Reciting Poetry After Death: The Berkeley Faculty Club Ghost

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 20, 2026 · How we verify

Tucked into a wooded fold of the University of California, Berkeley campus, a shingled clubhouse with a double fireplace and a long dining hall has collected more than a century of faculty gossip, and a good deal of it is about the dead. The Berkeley Faculty Club ghost most often named is Henry Morse Stephens, a history professor who lived in the building’s west wing and whose voice, students in California said afterward, carried out of his window long after he had stopped using it.

The orientation is simple. The Faculty Club is a private members’ club on the Berkeley campus, placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 under reference NPS-82000960, and also listed as a California Historical Landmark and in the California Register of Historical Resources. It sits on Faculty Glade beside Strawberry Creek, with lodging, dining, and event rooms inside.

Maybeck’s Great Hall and the Rooms That Grew Around It

The original structure went up in 1902 to designs by Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck in the American Craftsman style, and that first building survives as what is now the Great Hall. The footprint expanded considerably afterward. John Galen Howard added a lounge with a double fireplace to the south. Warren Perry designed the kitchen and dining rooms, later remodeled by W. S. Wellington. Artwork by Ray Boynton, Chiura Obata, and Jacques Schnier hangs in the meeting rooms and the main corridor.

One detail from the construction period is frequently folded into the ghost stories, though it belongs to the historical record rather than to legend: while Faculty Glade was being excavated ahead of construction, a variety of Ohlone artifacts and skeletons were uncovered. The sources connect that fact to the site’s history, not to any specific reported sighting, and it is worth keeping the two apart.

Henry Morse Stephens at the West Wing Window

Stephens is the figure the club’s own literature returns to. He lived in the west wing for over two decades until his death in 1919. According to A History of the Faculty Club by James Gilbert Paltridge, students reported hearing him reciting lines of poetry from his window. That is the shape of the account as it has been passed down: a secondhand student report, recorded in a club history, rather than a documented investigation. Stephens is also listed among the club’s notable members, alongside names including Clark Kerr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Phoebe Hearst, and the architect John Galen Howard.

Room 19 and the 1974 Berkeley Gazette Account

The best documented single incident has a name attached to it. In March 1974, Noriyuki Tokuda, a professor from Keio University, told The Berkeley Gazette that while staying in Room 19 of the Faculty Club he had seen a “very gentlemanly” man sitting on a chair, watching him, while he was half asleep. Tokuda was told at the time that the room had been occupied for 36 years by a professor who died in March 1971. A copy of the Gazette article was framed and hung in the club’s offices, which is as close as the building comes to an official position on the matter.

The 2009 Sitting in the Spirit Tower

Later attempts have been less tidy. In 2009 a psychic medium visited the club’s Spirit Tower in the company of a journalism student. He failed to connect with the ghost of Professor Stephens. He did claim to interview a ghost affiliated with the 1920 football team, either the captain or the coach or both, who reportedly said he had died of pneumonia, criticized modern football, and closed with a hearty “Go Bears!” Readers can weigh that for themselves. It is a medium’s claim, not evidence.

What Gets Reported Inside the Club

The accounts are modest by haunted house standards and that is part of their appeal. Poetry heard from a window belonging to a man who had died. A composed, well mannered figure seated in a guest room at night. A medium’s conversation with a long dead athlete. No violent history, no mass casualty event, nothing that the club has ever claimed as verified. The stories have circulated among members for years, including persistent talk attached to particular guest rooms.

Getting Inside the Faculty Club

Membership is not casual. The club began as a dining association and then a gentleman’s club, and it permitted women only as honorary members or visitors until 1972, when members voted to “eliminate all discrimination against female membership in the club.” Women had been restricted from the main dining room until 1969. The Women’s Faculty Club, which opened in 1923, stands just to the east and maintains reciprocity today. Active membership is now open, subject to approval by the board of directors, to current and retired faculty along with researchers, administrators, and career staff connected to the University of California, with associate membership for UC alumni.

For everyone else, the practical news is better than the membership rules suggest. The present facility includes lodging, dining, conference rooms, and event space that are open to members and non-members alike, and the club has hosted weddings and receptions. The Berkeley campus grounds around Faculty Glade are public. Anyone hoping to spend a night in a guest room should book through the club directly and treat the place as what it is: a working private club with a historic landmark designation, not an attraction.

The Monks and the First Week of December

If you want the building at its liveliest rather than its quietest, the UC Monks, an organized men’s choir based at the Faculty Club since 1902, perform Christmas concerts to large audiences in the main dining room. Performances fall on the Thursday and Friday of the first week of December, with a formal sit-down dinner, carols, drinking songs, and a closing sing-along of Handel’s Messiah. Member tickets go on sale in late fall.

Address: Faculty Glade, University of California, Berkeley campus, Berkeley, California

Sources

• Alameda (Ca (official))
• Legacy of Chiura Obata, artist and former UC Berkeley professor, endures on campus (Universityofcalifornia (official site))
• Unsual Art CollectionAwaits at Faculty Club. Category: Page One from The Berkeley Daily Planet
• University of California: In Memoriam, 1988
• NPS #82004641: Approved NRHP nomination of the Berkeley Faculty Club (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Berkeley Faculty Club