The Building the 1912 Fire Spared: Haunted Morrill Hall

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated November 10, 2026 · How we verify

Ask a student at the University of Maryland which building on the College Park campus is supposed to be haunted, and the answer tends to be the same one every time. The haunted Morrill Hall is the oldest continuously used academic building on the campus, a three-story survivor in a state where most of the surrounding structures are considerably younger, and the reason it is older than its neighbors is also the reason it attracts stories: fire took nearly everything else, and left this one standing.

What follows separates two things that often get blurred together. The building’s record is documented and specific. The ghost story attached to it is campus lore, passed along by students, and nothing in the available record supports it as fact.

Second Empire, $24,000, and the Fire That Took Everything Else

Morrill Hall was built in 1898 in the Second Empire architectural style for $24,000. Fourteen years later, the Great Fire of 1912 devastated almost all of campus, and Morrill Hall was the sole academic building left untouched by it. That single fact is the engine behind the building’s reputation. A structure that outlives a catastrophe tends to accumulate significance it did not ask for, and in student retellings, significance slides easily into the supernatural.

The building also had a feature worth noting for anyone picturing the campus as it was. In the years after its construction, Morrill Hall was noted for the view of the Washington Monument that could be seen from its cupola, a reminder of how little stood between College Park and the District at the turn of the century.

From Science Hall to Justin Morrill’s Name

It did not open under its current name. The building was originally known as Science Hall, and was later renamed for Senator Justin Morrill, father of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act, from which the university received funds in 1864. The land-grant connection is the institutional backbone of the place, and the name is a direct acknowledgment of it.

Its tenants have rotated steadily. Morrill Hall has housed numerous departments over the years, including the Zoology and Veterinary Science Departments. Today the three-story building holds a number of offices in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, among them the Center for American Politics and Citizenship. It most recently underwent a renovation in 2003, and it is currently being considered for addition to the Prince George’s County historic landmark list.

Civil War Ghosts: What Students Actually Say

Campus lore depicts the building as being haunted by ghosts of the American Civil War. That is the whole of it, and it is worth being blunt about how thin the claim is. There is no documented incident attached to the building, no named figure, no recorded death, and no catalog of specific encounters in the available record. The story is a general attribution rather than a set of reported events.

It is also chronologically awkward. The war ended more than three decades before the building went up in 1898, so any Civil War presence would have to be tied to the ground rather than the structure. Readers can weigh that for themselves. What can be said plainly is that the hall’s age, its survival of the 1912 fire, and its long run as a laboratory building for zoology and veterinary science give it exactly the atmosphere that campus ghost stories grow in.

Seeing Morrill Hall and the Quad Arboretum

This is a working academic building on an open university campus, not a tour site. The offices inside belong to the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences and are used by staff and students during the business day, so the respectful approach is to view the exterior and treat the interior as somebody’s workplace rather than an attraction.

The surrounding Morrill Quad is the better reason to linger. The Senior Gift of the Class of 2009 led to the establishment of an arboretum there, which makes the ground around the oldest academic building on campus a pleasant place to stand and look at the Second Empire roofline. Go for the architecture and the history. The ghosts, as far as the record goes, are a story students tell each other.

Address: University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland

See Morrill Hall for Yourself

Sources

• University of Maryland Timeline (Umd (official site))
• Morrill Hall Historical Marker
• Universal Halls
• 14 Spooky Sites at UMD (Umd (official site))
• University of Maryland, Newsletter to Students
• Wikipedia: Morrill Hall (University of Maryland)

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