There is supposed to be a ghost living in South Mandelle in the tower room. Apparently a young women went up there one night when she was extremely distressed and upset. She went up to the top ramparts of the building and she was, I guess she was considering suicide.

But then she decided not to, so she started to go back into the dorm and found that the door she had entered the tower room with was locked, and she couldn’t get back into the dorm. She went out onto the ramparts and tried to call for help but no one came, and she thought that no one cared about her and subsequently did commit suicide up there, and they found her the next day. So now the room is locked and no one can go into it, and you can hear her wailing away some nights.

Told by Glenda Wilson, class of 1979

Another story of the Mandelles’ ghost:

Last semester one night the footsteps [of the ghost] followed me up three flights of stairs and down two corridors. Twice I stopped and turned around and went all the way down to where I started from to make sure there was no one there. Being barefoot, I know it wasn’t the echo of my own footsteps … And there was nothing there.

Told by an Anonymous resident in 1977.

A girl named Jane lived the fourth floor of South Mandelle in 1975. When she went to bed one night and turned off the light in here room, she saw a shadow blocking out the light from the hall that came under the crack of the door. The shadow moved away and then came back and stayed. The next night the shadow came back but when Jane opened the door there was nothing there. The next night the shadow returned and Jane sprang to the door and opened it, but again there was nothing there.

Jane had a roommate, Louise, whom Jane did not like much, and to whom she did not tell anything about the shadow. The strange thing was that at exactly the same time as these things were happening to Jane and she was relating them to Nina, strange things were also happening to her roommate Louise, as she told Nina.

Louise started having nightmares that she was committing suicide be jumping out the fourth floor window. In her nightmare, she would be falling through the air and she would see the sidewalk coming up at her. Thus the two girls, independently and without knowledge of what was happening to the other, both apparently had a visitation from the girl who once committed suicide on the fourth floor.

From the telling of “Nina” in 1977.

Supposedly at midnight or late at night if you’re in the living room [of North Mandelle] all of a sudden you hear this “tch, tch, tch, tch” from the [portrait of Mary Mandelle], and when you turn around the picture’s shaking her head. She’s wearing a lace cap and she takes off the cap and it’s almost as if the picture becomes three-dimensional. She begins rearranging her hair and sort of shaking her head like, “tch, well that’s better,” and pats it and puts the cap back on and becomes a picture again.

Told in 1977 by “Lisa Drake”

Last year around exam time there were a number of girls holding a séance in the living room of North Mandelle. Right after the séance the portrait of Mary Mandelle [for whom the building is named] which was hanging over the mantle fell off the wall and into the fireplace. The girls had a fire burning. The girls pulled the portrait out and snuffed out the flame. The girls called up Security, and maintenance brought it over to the art building. What the girls didn’t know was that Mary Mandelle had lived at the house on top of Prospect Hill, and she burnt alive with her house when it burned to the ground.

Told in 1977 by “Wendy Berant"

©Mount Holyoke College. Witten (1977), p. 6-8, 22-23. Webpage created and maintained by Nancy Birkrem. Last updated Oct. 10, 2001.