Trace Phillips
Reporter
As the first state-supported college for women in America, Mississippi University for Women has a great deal of history in its campus. Established in 1884, it is not hard to imagine the stories and superstitions that have developed on this campus over the years.
From the well-known ghost of Callaway Hall to the myth that comes with the beautiful Ginkgo tree, the campus holds some very treasured legends. While many stories fade with time, students continue changing the narratives to keep the traditions alive.
“I don’t see it now, but somehow students figured out how to get up in the attic of Callaway, and occasionally, there is like a mannequin head that will appear up there,” said President Nora Miller, as she glanced out of office windows into Callaway Hall.
For as long as anyone can remember, students of The W have been captivated by the idea of the haunting of Callaway Hall. As the oldest building on campus, housing wounded soldiers during the Civil War, it’s not very hard to imagine where these stories come from. Although, as time goes on, stories have a way of evolving.
As the story goes today, supposedly the ghost is a woman named Mary who was a nurse during the Civil War. They say Mary fell in love with one of the soldiers she nursed back to health, and he never returned to her after the war. The tale suggests that Mary jumped from the clock tower in distress.
Looking back on the history of the construction of Callaway Hall, you will notice the clock tower wasn’t added until after the war ended and the state took control of the school. Although this disproves the proposition that the ghost is someone who jumped from the clock tower, many people over the years still claim the building is haunted.
Cheryl Birney, an alumna of The W, remembers a ghostly experience she had with a fellow student back in the mid-1960s. As she and her friend studied for an upcoming exam in Columbus Hall, their eyes would wander in and out the window toward Callaway Hall. All of the sudden, a light caught both of their eyes.
“We followed it from one end of the building all the way down,” explained Birney. “It was constant.
“There was no blinking.”
Birney explains the unnatural encounter by suggesting that if someone were to actually have been walking down the hallway with a light, it would have to blink in and out. This is because in between each of the windows that separate the dorms in Callaway Hall, there are walls. So, even if all of the dorm doors were open and someone was walking down the hall with a light, the light would need time to make it by the next dorms window before the flash struck again.
“There are questions that we are never going to know the answers to, so you might as well be open to the experience,” said Birney, who is now a pastor.
Some traditions developed later, and are less uncanny.
“When the Columbus Female Institute turned over its grounds to the state of Mississippi in 1884, the first thing the state of Mississippi did was to design and build a brand new academic building that was specifically designed for women students,” explained Dr. Bridget Pieschel, retired professor of English and former director of Women’s Studies and the center for Women’s Research and Public Policy at The W.
Dedicated specifically to women, the new building was topped with an owl, based on the sacred animal of the goddess of wisdom, Athena. Eventually, the owl would become The W’s school mascot.
“Early on, I think in the first five or six years of the school, girls started saying ‘if you can throw a penny up and hit the owl on the front of Orr Chapel you will pass your exams,’” explained Pieschel. “The idea, of course, is you’re offering a sacrifice to the owl, to Athena, to the goddess of wisdom, saying please, please give me the wisdom to pass these exams.”
At the start of the 19th century, The W and Mississippi State University received both Ginkgo trees as gifts from Japan. A female tree was planted on The W’s campus, across from the corner of Columbus Hall and Hastings-Simmons Hall, while the other tree was planted at MSU.
“They were symbolic of a growing cultural and economic opening up of Japan, really to the rest of the western world,” said Pieschel.
The legend behind these trees is that if a female student is under the tree at The W while a male student is under the tree at MSU and a Ginkgo leave falls on their shoulders at the same time, then they are destined to be together. Since all of the leaves fall from the tree in one day, the chances of this happening are not the best.
Pieschel says she believes it must have taken 20 to 30 years for students to have developed this superstition, considering it would have taken some time for the tree to actually grow large enough to stand under. However, she does recall first hearing the legend behind these leaves from her aunts who attended the university in the 1930s. As a student on campus in the 1970s, Pieschel remembers the legend more as a unifying tradition than a superstition.
“It was more kind of a fun thing when you heard on campus, ‘the leaves are falling, the leaves are falling!,’ and everybody runs at once because it’s a very beautiful and almost supernatural experience, when you’re standing under that tree with all those golden leaves falling,” explained Pieschel.
Even the main walking entrance to the university has developed a superstition over the years.
Memorial Gate was placed at the front of campus in commemoration of the class of 1920.
Pieschel says she thinks that students first formed the superstition that you should walk into the gate backwards to look like you were walking out of it. Initially, Pieschel says this symbolized “going on to bigger, better, more successful things.”
More than two decades later, erected by the Bernard Romans chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution on May 31, 1953, a boulder was placed on the campus of The W, right inside Memorial Gate. This boulder marked the site of the first state supported college for women in the United States.
Although it is difficult to pinpoint when Memorial Gate became known as Old Maids Gate and when the boulder got the name of Kissing Rock, we can assume it followed the placement of the boulder. In all likelihood, this was the turning point of the superstition.
The current tale with Old Maids Gate and Kissing Rock is that you have to walk through the gate backwards so you will not become an “Old Maid.” The Kissing Rock offers a redemption to this curse if you kiss the rock after walking through the gate incorrectly.
Laurie Teague, graduate of The W, remembers marching with her class to graduation through the Old Maids Gate in 1971. She explains how the majority of her class “whirled around and went out backward, laughing.”
Institutions with such a historical background thrive off their past and the tales that come with it. Although these different legends are important to the history of the W, over time the stories inevitably evolve, sometimes making them more of a tradition than a superstition, but no less part of the university’s culture.