UF loves rankings. Best public university, best football program, best this or that. If there’s a category to compete in, UF wants to top it. For all its success, it quietly holds another distinction as one of the most haunted campuses in the country.
It isn’t surprising to hear the university has ghosts. All old places do.
But what’s striking is how quiet they’ve gotten. The same handful of stories — Old Steve in Thomas Hall, the girl in Beaty Towers, the children in Norman — year after year. It seems the dead stopped enrolling long ago. Students inherit these tales the way they inherit fight songs and campus mottos. Somewhere along the way, the superstition that once brought us new ghosts faded. What shifted them from a living folklore to just old myths? Or maybe the hauntings haven’t stopped at all; they just feel different now.
These tales have been passed down for decades, their details shifting with each retelling. UF Advancement cataloged some of the university’s most persistent legends in a 2021 article, “Campus Haunts.”
The ghosts at UF are as old as brick, and like all good ghost stories, they begin with a building. Norman Hall, built in the 1930s, is home to some of UF’s better-known ghost stories. Rumors say a group of children died in an elevator accident long ago and still wander the halls. Students have reported the sound of laughter and footsteps echoing through the corridors late at night. The ghost of a young girl is said to roam the third floor, leaving an icy chill wherever she goes. During the building’s 2020 renovation, the College of Education took the chance to clarify that there was no evidence an elevator accident ever occurred.
Earlier visitors spoke of a second-floor lounge with a hospital bed said to belong to the school nurse who never left. According to legend, if you made the bed at night and locked the door, the sheets would be rumpled and slept on by morning.
Thomas Hall, the university’s first building, opened in 1906 and once held dorms, classrooms and a dining hall. The kitchen belonged to an infamous cook named Old Steve, known for his noise and temper. Students say they can still hear him clanging pots in the basement at sunset. University historians traced the legend to a student prank meant to honor him. The real source of the sound was Thomas Hall’s aging radiator, keeping Old Steve’s racket alive.
Then there’s Beaty Towers, the twin dorms opened in 1967 as the university’s only high-rises. Legend says that not long after construction, a female student leapt to her death from one of the towers. The rumors contradict on why she jumped. In one, she was a student left heartbroken and pregnant. In another, she was convinced she could fly during an LSD trip.
Her ghost is said to wander the corridors, sometimes silent, sometimes sobbing, appearing in mirrors or rearranging objects in students’ rooms. The tale deepened when locals began linking her to Tom Petty’s hit song “American Girl.” Petty, who grew up in Gainesville, denied it repeatedly, calling the rumor “a huge urban myth down in Florida.” The dorm’s sealed windows make the story impossible, but the tale persists nonetheless.
UF hasn’t lost its ghosts — only the conditions that create them. College folklore doesn’t just come from being around for a long time. It grows out of boredom, curiosity, loneliness and communal spaces between strangers. Universities are designed to blur physical transience. Here, thousands arrive and thousands leave, but the buildings stay.
Ghost stories give those walls a sense of continuity. They let students believe a place can remember them. School ghosts tend to be a mirror of school spirit. Ironically, hauntings thrive wherever a campus feels most alive. Once, those hauntings helped stitch generations together.
The UF of today leaves little room for mystery. The lights stay on all night, every hallway has a camera and it feels like nothing creaks without an explanation. Without the darkness or downtime, there's no need to whisper stories to each other. Word travels too quickly for rumor to root. Before a story can settle into mystery, it’s already explained and ready to be forgotten.
It may sound like nostalgia talking, but students now scroll past stories instead of speculating. This is not a suggestion of some moral decline but a clear cultural shift. The conditions that made hauntings possible have been optimized out. What’s left isn’t superstition, only the quiet wish that something unexplainable might still happen here.
The ghosts haven’t vanished, they just fall quieter while the world grows louder. UF will always be haunted, just not by the unexplainable. Maybe that’s how these stories can survive — haunting the spaces between what we know and what we miss.
Dylan Santana is a 21-year-old UF media production, management and technology junior.
