Weird Thingamagodgers! Another dispatch from the irritable bowels of the Deep South -

The Ghost of Callaway Hall

A little background on Columbus, Mississippi: the town was founded as a summer vacation spot for the wives and daughters of wealthy plantation owners – a shady, riverside retreat in which white, columned mansion after white, columned mansion were built up to loom over one another, each casting out a stark, boastful shadow of wealth across the green lawns and flowering magnolias. Columbus also had a private university, The Columbus Institute for Women – an all-girls teaching academy built less as an academic haven than as a cloistered safe deposit box for the sexually mature daughters of conservative cotton moguls. It was during the Civil War, when the school’s buildings were repurposed into ad hoc hospital wards for wounded Confederate soldiers, that the ghost story begins.

According to the tale, a beautiful woman named Mary arrived in Columbus with the intention of joining the war effort. While bleeding and feeding the fallen Grays, she met a requisitely dashing, handsome and physically compromised fighter, and quickly fell into the sort of mad, perfect love so common of characters in romantic comedies and tragic ghost stories. In short order, her man went back to war and died in combat, and Mary hauled herself six stories up to the top of the Callaway Hall clock tower and hanged herself.

These days, the campus is home to the Mississippi University for Women (known locally as “The W”), a public institution that’s name remained beautifully descriptive until 1982, when the Supreme Court decreed its gender-based admissions policies discriminatory, forcing the school to accept men. Despite the ruling, the college’s current male population hovers around 15%, and Callaway Hall remains an all-female dormitory. As for Mary – her lingering, lovelorn spirit has been known to weep and moan its way across the building, visit the rooms of sleeping Freshman and give the clock tower bell an bonus 13th ring when the hour hits midnight.

Now think on this: Prior to ’82, the university was stocked exclusively with crowds of locked-down, curfewed females defiantly dreaming of late-night dalliances parlayed into tender, dad-despised love affairs. The most popular course of study for these women? Nursing. In fact, The W has consistently boasted one of the strongest nursing programs in the state of Mississippi. Really, it’s almost hard to imagine a more appropriate haunt for the depressive specter of a Civil War nurse.

Maybe Mary did exist. Maybe she loved and lost and ultimately succumbed to passion-honed misery. Regardless, what she stands for now is something more than war-shattered ardor and antiquated medicine – truly, she’s the mascot of future love affairs, carried in the hearts of the smiling, hopeful soon-to-be nurses of a unified United States.

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