By Jane Lebak

Wellesley has a long history, and as any history buff knows, with history come ghosts.

Spooky happenings are a piece of any New England town: homes with questionable histories, weird disappearances, faces in windows, and houses that aren’t quite the same in daylight as by moonlight. Gather around the campfire and listen closely, because Wellesley is no different.

Take, for example, the Wellesley Inn, initially built in 1860. Stories grew about Room 18, a reportedly haunted bedroom where furniture moved and flowers mysteriously re-located into the hallways. The room had a “water closet” with a toilet operated by a pull-chain, but the water would be heard flushing even when no one was in the room. 

The Inn’s “Lafayette Lounge” also had its own spectral residents, with furniture shifting about and the occasional whiff of rosewater perfume where no one was standing.

Unfortunately, even spooky shivers were not enough to keep the Inn in business. It closed in 2005 and was demolished in 2006, taking its ghost stories with it.

Wellesley College has no shortage of ghost stories. Alumnae Hall, for example, has a basement theater called “the black box.” In that theater, some have reported seeing guests from another era, such as a man in a top hat, enjoying the performances. Still others have experienced glitches with the lighting during productions, or even full-on light shows.

The Beebe ghost is creatively named because it lives in Beebe Hall, supposedly on the sixth floor. This poses something of a problem, since according to the res life website and exterior photographs of the building, Beebe Hall has only five floors. Nevertheless, the rooms occupied by this ghostly black-clad woman are supposedly accessible through a trap door, so you’ll have to work hard for your haunting.

Wellesley’s “suicide suites” are a series of three rooms located in the base of Tower Court, and accessible only by tunnels. While these rooms are not used as dorms now, legend has it that every year, at least one student living in these suites would have committed suicide, or in some tellings, one student developed mental health issues and attempted to harm the others. Furniture would be reputedly moved around, and the custodial staff also reported oddities. Whether because of the odd location, the reputation, or the overall strangeness of the suites, they are locked and no longer accessible.

Perhaps capitalizing on the ghost stories, the College’s Guild of Carillonneurs, a student organization and ensemble of the music department, have hosted a Halloween Haunted Tower, allowing guests the experience of climbing the bell tower while listening to the echoing spooky tunes on the bells and enjoying the creepy Halloween décor.

Wellesley College isn’t alone in its hauntings. Renee Mallett’s book, Haunted Colleges and Universities of Massachusetts, includes a haunting from Babson College as well. According to Mallett, sounds of an otherworldly poker game have been heard by students in Bryant Hall, but whenever they go to investigate, no players can be found.

Another unusual connection to Babson is the distant Dogtown, reputedly haunted by witches who used to live there after the town’s abandonment in the mid 1800s. Today, visitors to Dogtown will see many boulders carved with strange motivational messages. These stones were commissioned by Babson College’s founder, Roger Ward Babson, to give work to unemployed stonecutters. But the stones themselves and their messages (such as “Help Mother” and “If work stops, values decay”) give a deliciously creepy feel.

In neighboring Weston, Regis College also has its own set of hauntings. On the second floor of College Hall, a former piano teacher can be spotted from the corner of your eye as you walk the halls. On the fourth floor, a religious sister is occasionally spotted in her full habit, with the rattle of rosary beads just barely perceptible.

With so many older buildings and historic stories, it’s no wonder ghost stories abound. Rock Ridge Road was a school for boys that burned to the ground in 1916, creating ripe ground for stories of spooks and ethereal sounds that can’t be tracked down. Is it haunted?

For modern-day haunting stories, Wellesley has its own creative talent in author Liz Sower. Sower began her podcast “Ghosts in the Burbs” back in 2016, crafting weird tales centered in Wellesley. Her website is https://www.ghostsintheburbs.com.

For Sower, Wellesley is the perfect setting for ghost stories. “ I blend in details from my real life, and many of the characters are amalgamations of people I’ve known or met. While the monsters and ghosts in them seem completely improbable, the characters are just real enough to make you question whether or not the story might be a little bit true.”

They are, however, fiction. Sowers’ most recent publication is the audiobook Lilith, “a Tale of Motherhood, Isolation, and Demonic Possession.”

Sower crafts her stories with a very “Wellesley” feel. “I’m leaning hard on that old writer’s advice ‘write what you know.’ I know horror because it has always been my favorite form of distraction. And I know family life in an intense social setting because I live it. So, there are demons and witches and monsters in these stories, but what I really love is imagining my neighbors’ reactions to the paranormal nightmares in their homes. For example, Jen simply can’t deal with Bloody Mary terrorizing her family right now because she has twenty women coming to her house on Tuesday for a trunk show for goodness sake... Hillary, Vanessa and Jill aren’t just the three witches who make PTO events dreadful, they’re the witches who trapped their best friend’s soul and used her energy to grant them wishes...”

For the town of Wellesley, the combination of the past and the everyday has brewed up these stories, whether fact or fiction. The routine life of a college dorm or an inn, a PTO meeting or an abandoned cemetery—these are what make history come alive, and perhaps keep it alive.