NCSSM-Morganton sits atop a beautiful expanse of rolling hilltop, with stunning views of the distant South Mountains. It’s a place of hope and joy and dreams for the future. But all is not as it seems. Before NCSSM-Morganton and the state-owned facilities around it became what they are today, there was a time when they were very different versions of themselves. Some of that history remains . . . how shall we say this? It remains. . .  present.

Many thanks to Christy Davenport, an instructor of American Studies and Humanities at NCSSM-Morganton, who shared with us two tales from the past.

School is back in session for the ghosts of Goodwin Hall

Goodwin Hall, on the campus of NCSSM-Morganton, is brand new inside, and filled with modern, brightly lit classrooms and open floor-plan offices whose windows look out upon the distant mountains.

But there was a time when Goodwin Hall was something else. 

For years, Goodwin Hall was a senior dormitory for students from the North Carolina School for the Deaf, which to this day still occupies several buildings adjacent to NCSSM-Morganton. And buried deep beneath Goodwin Hall are the remains of an old, now-sealed tunnel that led across the hills from the School for the Deaf to nearby Broughton Hospital, a state-run psychiatric hospital that opened in 1883 under the name of the Western North Carolina Insane Asylum.

The tunnel linking the school and Broughton  was used primarily for utilities and occasionally the movement of goods between the campuses. But there are stories –  perhaps credible – of families with loved ones battling mental health challenges who, rather than face the stigma so often associated mental health in decades past, carried their loved one not to the psychiatric hospital, but to the steps of Goodwin Hall so they could be led below ground and shuttled unseen through the dimly-lit tunnel.

Who knows what kind of lingering energy still radiates from the past? Who knows what spirits rise up from the ends of the tunnel and makes their presence known above ground? Or what about the NCSD students who once called Goodwin home?

A coach and faculty member at NCSSM-Morganton thinks she encountered some of these forces – more than once – in Goodwin Hall.

Most shocking among her experiences was a moment that occurred on a cold January day in 2023 when NCSSM-Morganton was still in its infancy. Goodwin Hall was very quiet and often empty during that time. The faculty member entered their classroom, carrying her lunch with her, to prepare for an afternoon class. As she crossed the open room, something tripped her, sending her and her lunch to the floor. She looked around to see what had caused the fall.

There was nothing to be seen. No chair, no rugs, no cords, no anything to have caused a fall. Just a flat, open floor free of hazards.

She knew the stories surrounding Goodwin Hall’s history. “Real funny, guys,” she said.

A few short minutes later, a garbled, brief voice came through the intercom in the classroom as she sat alone. “Hello?” she said in response. 

Silence.

She wondered if someone was testing the intercom. But there had been no tests scheduled for the day. There could only be one explanation.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” she said.

Later that year, something trailed along behind her as she moved through Goodwin Hall. Again, she was alone in the quiet of the building. But as she walked, the sound of footsteps came from behind her. She turned to see who was there.

There was no one.

She resumed her walk, and there the sound was again, still behind her, scurrying back and forth across the hall, it seemed, as though running from one classroom to another to hide.

But the teacher in this tale is not the only one to have had unexplained experiences in Goodwin Hall. There are students at NCSSM-Morganton who say that late at night in the building they have been poked and had their hair lightly tugged by something unseen.

The faculty member thinks there’s nothing to fear. The energy she felt was that of a middle school prankster.

It leaves one to wonder: how long have these spirits beneath Goodwin Hall been waiting for new friends?

The Eller sisters

As playful as the spirits in Goodwin Hall may be, there are some not-so-happy stories from things that happened years ago that are within haunting distance of NCSSM-Morganton. Again, Broughton Hospital, the old Insane Asylum, lies at the heart of them.

One of the most prominent is that of the shocking deaths of 31-year-old twins Betty Jo and Bobbie Jean Eller.  

The Eller girls were admitted to Broughton Hospital for their second – and last – time in early spring of 1962. Psychiatrists diagnosed both women as schizophrenic, an illness that was drastically misunderstood at the time. 

On April 11, 1962, the Ellers sisters were separated into different wards at Broughton as part of their treatment plan, despite their desperate pleas to remain together. That evening, not long after midnight, a night nurse, whose grandson remains a local in Morganton, found Bobbie Jean dead in her bed with no apparent wounds or visible distress. The nurse ran to the neighboring ward to check on Betty Jo.

Betty Jo was dead, too. And without an obvious cause. 

Due to the mysterious nature of both deaths, the twins’ bloodwork was sent to the SBI for toxicology testing. Nothing was found with the lab work, nor the autopsies. The coroner serving Burke County suspected the “will not to live” triggered by their sudden separation as the cause of death, and he told this to local reporters.

 Though the official death certificates for both women listed “Ill Defined and Unknown Cause of Morbidity and Mortality” in all caps, the speculation of a documented paranormal death in Morganton became national news, though no answers were ever found. 

Perhaps the twins’ spirits remain at Broughton, reunited as they wished. And maybe – just maybe –  they are still together, peering down curiously from the Broughton turret onto the NCSSM-Morganton campus waiting for greater understanding of the connections between science and psychology? 

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NCSSM-Durham opened in 1980 in the abandoned remains of the old Watts Hospital, which opened in 1908. Though buildings have been added to the campus in the years since, the most iconic structures on campus date back well over one hundred years and once housed operating rooms and a newborn nursery and sick halls.

Bobby Jackson worked as a security guard at NCSSM for almost 30 years. Bobby is from Durham, and he remembers as a child when NCSSM was still the Watts Hospital where the sick went to be healed, the injured mended, and the afflicted cured.

But not everyone left the hospital as part of this realm.

In the decades Bobby Jackson patrolled NCSSM-Durham, he heard things.  And he  saw things. And he told us some of those stories. Here they are, in his own words.

The Lady in the Rain

You know, little brother, sometimes it’s kind of funny, how life puts you in a situation where when the day is done, and everything is quiet, and you just sit back and you  think back down through the years. What a different world it is when you’re a little boy to when you’re an old man. A lot of things you go through, some you can explain. Some you find out the answer to. But some you never do.

So, I was in that mood a while back. Things were quiet, the day was done, the news was over, and I just reared back in my chair, and my mind just went back, and I was thinking.

You know, I loved NCSSM. And I walked all over it. If I could pick any other place to go to work, I’d turn the job down. I loved the people, loved the place. But, let me tell you; when it was dead quiet there . . . . Strange things happened there that to this day, I can’t explain.  

It used to be that there was just one Campus Security officer on the whole campus. He watched 27 acres. That’s a hard thing to do for one man. He locked every door, he watched the fire panel. But we had a little brown Chevrolet station wagon up there that security used. I loved that little car. It had a digital radio clock. I thought that was the most fantastic thing I’d ever seen in my life. Look at that, the numbers are changing!

Late, late one particular night, it was raining. And when I say raining, I mean it was just like standing in the shower. And it was lightning. I’d never seen it like that. It was like 4th of July lightning.

Well, I’m security, so I had to make my rounds. I went and got the car. I decided I was going to sit out there in that little brown station wagon with that fancy digital clock in it and I’m going to watch the buildings from the car in case anybody comes through or tries to break in. I was facing Hill House and it was 2:22 in the morning, because of that little magical clock. It was 2:22 in the morning. It’s strange I remember that, but that was the time it was

Well, it was raining so hard. Sitting in that car was like sitting behind a waterfall. I mean water was running down the windshield just like a waterfall.

And then I saw something. I saw something come from around behind Hill House. And this something was white. It wasn’t floating or anything. And I spoke to it. 

Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself here. But this is where it gets strange, though.

I sat and watched that thing, and I said, “Oh, no! Man, one of our little sisters is trying to sneak out or something, you know what I mean? That’s the first thing goes through your mind. So, I sit there and watch it. Well, this female—I could tell it was a female—she had on a white dress come down to her knees, and she had a sweater on, and she was kind of holding the sweater up around her neck, and she was looking straight down at her feet, walking. And her hair was so wet. She had long hair and it was wet and it hung straight down in front of her.

And she was walking right straight toward me. I said to myself, “She’s coming straight to me!” 

Little brother, she came within two feet of that car I was sitting in. 

So, I cracked the window down. It was still raining so hard that I was getting little specks of rain on my glasses. I said, “Are you one of our students?” 

This lady stopped. Just like somebody threw the brakes on her.  She stopped, and she looked to her left at me, she just rolled her head over, and she was looking through her hair, and she said, “No. I’m not.” Then she looked back down at her feet, and she started walking down beside the building where the gym is.

Well, I said, “This is strange, this lady.” I start the car up, and I go around, and I see she’s walking down beside the PEC toward Maryland Avenue. And I’m following her real slow, watching her, you know, kind of right behind her. My headlights were at her feet. 

She turned the corner. I rolled up there to see which way she went around the corner, and, little brother, she was gone! That lady was not there. She was not on the grass, and she was not on the street. 

Right off to the side along Maryland Avenue there was a set of double doors on one of the school buildings. I said, “That lady had to go in that door. That door must have been unlocked.” So, I jumped out of the car, shone my flashlight up there and I go up there and I’m getting soaked down to the bone it was raining so hard and I hit that handle on that door.

And it was locked.

I shone the light all down Maryland Avenue and all around and I said, “She had to have gone in there. She had to. She didn’t have but three seconds around the corner before I could look.” So, I unlocked the door, and I went inside.

The floor was dry. No wet person had been in that door.

So, that’s one of those things I don’t know if there is an explanation. If there is, I would like to know it. Where did that woman go? What happened to that lady? And who was she? To this day, I would like to know.

The Little Girl Who Giggled

Back then in security at Science and Math, you had two main things. You did other things during your shift of course but it was built around two main things:  lockups and open-ups. And over a period of time, you’d work up a routine. You head from that door to this door, this door to that.

Okay. Now, my routine was coming down the tunnel through the basement of Watts Hall. I’d step in the door of the basement of Watts, and I’d walk down that hall and lock the door at Ground Reynolds. Then I would walk back up the hall and go through the assembly hall and check those doors. It was just the route that I took.

I got the notion that every once in a while I was hearing a little squeaking sound. It didn’t happen every night. It didn’t happen every month. But God, I worked there 28 years, so I had plenty of nights I worked, you know what I mean? But anyhow, I’d walk through there, and I kept noticing a little squeaking kind of sound, and I got to the place that whenever I did hear it, I would just stop right in the middle of the floor and listen. I even leaned up against the wall sometimes and listened for it. And I’d hear it again!

It sounded like it was coming from over near some doors and so I’d walk over there and look, I would open the doors, make sure nobody was there, and then I would just go on. I would say, “Well, it could be a loose belt on one of those electric motors in that mechanical room. It could be something in this elevator shaft right here making a noise.” And I was just trying to push it aside every way I could, trying to find out the reason. What is this noise?

So, like I said, over a period of time, I got to noticing this. And it got to sounding clearer and clearer and clearer once I started  listening for it. It sounded just like, to me—well, it makes cold chills run through me now—the first night I said, “No, that can’t be.” I said, “My imagination is going wild.” But you know, I said, “It sounds just like a little child giggling.”

But it wasn’t never nothing like it wanted to scare you. It wasn’t never nothing that wanted to harm you. It was just like they just wanted to let you know that they were there. And that’s all.

It got to the point that it only seemed to happen when I had my mind on something else, like the Dallas Cowboys or something, when it was the farthest thing from my mind. It’s like they knew this, and they wanted to make themselves known.

So, I would go through there on a regular basis, and I got to the place where I would just stop and lean up against the wall. And every now and then, I would hear it, and it was just a little giggle, a little squeaky giggle. 

That went on for a year or two, maybe longer. And then one night I was locking up again. I locked the ground floor, I locked the third floor, and I go to to lock up the second floor. Now, keep in mind I’d never heard that giggle nowhere else except in the basement right out in front of that elevator, never once. So, I got off the elevator on the second floor, and I started down that hallway to lock that door at the end of Reynolds’ long hallway. And I heard it. I heard that voice right then. I heard that little giggle.

I just stopped. I said, “Wow, that’s it again.” And it was just a little giggle. Not scary, not like it wanted to hurt me. I wasn’t scared of it at all. But I just stopped before I got to the hallway.

And, little brother, as I was standing there listening to that giggle, for some reason I looked up to my right, and there was this big black and white picture from when it was still Watts Hospital. And I looked straight at this one photograph, and in that photograph, there’s a little child sitting in a wheelchair. A little child sitting in a wheelchair covered up in a blanket, with a nurse standing there with her and all. 

And then it clicked. I said, “That’s her right there. That is my buddy sitting in the wheelchair right there.” And I just knew. I said, “I’m looking at her. That’s my little friend.”

So, after that, every time I would go by that picture in the daytime, I’d reach over and I would pat that little child in the wheelchair. I don’t know. That could be me doing a lot of unnecessary thinking, me doing a lot of wrong thinking. But like I said, sometimes when you get to be an old man and you look back on your life, and you’ve got time to really ponder about things, some things start fitting together.

But wait. There’s one more thing I need to tell about this story.

A while later, I got called up to the front desk. There was a guy, a little young man from Duke University and he was in some kind of class out there or something – I can’t remember what he called it – but it’s where they studied spirits or what not, supernatural stuff.  Now nobody had ever said nothing to him, nobody, about that little girl. Never, okay?

He wanted to know if he came back one night, would I be willing to escort him around? He had a briefcase with him, and he opened it up and showed me some kind of machine, and he said, “This picks up some kind of charge when this happens and that happens.” Well, I had no idea what he was talking about. No idea. And he had no idea he was talking to a complete idiot.

Anyway, so, we set up a time and a date. He came back by himself, and he had his little machine with him, and we walked around. And we picked up something in two places: The first was First Floor Reynolds. On First Floor Reynolds, he detected this whatever it was he said was causing this thing to go off.

But you know where the other place he detected it was? That’s right. In the basement of Watts where I’d first heard that little girl giggling. That’s exactly right. I was standing there with him, and when that little thing went, “Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,” cold chills run down my back. I said, “That’s my baby right there.”

 She’s just lonesome. She don’t want to hurt nobody. I don’t think she wants to scare nobody. She just wants to let them know that she’s there, you know?

And that’s a true story.

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