Living With Emily Local Haunt: Lees-McRae By Leigh Ann Henion The ghost that haunts Tate Dormitory and the Lees-McRae library in Banner Elk has many different stories of how she came to be, but her name is Emily. That much everyone agrees upon. Tate Dormitory on the Lees-McRae campus was a community hospital before it was a residence hall for college students. It served physically and mentally ill people. Many patients were healed of their ailments, others died within the hospitals walls. However peaceful their exit, each patient left. Except for Emily — or, was she a nurse? Did she die of natural causes or did she commit suicide? Was she a young girl or a woman? There are as many questions surrounding Emily as there are encounters of her existence. Rebekah Graham, a Lees-McRae alumnus, lived on the 4th floor of Tate Dormitory for two years. During her freshman year, an upper-class friend told her about Emily. “It’s a story that’s kind of passed down,” she said of the tale. During her college career, Graham heard two different stories as to how Emily came to live in Tate. “I heard she was a nurse and I heard she was a patient, but in both stories, Emily jumped out the window,” Graham said. The story that portrays Emily as a suicidal young girl explains that she was a mental patient around 12 years old. The one in which she is a nurse depicts Emily as a caretaker driven to suicide by the madness of her patients. Lees McRae librarian, Donese Preswood, has heard yet another variation. After confirming with her co-workers, she said, “Emily supposedly died of tuberculosis. Supposedly she passed and didn’t want to go on. Her spirit stayed behind.” Preswood talks about Emily as if she was a real person, though she attached, “I don’t believe in Emily” to any comment she offered about the ghost. Disputing the legend, Preswood said, “I’ve worked in this library for 30 years, mostly evenings, and I’ve never had an encounter.” Though she’s known Emily’s story for many years, Preswood has never understood why Emily chose to haunt the library, or according to her non-believer status, why the legend has grown to include the library. Graham, recalling her student days, said matter-of-factly, “I think Emily likes to read.” One of Graham’s college friends had an encounter with Emily in which the ghost pulled a book off of the shelf, making it look like it had just jumped from the shelf and onto the floor. When the student looked closely at the book, he realized it was just the book he’d been scanning the stacks for. Graham herself has had personal encounters with Emily in Tate Dormitory. She specifically remembers one weekend when she stayed in the dorm alone when all of the other residents went home for the weekend. “I woke up and heard someone running up and down the hall and I knew no one else was in the building,” Graham recalled. The experience made Graham attach her belief in Emily to the story of her as a little girl. “She’s playful – always moving stuff around, closing doors, turning on lights and running around all the time. Like a child.” Encounters such as this inspire many students to uncover more of Emily’s history. Every few years, Preswood helps a student interested in researching Emily’s lineage. “We’ve had some students that want to look at records to prove her existence. But we don’t really have many records from the hospital,” Preswood explained. And so the oral history and the haunted happenings remain the only proof of Emily’s existence. Preswood remains a steadfast non-believer, but sitting in the library, surrounded by books that some claim to pop off of shelves, she said, “Maybe my last day of work she’s going to come in to prove she’s real. Maybe she’ll say, ‘You should have believed in me’”. Schools, like hospitals, are transient places. It’s been two years since Graham graduated from Lees-McRae and four since she lived in Tate Dormitory. She still visits the campus from time to time, but her friends have all graduated, she said, “Everyone I knew has moved on by now.” Everyone except for Emily.