As a frequent haunt for Edgar Allan Poe and a filming location for The Exorcist, Fordham boasts some genuinely spooky bona fides. But is it also home to actual ghosts? It depends on your source.
Blogs and social media often claim the Rose Hill campus is “haunted”—one college search site even called Fordham the most haunted university in the country. Students in past years have leaned into the lore, frightening their friends with tales of Fordham’s spirits on Rose Hill ghost tours. Mike Trerotola, PhD, would know: he was one of those tour guides as an undergrad.
The vice president and chief of staff doesn’t believe in ghosts, nor does he like Halloween. But as a member of the Rose Hill Society, which leads campus tours for prospective students, he participated in the ghost tours as a fun side project. (The student organization no longer offers them.)
“It’s mostly because I knew the stories. It’s like osmosis—you just collect these stories over time while you’re a student here,” Trerotola said.
He still has a document—it’s titled RHS Spooky Tour—containing all of the ghost stories he told as a guide to Fordham’s haunted side. But he also admits to going off script. “We would make things up on tours all the time!” he said.
There is at least a bit of truth in these supernatural tales, which speak to Fordham’s rich history and the origin stories of its buildings and schools. Below, Trerotola, a triple Ram, shared three of his favorites.
The Boy in Hughes
Before it became the undergraduate Gabelli School of Business, and before it was a filming location for The Exorcist, Hughes Hall was home to Fordham Prep from 1891 to 1972. It operated as a boarding school until 1920—and as the ghost story goes, a young boy who was a resident there asked his older brother to play ball with him. The brother refused, so the boy played ball by himself, throwing it against the hallway wall until it bounced down the stairwell. After he followed it—and fell to his death—he purportedly haunted Fordham Prep students, who could hear the sound of a bouncing ball and see the apparition of a young boy in the hall.
During ghost tours, Trerotola told students that you could also hear him saying, “Mommy, I want my mommy.”
“That was always a good one because you could whisper it,” Trerotola said with a laugh.
A Funny Feeling in Finlay
As the home of Fordham’s School of Medicine from 1913 to 1921, Finlay Hall’s lofted classrooms allowed students to observe their professors as they dissected cadavers below, said Trerotola. The medical school closed and Finlay became a residence hall known for its unique, loft-style rooms—and unsettling sensations. Students would complain of waking in the middle of the night to the feeling of their toes being “tagged” as if they were in a morgue, or having their sheets pulled over their heads, or people observing them from above. “Those are the stories that have been told over the years,” said Trerotola.
Backstage with Father Collins
Strange lighting, voices on the catwalks, and items mysteriously rearranged backstage are just a few of the things that have allegedly gone awry in Collins Auditorium. The mischief maker, said Trerotola, is rumored to be the ghost of the building’s namesake, former Fordham President John Collins, SJ.
“When I was a student, a lot of people in the theater program truly, truly believed these strange things happened because of him.”
