Florida State University - Cawthon Hall

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There is allegedly a poltergeist in the Cawthon Hall dormitory of Florida State University, in Tallahassee. According to the story, a female student was struck by lightning and killed on the roof in the 1940s. Since then, residents report objects moving all on their own, unexplained noises, and the unshakeable feeling that someone is standing right next to them when no one is.

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    Geographic Information

    Address:
    Cawthon Hall
    Tallahassee, FL 32304
    United States

    Get Directions »
    GPS:
    30.4424435, -84.2938921
    County:
    Leon County, Florida
    Nearest Towns:
    Tallahassee, FL (0.8 mi.)
    Woodville, FL (9.3 mi.)
    Midway, FL (10.2 mi.)
    Havana, FL (14.4 mi.)
    Lloyd, FL (16.4 mi.)
    Crawfordville, FL (19.0 mi.)
    Wacissa, FL (19.2 mi.)
    Quincy, FL (19.9 mi.)
    Calvary, GA (19.9 mi.)
    Saint Marks, FL (20.1 mi.)

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    Comments (5)

    1. summer of 2000 I stayed there and when I would be sleeping at night and want to wake up, it felt like someone was holding me down and this happen at least 5 times during that summer. I believe it is haunted.

    2. Everybody on campus knows this story, but part of it isn’t written here. They say that any picture of you and your friend you have on the wall will somehow get turned upside down. Also, the hauntings supposedly get worse each floor up you go. In fact, the 5th floor where the girl used to live got so bad, they closed it. To this day, it goes unused, but plenty of my friends have told me the elevator will still randomly go up to the 5th floor instead of resting on the 1st floor like it should.

    3. Never heard of this story. But I have heard a lot that there is a young Confederate Soldier that walks the campus. If you don’t know FSU was a C.S.A. training facility/camp before it became an all girl school before FSU. But if you ask me it still is an all girl school. Go Gators!!! lol Nothing like the Florida rivalry.

    4. My daughter lived in Cawthon Hall 22-23. The first weekend she was on campus, half of her floor had a mandatory off campus retreat. She was one of the first to return after the retreat and was eager to take a shower. When she opened the bathroom door, the shower was already on full blast! Everyone on the wing of her floor had been gone for two days, no one with a key had been around either. Residents call her Sara.

    5. I lived in Cawthon my freshman year in 2004-2005. My random roommate and I got along and were both excited about fsu but didn’t know anyone else who went there yet. We had eerie and unexplained things happen in our room almost immediately and incessantly. The ghost would move things and startle us when we were both there or when it was just one of us in the room. The weirdest was she would make electronics so strange things, like the time our game of BopIt kept sounding like someone was playing over and over. We weren’t near it and got annoyed then freaked out, especially when we picked it up to see how it was turned on and there weren’t any batteries in it. We decided her name was Catherine and wanted to learn about her, so we went to the library to find old yearbooks and campus newspapers. At this point, we hadn’t talked to anyone else about Catherine, so we had no idea about the haunted dorm and the lightning story. We found the filing cabinets with the old newspapers on microfiche but couldn’t get it open. It was stuck for no apparent reason. We asked for help from library staff who also couldn’t figure it out. We assumed that Catherine didn’t want us to pry into her story, and we left the library completely freaked out. Eventually we were feeling uneasy in our dorm room due to the constant presence, and I told a friend from home. She gave me the advice that ghosts don’t necessarily mean to frighten us and suggested I talk to Catherine. Next time I knew she was in the room with me, I simply said out loud that she was scaring me and asked her kindly not to. After that I felt at peace with Catherine and in our room. Ghost roommate? I should note that this was early internet days (I took a pc desktop to college and had to install a port in it to connect to the Ethernet), so our experience was really just between us roommates and not something that was influenced or inspired by others.

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