Peter Upon the Wall
It started out a banal summer morning on a small college campus in a small central Kentucky town. It was many summers ago and the campus was freshly emptied of students. As per routine, the housing and facilities teams were filtering through the dormitories, inspecting for damages and excess filth when they came upon Breckinridge Hall. Down the halls and up the stairs they opened each and every door until they happened across the door. Upon entering this room, their eyes shifted to the east wall where a detailed mural of a male face met their gaze. Regardless of where they stood, he tracked them, eyes complete with lashes and contour. They were watched. Every step. Every breath. Watched.
Enter Ann Young and Wayne King. ‘We got us the artist in here,’ Wayne quipped.[1] But it was no artist. Even on such a sunny day it became clear, this mural would not be exorcized from the wall. No amount of scrub-adub-dubbing would so much as smear the charcoal shadows. The solution: surely a fresh paint job would solve the problem.
The next day facilities set about casting the room in its predetermined off-white shell.
But the face was gone. Poof. Erased. But that was not that.
Psychics have since entered the building and emerged with solid conviction: Breck Hall is haunted by a spirit named Peter, a poltergeist but free of malicious intent. The narratives told between Young and King diverge here, among other places. For example, Ann says the psychic explained that Peter was an employee; Wayne says he was a student.[2] Documentation of Peter is elusive, yet he has established Breck as his permanent residence. Whether the stories align or not, he is an established ghost in one of the oldest buildings on the Centre College campus. Hesitant to resort to an entirely reductive rationale for Peter the Breck Ghost, it remains doubtless that the nature and history of the building itself has endowed it with enough ‘character’ to play host to such tales of the supernatural.
Built in 1892, Breckinridge Hall has witnessed over half of Centre’s past, even while owned and operated by the Danville Theological Seminary. Less than a decade passed after its construction before Centre acquired it. Since then, it has hosted classrooms, offices, World War II cadets, workers laying a gas pipeline, and Peter.[3] Whatever his precise connection to Breck, Peter would have been alive and associated with the building in the 1920’s, basing off Wayne King’s testimony.[4] Even before and divorced from Peter, however, Breck had a story to tell, a story that made it most opportune to host a ghost.
‘Breck’ Hall has been described by many a student and guest as something straight out of Halloweentown. It was originally constructed near the end of the Victorian Era when architectural revivals were in vogue. In Breck’s instance, my untrained eye might peg it as a muted Queen Anne Revival, with key features including asymmetry and contrast. Whether I surmise correctly or not, from the beginning this building had ‘ghostly’ potential. Since its construction, the building has been partially reconstructed a few times. Shortly after Centre College acquired it, for example, much of the building was engulfed in flames, verifiable on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map dated 1908.[5] The foundations of the building were stable enough but reconstructing the third floor and much of the second was of utmost necessity. It was from this point that the structure began morphing into an architectural creation of Victor Frankenstein, the perfect place for a ghost to linger.
Ironically, it is not the oldest parts of the building that have had the greatest connections to Peter. It has instead been that third floor where many oral histories concentrate, and many are at least tangentially related to the attic sitting just above. The attic, returning to Ann Young’s recollection, was where Peter lives ‘because he can look out over the campus and see everything.’[6] But Peter is a troublemaker up in the attic, just as he was in that room on that summer day. In a Centre 360 video, Wayne King recollects the times workers have gone up through the attic to the hatch leading to the roof. The hatch is usually secured by a chain, yet on many occasions, it was found completely unsecured when no foot traffic has been up there.[7] Centre College alumna and current Associate Dean and Director of Admissions, Pam Baughman, has no stories of her own, but she does recall fellow alumni in her network hearing noises from the attic.[8] Her acquaintances are not alone. These stories abound on campus, though it must be said that living on the third floor of Breckinridge Hall is no guarantee to hear any such noises. In fact, my interviewee, Valerie Mims, mentioned just how much she loved her room on third Breck: ‘I loved the third-floor room. Something about it was so—it was so comfortable. It just felt really comfortable there and really safe there.’[9] It is clear that though she was in close proximity to the attic (and experienced errant calls on her landline), her experience on the third floor did not affect her the way some students have been affected. But to many, the building remains creepy at the least, haunted at the most.
The story of Breckinridge Hall is overflowing with uncertainty. True, the construction itself never knew the Civil War as did Old Centre, but between its architectural style and experience with flame, its fate was hardly certain. Even its name remains unstable today, as its namesake Breckinridge family had undeniable connections to the Confederacy. Compounded with that, we can feel the spirits of those who spent their most vulnerable moments there, when the world seemed to be crashing down upon them. Either being sent to war, losing loved ones, fighting illness, battling financial shortfalls, or the simplest and most expected of all college experiences: failing an exam. During its time as a student dormitory, students would shut themselves in their rooms and allow themselves to fall apart, scattering bits of their souls into the wallpaper and the bone structure beyond. Breck Hall is now the keeper of their souls, their stories, their anxieties. And we feel them whenever we gaze upon the façade of the building, or enter the basement, or engage the tale of Peter Upon the Wall, whose story echoes the self-same uncertainty.
-Amanda Gosper
Endnotes
[1] Ann Young, interview by Madison Malloy, 13 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 06:35.
[2] Ibid., 10:58; Wayne King, interview by Mackenzie Conkling, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 02:05.
[3] ‘Breckinridge Hall,’ CentreCyclopedia. Accessed 20 January 2021. https://sc.centre.edu/ency/b/breckinridge_hall.html.
[4] Wayne King, interview by Mackenzie Conkling, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 02:05.
[5] Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danville, Boyle County, Kentucky, Sanborn Map Company, May 1908, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
[6] Ann Young, interview by Madison Malloy, 13 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 10:58.
[7] ‘Centre 360 Video with Wayne King,’ Ghosts at Centre College, Centre College, Danville, KY, 11:30.
[8] Pam Baughman, interview by Ella Aponte, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 18:11.
[9] Valerie Mims, interview by Amanda Gosper, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom, transcript, Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY, 07:32.
Bibliography
Baughman, Pam. Interview by Ella Aponte, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom. Transcript. Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY. https://centreghosts.omeka.net/items/show/16
‘Breckinridge Hall.’ CentreCyclopedia. Accessed 20 January 2021. https://sc.centre.edu/ency/b/breckinridge_hall.html
‘Centre 360 Video with Wayne King.’ Ghosts at Centre College. Accessed 25 January 2021, https://centreghosts.omeka.net/items/show/12
'Eccentric 1907.’ Centre College Digital Archives. Accessed 23 January 2021. https://centre.omeka.net/items/show/1128
King, Wayne. Interview by Mackenzie Conkling, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom. Transcript. Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY. https://centreghosts.omeka.net/items/show/19
Mims, Valerie. Interview by Amanda Gosper, 15 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom. Transcript. Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY. https://centreghosts.omeka.net/items/show/27
‘Old Centre 1916.’ Centre College Digital Archives. Accessed 23 January 2021. https://centre.omeka.net/items/show/1137
Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danville, Boyle County, Kentucky. Sanborn Map Company, May 1908. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn03155_005/
Young, Ann. Interview by Madison Malloy, 13 January 2021, oral history interview via Zoom. Transcript. Haunted American History: His 470, Centre College, Danville, KY. https://centreghosts.omeka.net/items/show/34