By Tanner Huey, Reporter
MOUNT BERRY, Ga. – While it’s not surprising to find an abundance of legend and lore at a place as storied as Berry College, the resilience of tales with little basis in fact is a bit unexpected. Intrigued by the scary Berry traditions shared mostly as folklore, I determined to find out just how much historical fact there might be for these mostly tragic narratives.
So, hop on my metaphorical Berry ghost tour bus, and I’ll show you around.
Our first stop, naturally, is the Oak Hill & Martha Berry Museum, where we meet Agatha, a heartbroken collegiate who took her own life. Giving us the details is Emma-Louise Ramus, a public relations and marketing coordinator at the museum and a Communication major at Berry.
A student at Berry in the 1940’s, Agatha seemed to have a bright future ahead of her. She was in a romantic relationship with the boy she planned to marry. One snag: He had to safely return from fighting overseas in WWII.
You can guess where this story is headed. In the days before college let out for Christmas, in the fall of 1944, Agatha received a letter informing her that her fiancé had been killed in the D-Day invasion. Overtaken with grief, she ended her own life. But how?
One version of the story has her hanging herself in her dorm room in the connecting tower between East and West Mary on Berry’s Ford campus. That’s right, a ghost story with a woman in a tower.
Another version and the version preferred by the museum on their Haunted Berry Tour is that Agatha’s parents picked her up for Christmas break. Once home, she turned her father’s hunting rifle on herself.
“Berry has no evidence to support that she did kill herself here,” Ramus said. “But there’s also no evidence to support that she killed herself at her parents’ place. It wasn’t really written about back then.”
Some are convinced Agatha still haunts the tower and the Ford campus. Reports of hearing crying coming from the East Mary tower and of feeling cold rushes while walking the halls of Ford come from residents past and present.
I decided to dig into this ghost story a bit further, checking in with the archivist for Berry College, Michael O’Malley. Not only could we find a record establishing Agatha’s existence, we also have reason to doubt that the room where the supposed death took place was ever a student residence.
O’Malley showed me an article in the Campus Carrier student newspaper from October 1990 that features a Berry official telling the reporter that the “only purpose of the towers is to lead to the roof and mechanical equipment. Much of the space in the towers is empty for fire safety reasons,” he said. “It holds no mystery.”
The Green Lady
As long as we’re at Oak Hill, let’s ask Mackenna Johnson, a museum staff member and Berry student about one of Berry’s most enduring ghost stories, the Green Lady. Or, as it might more accurately be described, the Green Ladies.
According to Johnson, the seniors at the Martha Berry School for Girls used to wear a light green outfit. In the many reported sightings of the Green Lady, she’s wearing a tattered green dress. The ghost could be one of those seniors or she could be several – an amalgam.
At the root of this particular folktale is another love story.
Berry student Lindsey Elizabeth Will and her boyfriend decided to take a romantic, late-night bike ride along Stretch Road in 1987. Racing ahead, her boyfriend lost track of Will. Tracking back in darkness, he collided with her, causing a head injury that killed his love.
A memorial to Will in front of Memorial Library features a plaque that rather darkly reads, “Where Paths Cross and Minds Meet.” Ouch.
But, is Will the famous Green Lady? Allison Moore, director of community engagement and education at the museum, says she doesn’t think so.
“The first documented sighting of what we consider to be the Green Lady actually happened in 1984,” or three years before Will’s accident. “There have also been a couple of suicides on Stretch throughout the years.”
Bailey Casey, adult programs specialist at the museum and a creative writing major at Berry, says she might have a Green Lady sighting of her own.
“Mostly the experiences I’ve had are seeing things in the woods while I’m driving on Stretch,” she said. “Maybe it’s a deer, maybe it’s something else, but I’ll see things moving in the woods or I’ll see eyes in the woods.”
The Deer Man
No survey of Berry’s lore would be complete without at least one deer sighting. Obliging is the so-called Deer Man, subject of an urban legend. Deer Man is Berry’s version of a larger folkoric tradition, the NotDeer.
As a guide for one of Oak Hill’s Haunted History tours described it, a NotDeer “looks like a normal deer at first, but then you look a little closer and its legs are a little too long, its joints are all in the wrong spot, its eyes are facing forward instead of on the side, like a predator.” If you see one, the Tour’s advice is not to make eye contact.
“If you get a little too close to it or you look at it for a little too long it will stand on its hind legs, unhinge its jaw to rows of teeth, and pounce,” my guide told us.
My NotDeer research took me to the Paranormal Catalog, a website specializing in the cryptids and ghosts stories. According to the site, NotDeer are most commonly sighted in the Appalachian Mountains, and to spot them, look for “misshapen legs, the forward eyes of a predator or unusually large, pointy teeth.”
A more plausible explanation for the disfigurement and awkward movements of what eyewitnesses report is simply wildlife that is sick and deformed, according to the Catalog’s entry on NotDeer.
Another possibility is Chronic Wasting Disease, “an always fatal, contagious, neurological disease affecting deer species,” according to a webpage devoted to CWD.
Tales from the Archives
Our last stop is Memorial Library’s archive for three of Berry’s lesser known legends, beginning with the Story of Swafford. In 1927, Martha Berry hired a man by the name of “Mr. Swafford” to maintain the mountain campus. However, as archival records put it, “Over the years, Berry School children turned Swafford into more of a frightful legend than an industrious individual.”
The children at what was then Berry Academy would make jokes about Swafford terrorizing boys in the woods, and they started rumors of how Swafford would lead you back to is home and serve you for dinner. But, there is no factual basis for any of it.
Next is the Rumor of Ruth.
Ruth was the first dorm mother for Lemley Hall, a boys’ dorm in the late 1920’s and a co-ed dorm today. Since her death, Morton Lemley residents have reported seeing objects moved and electronics tampered with; some even say they were held down in their beds by some unseen force.
In Campus Carrier article from Oct. 20, 2005, Communication major Teresa Weimann said she and her roommate found bruising on the back of their legs, strangely in the same spot. Another student, Julia Middleton, reported knowing someone who claimed to have seen Ruth in the women’s bathroom.
“Many attribute this behavior to [Ruth’s] dislike of the changing culture and general disorder of the residence hall,” according to the article.
Our last bit of lore features a pony, specifically the ghost of one seen near the townhouses. Roany the Pony, also known as the Sunday School horse, was Martha Berry’s personal horse, used to transport her to teach Sunday school. She also rode atop Roany during Mountain Day until his death on Nov. 26, 1929 at the impossible age of 35 years old.
Buried outside the Ladd Center where a memorial marks the spot, Roany might still roam. Some say they have seen Roany early in the mornings on Sundays trotting down the street to Martha’s grave. There is nothing in fact to back this up; perhaps Roany’s tale tellers are simply horsing around.
That’s our tour. If you are interested in more, consider visiting the Berry College Digital Archives, the physical archives on the second floor of Memorial Library, and Oak Hill.