In preparation for the upcoming Halloween weekend, Simpson College students reflected on their own ghostly experiences on-campus.

Everyone involved with Simpson College knows or should know about Millie – the campus’s favorite ghost, and a few stories that involve her hauntings.

Mildred ‘Millie’ Hedges was a first-year student in 1935 from Scranton, Iowa. When Hedges was leaving class on the top floor of College Hall, formerly known as the Old Chapel, she fell over the staircase railing to her death and has haunted Simpson since.

Senior forensic science major Hannah Spencer has her own experience that she believes is evidence of Hedges’ continued presence on campus.

“I was sitting in Carver, and I was going to Kent to get a snack. It was probably 10 o’clock at night. I was walking by College Hall, and I saw all the lights in the Matthew Simpson Lecture Hall flickering crazily. Then they all just stopped, and it was dark. I was like, ‘Okay, that was weird.’ I went to Kent, got my snack and everything was fine. On my way back, they just started flickering again out of nowhere as I was walking by. It was just really creepy and threw off my whole night,” Spencer said.

Spencer said she didn’t know what to do, so she walked a bit faster and looked back after passing College Hall again to check for the lights, but nothing was happening. This experience made her believe in ghosts more.

“I believe in ghosts. There are way too many stories and incidents involving ghosts for them not to be real,” Spencer said.

The Simpsonian’s own Editor-in-Chief, Amelia Schafer, has her own paranormal campus story.

Schafer is a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and lived there in spring 2020 when students had to move off-campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schafer ended up being one of the last girls in the sorority to move out of the house that semester. The night that Schafer was packing up, she began to experience some paranormal activity in the house.

“I decided I was going to take a shower between packing, take a little bit of a break and relax. Everything was fine, and then I heard weird childlike laughter. I thought maybe the other girl hadn’t fully moved out yet, so when I got out [of the shower], I checked Snapchat and the snap map said she was in Des Moines. I texted her just in case the snap map was incorrect, and it wasn’t, she was in Des Moines, so I started to get a weird feeling,” Schafer said.