CFB ghost stories: Death Valley to Tennessee’s ‘Body Farm’

Welcome to school soccer’s scary season. Week 9 on All Hallows’ Eve.

When jack-o’-lanterns shall appear to be huge, leathery orange footballs. When a waning moon shall rise over stadiums stuffed with college students all hopped up on pumpkin spice lattes and marinated in cinnamon whisky, wearing right-out-of-the-bag costumes purchased off the rack of the Spirit Halloween that has already gone up within the vacated workplaces of their already fired head coach.

Whenever essentially the most horrifying day on the calendar falls on the identical perilous semi-late autumn Saturday when whole seasons, postseason hopes and, sure, gainful employment all grasp within the steadiness like a janky skeleton dangling from the ceiling of a dorm room, it is sufficient to make you go “Boo!” As within the even dozen gamers named Boo who’ve performed FBS soccer, from a pair of Boo Smiths (Southern Miss ’76 and Troy ’06) to present Colorado DB Boo Carter.

I see you @ETSUFootball. The Boo-caneers! https://t.co/zOW5flcWvM

— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) October 29, 2026

The historical past of school soccer is mobbed with the macabre. Just ask a kind of Boos, as in South Carolina operating again Boo Williams, who was a Gamecock within the Nineteen Nineties, not lengthy after a gaggle of followers employed a “magic man” to carry out a “chicken curse” exorcism within the car parking zone of Williams-Brice Stadium.

Archibald Thibeaux was a New Orleans native and self-described witch physician, full with a hat and face paint getup that seemed just like the Shadow Man from “The Princess and the Frog.” He crammed a black cauldron with hen feathers and a few type of orange mud, and because it all exploded, he loudly proclaimed, “Go back to where you belong!” And he completely meant up Interstate 26 to Clemson, thus his alternative of holistic hue for his powdery ingredient.

Clemson is the place Cemetery Hill sits simply exterior the stadium identified fittingly as Death Valley.

The graveyard formally generally known as Woodland Cemetery is immediately throughout from Memorial Stadium’s scholar ticket entrance. Imagine some frat man and his date on the finish of a protracted night time on The Hill spent sitting on the base of the Howard’s Rock pedestal (a stone introduced in from the precise Death Valley) as they stumble out of that gate postgame looking for to sober up, however as a substitute journey over a gravestone.

It’s an analogous spine-chilling scene in Tuscaloosa, the place Evergreen Cemetery is tucked right into a wooded space lower than 1,000 toes south of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Since 1841, the graveyard has contained those that rolled on to a celestial tide almost 90 years earlier than the Bear and Nick Saban’s residence stadium was constructed.

As for these houndstooth-wearing overserved college students attempting to get again to their residences, they may discover themselves misplaced among the many plots which have lately bought for as a lot as $32,000 (a reasonably whole lot for a Bama season ticket that lasts into the afterlife) and the place one gravestone teasingly terrorizes at present’s Tide fans with the inscription “Hi, thanks for stopping by!”

Hey, not less than Bama and Clemson preserve their our bodies exterior the constructing. The identical cannot be mentioned for Rocky Top, the place Tennessee’s famed forensics crew saved carcasses in sarcophagi beneath the Neyland Stadium grandstand starting within the Forties. What? You thought Kathy Bates was making that up in “The Blind Side”?

At one level, there have been greater than 1,000 skeletons housed in a classroom constructing atop of which the present visiting sideline grandstands have been constructed. They have been introduced in to be cleaned and studied after spending time in different states of decomposition at UT’s “Body Farm,” which takes donated our bodies and buries them in filth to examine how they — as in we — return to the earth after our souls have departed. When the Vol Navy glides in on recreation days, most of these boaters know when to maintain their noses as they go the hillside the place lots of these stays are being purposely rotted.

Vols legend Johnny Majors, who performed and coached within the corpse coliseum alongside the Tennessee River, acquired such a kick out of visiting groups being freaked out by Neyland’s tales from the crypt that he would use it to his benefit. At least as soon as, Majors requested {that a} bag of unsold concession stand frankfurters be tossed atop the motor that ran an ice cooler sitting exterior the stadium’s notoriously spartan guests locker room, and he made certain it was completed a full week forward of recreation day. When the recent canines went rotten, their stench could be blasted by means of the fan used to cool that locker room.

“It smelled like death,” Majors recalled years later. “And that was exactly the point.”

The college moved the skeletons out of the stadium in 2017 to a web site throughout campus, however do their gridiron ghosts stay?

Speaking of stadiums, a drainage building venture this summer time on the japanese facet of Johnson Hagood Stadium at The Citadel unearthed greater than 50 unmarked graves. And it wasn’t the primary time. Charleston, South Carolina, leaders constructed their metropolis’s soccer stadium in 1927 and knowingly did so atop Tower Hill Cemetery, the place greater than 26,000 Charlestonians have been buried throughout 23 acres beginning in 1841. Since shopping for the stadium in 1960, The Citadel has continued to uncover extra stays. In 2005, 341 our bodies, largely sailors and Confederate veterans, have been relocated and memorialized. Others have been moved as properly, however with out the identical formal ceremonies.

“They never moved the bodies. They just erased them,” native resident and Citadel alum Julie Bowling mentioned this summer time as 53 our bodies have been found and transferred. “Every few years, more are found.”

The northernmost Confederate States of America burial floor is in Madison, Wisconsin, only a quick stroll from Camp Randall Stadium. Before the positioning was the house of the Badgers, it was residence to a coaching facility the place greater than 90,000 troops ready to struggle within the Civil War. The camp housed almost 1,500 captured Confederates, 140 of whom died whereas being held at Camp Randall, then have been carried up the hill and interred on the nook of Monroe and Regent streets.

Thirty years later, the grounds began internet hosting soccer video games. Today, tailgaters and college students alike declare to see Southern troopers, nonetheless in uniform, marching round parking heaps and dormitories.

The residence of the defending nationwide champions, Indiana’s Memorial Stadium, is alleged to be routinely visited by the spirit of a scholar who in 1960 was found hanging from the west-side stadium rafters. His dying was dominated a suicide, however his household has lengthy argued it was foul play. Stadium staffers say he nonetheless seems in that part of the stands looking for the reality about his dying.

In the Little Apple, a former Kansas State participant identified solely as “Nick” suffered extreme accidents throughout an on-field observe incident. Nick was carried to a cafeteria subsequent to the stadium, the place he died. Today, it’s the web site of KSU’s Purple Masque Theatre, the place Nick is alleged to shake the seats, fiddle with fireplace extinguishers and not less than as soon as despatched a field floating throughout the room.

At Notre Dame, there are those that say they’ve additionally noticed a spirit, and it is a spirit who loved his spirits. George Gipp — sure, the “Win one for the Gipper” man — was the Fighting Irish’s first celebrity, and he was additionally a infamous ache in Knute Rockne’s neck as a result of he favored to sneak out and have an excellent time after hours. In 1920, the halfback died of pneumonia attributable to strep throat (antibiotics have been nonetheless a number of years away), and campus legend has it that he contracted the sickness sleeping on the step of Washington Hall, locked out as a result of he had missed curfew.

That’s not true, but it surely hasn’t stopped college students from claiming to have seen the Gipper’s ghost dashing by means of the halls of the Hall. Students and workers have reported phantom footsteps, mysterious music, unexplainable noises and even pleasant (however puzzling) pats on the again.

“I don’t remember any ghosts coming up and saying ‘Boo!’ during my time at Notre Dame,” Lou Holtz recalled when requested in regards to the Gipper apparition in 2021. “Some weeks he was the only one not booing me.”

From booers to Boomer, beneath the sector the place Oklahoma’s Sooner Schooner will roll out to face the Gamecocks on Halloween is buried a small casket holding the physique of Mex, OU’s unofficial canine mascot who was so beloved that when he died in 1928, the college canceled courses for 3 days.

Mex is much from the one canine to be gridiron entombed. At Sanford Stadium, the very tunnel the place the Dawgs enter to play between the hedges is lined by a mausoleum housing the stays of each Uga bulldog, full with their names, years of sideline service and championships gained on their scrunchy-faced watch.

And at Texas A&M, each Lady Reveille is laid to relaxation the place she will be able to keep watch over her Aggies. Their headstones line a raised, sloped space exterior the north finish zone of Kyle Field that was initially positioned so they may see contained in the stadium, however as soon as that space was closed off, the varsity put in an digital scoreboard in order that the First Ladies of Aggieland can keep up to date.

I now have this image in thoughts of Cal Naughton Jr. from “Talladega Nights.”

“It’s creepy, ain’t it?”

One should surprise if there was any Gig ‘Em consideration given to having the A&M scores delivered to the Reveilles by means of passenger pigeon … or relatively, passenger bat. Kyle Field is — and that is for actual — a “bat-friendly stadium” thanks to the 1000’s of Mexican free-tailed bats which have claimed the “Home of the 12th Man” as their residence because it opened in 1927. When the varsity tried to deter the flying mammals from holding up of their soccer residence (enjoyable reality: bat guano is tremendous costly to clear up), the furry flyers merely took over different campus buildings, together with dorms.

Down the street in Austin, a.okay.a. The Joker to A&M’s Batman, DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium hasn’t had as a lot of a difficulty with flying vermin taking over upside-down residence in Arch Manning’s digs. But anybody who has tried to stroll again to their resort after taking in a Horns recreation or taking in a single too many on Congress Avenue is all too properly conscious that you just’d higher watch your noggin. An estimated 1.5 million bats reside underneath the Congress Avenue Bridge, which spans a bit of the Colorado River known as Lady Bird Lake, they usually simply love to swoop down out of the darkness to buzz the towers of burnt orange followers as they stroll the streets of the Texas capital.

And when is the height bat viewing/ducking season in Austin? Why, October, after all.

But the all-time All Hallows’ Eve school soccer second belongs to the opposite venue generally known as Death Valley. That’s the place Billy Cannon unleashed his fabled “Halloween run,” an 89-yard punt return that helped his LSU Tigers defeat Ole Miss in a No. 1 vs. No. 3 Magnolia Bowl showdown. That play clinched the Heisman for Cannon, although that trophy additionally got here with a little bit of a Halloween curse. Cannon went on to endure authorized troubles, went to jail and at one level had his Heisman on show at a rib joint. Ultimately, he turned his life round and was re-embraced by his alma mater.

“What people thankfully forget about that ’59 team is that one week after the Halloween run, we were upset by Tennessee,” Cannon recalled in 2013, 5 years earlier than his dying. “The emotion of that Ole Miss game, it caught up with us.”

Talk about curses. Cannon’s assertion about ’59 sounds all too acquainted for the groups of 2026, who preserve following up huge, field-storming victories with huge, heartbreaking losses. See: Georgia beats Alabama, then loses to Auburn. Auburn beats Georgia, then loses to LSU. Tennessee beats Bama, then loses to South Carolina. BYU beats Notre Dame, then loses to UCF. The listing goes on and on, and on a Halloween Saturday in what has already been a haunted mansion of a school soccer season, who is aware of what fright may bounce out from behind the subsequent nook route to scare the CFP out of somebody.

This is, in any case, the game of Blue Devils, Demon Deacons, Pirates and no matter metaphysical mass Big Red is, who already kicked off this Halloween week by almost throwing down with a Delaware Blue Hen on Tuesday night time.

“My kids asked me once if I liked to go to haunted houses,” Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz mentioned over the summer time. “I told them I don’t need to do that. I’m a college football coach. That’s plenty scary enough.”