Adams basement. You can see the plaster-filled alcoves on the right
Access: Available when the building is open. Basement closed to the public.
Directions: From behind Massachusetts Hall, walk due east and on to the front doors of Adams
Hall.
GIS: 43° 54‘ 36.02“ N --- 69°
57‘ 39.98“ W
---Photos follow--
We now come to the centerpiece of the Bowdoin Haunted Tour: Adams Hall. No other building has such a rich history of the paranormal---and is it any wonder? From 1861 until 1920 Adams Hall was the home of the Maine Medical School, and as such had a steady stream of bodies being brought through its doors for dissection. Many of the bodies were shipped in from Maryland where, at the time, grave robbing laws were lax and an unscrupulous fellow could make a deal for quick cash from a doctor that didn't ask too many questions.
Step in through the main doors of Adams Hall and you enter a small foyer with a door to the basement to your left and a stairway just beyond leading to the upper floors. If you pass through the basement door, you will go down to where the cadavers were kept "in pickle" until they were ready for use. You can still see the alcoves (now plastered in) where the bodies were slid into the walls to be kept out of the way.
Take a few steps forward and you will see the stairs winding up above you. Take a look at the shape of the space around the stairs. Just perfect for hoisting a gurney! And that is just what they used to do. The dissection rooms were on the top floor of Adams and the bodies were hoisted up by a hook in the ceiling. You can still see the hook today if you look straight up to the top landing.
When Adams Hall was renovated in 2007 (sadly, removing forever a lot of its spooky charm), workers on the project made a gruesome discovery. When pulling up the floorboards on the top floor, they discovered that some of the boards were actually lids to the coffins that were used to ship their corpses!
Only a few years ago, the basement was accessible to the public and was used as a costume storage area for Pickard Theater and also contained a small study room. To get to the costume shop required walking past the cadaver walls in the dark before you could get to a light. A student went down one night to retrieve a costume and as she was heading towards the light switch, she saw just ahead of her a dark shape hunched over by the wall. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark so she could make sense of what she was seeing, but rather than clearing up, the figure continued to become less and less solid. She stayed long enough to watch it melt away into nothing and then turned around and ran back up the stairs and straight back to her room!
A few years before that, students were using the study room during one stormy night. In the middle of their session, there was a sudden clap of thunder and the building lost power. The students were instantly encased in complete darkness. As the students started groping their way towards the door, they were stopped by the appearance of a bluish-white light that kept bobbing back and forth by the doorway. The students watched in silence until the light finally faded and the power came back on.
One night about 30 years ago, an ambulance was seen pulling up outside of Adams Hall. As a custodian was wheeled out on a stretcher, he could be heard repeating over and over again: "I was pushed!" He had been found by a co-worker at the bottom of the stairs when he had been left alone in the building. Another custodian told how while vacuuming the third floor, his vacuum cleaner suddenly stopped. Thinking he must have accidentally jarred the plug from the outlet, he followed the cord back. When he got there the cord was firmly plugged-in. What's more, as he stood there, the vacuum cleaner suddenly jumped back to life, nearly causing the custodian to jump out of his skin!
On the third floor, only a few years ago, an employee was coming into her office late one night to finish a project. When she got to her door it was locked, so she got out her key and inserted it into the lock. No sooner had she done so then the entire door started shaking violently. Being a rather brave person, she went ahead and unlocked the door, thinking she was going to find one of her office mates inside playing a trick on her. When she opened the door, she found the office completely deserted. The project would have to wait, and she never worked in Adams after hours again!
And what about the top floor where the dissections actually occurred? Well, a person in facilities shared a story about that room that he couldn't explain. On this particular night a storm had cut power not to just Bowdoin but to all of Brunswick and Topsham as well. He had to come onto campus because back then, if they didn't shut off the power circuits in the buildings, then when the power came back on suddenly it would sometimes blow them out. He had just come from the basement where he had flipped the circuits and was heading for his truck when he looked back and saw a strange light coming from the window of the top floor. This made no sense to him because there was no power in the building---no power in the entire town! So what could be causing the light? Knowing Adams' reputation for the unusual, he decided he didn't really want to walk up five floors alone in the darkened building to check it out, and just drove home.
