to haunt Iowa State University. The university has collected campus ghost stories involving apparitions, unexplained sounds, moving objects, and strange faces appearing in windows and mirrors. Buried among those stories is a brief but wonderfully creepy reference to a “football ghost” associated with Linden Hall who reportedly suits up on game days. Nobody seems to know exactly who he is, why he appears, or how the story began. His identity may have disappeared over the years, but the legend remained. While thousands of fans prepare for another fall football Saturday, somewhere on campus another player may still be getting ready for the game.
Footsteps Above the Top Floor
At North Carolina State University, the haunting became associated with a piece of the school’s football history that remained long after the stadium around it disappeared. Riddick Stadium served as the home of NC State football for decades. Eventually the stadium was gone, but Riddick Field House survived and later became home to the University Police Department. That was when officers working inside began reporting some very strange experiences.
They heard footsteps and unexplained noises coming from empty areas of the building and reportedly saw shadowy figures moving through the halls. One officer watched a dark figure move into a room and followed it, only to discover that the room was completely empty. Another officer working alone at around four in the morning reportedly began hearing strange static and noises coming through the intercom when there was nobody else there who should have been making them.
The creepiest reports, however, may have come from officers working on the second floor. They sometimes heard what sounded like someone walking around directly above them. There was just one problem: Riddick Field House was only two stories tall. Imagine sitting inside an old building in the middle of the night, listening to footsteps slowly crossing the ceiling above your head while knowing there is no floor up there and no person who should possibly be walking over you.
Riddick Field House was finally demolished in 2013. Whatever was responsible for those footsteps presumably disappeared with it.
Or at least that’s what everyone has to hope.
The Girl in the Prom Dress
Ghost stories involving dances have circulated for generations. One of the best known is Resurrection Mary, the mysterious young woman in a white dress reportedly seen along Archer Avenue near Resurrection Cemetery outside Chicago. In some versions of the legend, drivers pick her up only for their passenger to mysteriously disappear before reaching her destination. Stories like Mary’s are part of a much larger tradition involving young women, formal dresses, dances, and death.
But one story collected by the USC Digital Folklore Archives in 2013 brings that tradition into a school locker room.
According to the account, a teenage girl had a lacrosse game on the same night as her prom. There wouldn’t be enough time after the game to go home, shower, get dressed, and return for the dance, so she brought everything she needed with her and left it inside the school locker room. Her team won the game, and afterward, while everyone else was leaving, she returned to the locker room alone to get ready.
The room was dark, but she could see one tiny red light glowing inside. It was the light on her curling iron. The problem was that she hadn’t plugged it in.
As she approached it, she heard a girl’s voice somewhere in the darkness warning her not to touch it. She called out and tried the lights, but they wouldn’t come on. As her eyes adjusted, she realized there was another girl standing in the locker room with her. Strangely enough, the girl was also wearing a prom dress. She repeatedly warned her not to touch the curling iron because it was hot and would burn her.
Eventually, the encounter became unsettling enough that the student decided she didn’t need to get ready in that particular locker room after all. She gathered her dress and the rest of her belongings and left. As she did, the little red light on the curling iron went out, leaving the locker room completely dark.
According to the story, she returned to school the following day and was telling friends about the strange encounter when she saw a memorial for a former student named Beth James. Beth had supposedly died twenty years earlier on prom night during an electrical fire in the old gym.
Inside the memorial was a photograph.
The girl recognized her immediately. It was the same girl who had been standing with her in the dark locker room, warning her not to touch the curling iron.
Somebody Told Me: Holy Cross School in New Orleans
We end this episode with a Somebody Told Me story that came to Andi from someone who actually attended Holy Cross School in New Orleans. He was a student there from 1998 to 2002 and worked at the school during summers and outside school hours to help pay his tuition. The historic administration building had once been part of the school’s boarding facilities, and by the time he attended, students generally weren’t permitted on the fourth floor.
While working in the building, he and the other students sometimes heard huge crashes coming from upstairs. They would go investigate and find nothing that could explain the sounds. Even stranger were the old windows on the upper floor. Their counterweights had been removed, and years of paint had effectively sealed them shut. The students couldn’t simply open them for relief from the brutal Louisiana summer heat.
Yet on multiple occasions, they arrived upstairs to find those same heavy windows standing wide open.
He remembered that it could take two or three teenage boys to pull them back down. There were no functioning counterweights to hold them up, and when the students actually wanted to open the windows themselves, they couldn’t.
Maybe someone else thought they needed a little fresh air.
Haunted Homecoming
That brings us back to the strange thing about homecoming. It is a celebration built entirely around returning to a place you used to belong. Former athletes come back to the field, alumni wander through buildings they haven’t seen since they were kids, old photographs come out, and friends who haven’t seen one another in years find themselves sitting in the same stadium where they once spent their Friday nights.
Most of those people eventually leave again.
But if even a few of these stories are true, maybe not everyone who returns is quite so willing—or able—to go home.
Maybe Shawn Akina really does still slam lockers at Punahou because that’s exactly what he did when he was eighteen. Maybe an old Iowa State football player is still getting ready on game day. Maybe the strange activity at West Chester really does pick up when homecoming weekend rolls around. And maybe somewhere there is still a girl standing in a dark locker room in her prom dress, waiting to warn the next student who walks through the door.
Homecoming has always been about coming back.
According to some of these stories, there are former students who never left in the first place.
Listen to the full Haunted Homecoming episode of the You Two Scare Me Podcast for these stories, our reactions, and plenty more paranormal weirdness.
Have a paranormal experience of your own? Send your story to youtwoscaremepodcast@gmail.com for a chance to be featured in our Somebody Told Me segment.
Want to hear about more haunted schools?
Check out our episode on Haunted Penn State!
