College football ghost stories, from Death Valley to Tennessee's 'Body Farm'

Welcome to college football's scary season. Week 9 on All Hallows' Eve. When jack-o'-lanterns shall look like big, leathery orange footballs. When a waning moon shall rise over stadiums filled with students all hopped up on pumpkin spice lattes and marinated in cinnamon whisky, dressed in right-out-of-the-bag costumes bought off the rack of the Spirit Halloween that has already gone up in the vacated offices of their already fired head coach. Whenever the most frightening day on the calendar falls on the same perilous semi-late autumn Saturday when entire seasons, postseason hopes and, yes, gainful employment all hang in the balance like a janky skeleton dangling from the ceiling of a dorm room, it's enough to make you go "Boo!" As in the even dozen players named Boo who have played FBS football, from a pair of Boo Smiths (Southern Miss '76 and Troy '06) to current Colorado DB Boo Carter. I see you @ETSUFootball. The Boo-caneers! https://t.co/zOW5flcWvM — Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) October 29, 2026 The history of college football is mobbed with the macabre. Just ask one of those Boos, as in South Carolina running back Boo Williams, who was a Gamecock in the 1990s, not long after a group of fans hired a "magic man" to perform a "chicken curse" exorcism in the parking lot of Williams-Brice Stadium. Archibald Thibeaux was a New Orleans native and self-described witch doctor, complete with a hat and face paint getup that looked like the Shadow Man from "The Princess and the Frog." He filled a black cauldron with chicken feathers and some sort of orange dust, and as it all exploded, he loudly proclaimed, "Go back to where you belong!" And he totally meant up Interstate 26 to Clemson, thus his choice of holistic hue for his powdery ingredient. Clemson is where Cemetery Hill sits just outside the stadium known fittingly as Death Valley. The graveyard officially known as Woodland Cemetery is directly across from Memorial Stadium's student ticket entrance. Imagine some frat guy and his date at the end of a long night on The Hill spent sitting at the base of the Howard's Rock pedestal (a stone brought in from the actual Death Valley) as they stumble out of that gate postgame seeking to sober up, but instead trip over a headstone. It's a similar spine-chilling scene in Tuscaloosa, where Evergreen Cemetery is tucked into a wooded area less than 1,000 feet south of Bryant-Denny Stadium. Since 1841, the graveyard has contained those who rolled on to a celestial tide nearly 90 years before the Bear and Nick Saban's home stadium was built. As for those houndstooth-wearing overserved students trying to get back to their apartments, they might find themselves lost among the plots that have recently sold for as much as $32,000 (a pretty good deal for a Bama season ticket that lasts into the afterlife) and where one headstone teasingly terrorizes today's Tide enthusiasts with the inscription "Hi, thanks for stopping by!" Hey, at least Bama and Clemson keep their bodies outside the building. The same can't be said for Rocky Top, where Tennessee's famed forensics team kept carcasses in sarcophagi beneath the Neyland Stadium grandstand beginning in the 1940s. What? You thought Kathy Bates was making that up in "The Blind Side"? At one point, there were more than 1,000 skeletons housed in a classroom building atop of which the current visiting sideline grandstands were constructed. They were brought in to be cleaned and studied after spending time in varied states of decomposition at UT's "Body Farm," which takes donated bodies and buries them in dirt to investigate how they -- as in we -- return to the earth after our souls have departed. When the Vol Navy glides in on game days, most of those boaters know when to hold their noses as they pass the hillside where many of those remains are being purposely rotted. Vols legend Johnny Majors, who played and coached in the corpse coliseum alongside the Tennessee River, got such a kick out of visiting teams being freaked out by Neyland's tales from the crypt that he would use it to his advantage. At least once, Majors requested that a bag of unsold concession stand frankfurters be tossed atop the motor that ran an ice cooler sitting outside the stadium's notoriously spartan visitors locker room, and he made sure it was done a full week ahead of game day. When the hot dogs went rotten, their stench would be blasted through the fan used to cool that locker room. "It smelled like death," Majors recalled years later. "And that was exactly the point." The university moved the skeletons out of the stadium in 2017 to a site across campus, but do their gridiron ghosts remain? Speaking of stadiums, a drainage construction project this summer on the eastern side of Johnson Hagood Stadium at The Citadel unearthed more than 50 unmarked graves. And it wasn't the first time. Charleston, South Carolina, leaders built their city's football stadium in 1927 and knowingly did so atop Tower Hill Cemetery, where more than 26,000 Charlestonians were buried across 23 acres starting in 1841. Since buying the stadium in 1960, The Citadel has continued to discover more remains. In 2005, 341 bodies, mostly sailors and Confederate veterans, were relocated and memorialized. Others were moved as well, but without the same formal ceremonies. "They never moved the bodies. They just erased them," local resident and Citadel alum Julie Bowling said this summer as 53 bodies were discovered and transferred. "Every few years, more are found." The northernmost Confederate States of America burial ground is in Madison, Wisconsin, just a short walk from Camp Randall Stadium. Before the site was the home of the Badgers, it was home to a training facility where more than 90,000 troops prepared to fight in the Civil War. The camp housed nearly 1,500 captured Confederates, 140 of whom died while being held at Camp Randall, then were carried up the hill and interred at the corner of Monroe and Regent streets. Thirty years later, the grounds started hosting football games. Today, tailgaters and students alike claim to see Southern soldiers, still in uniform, marching around parking lots and dormitories. The home of the defending national champions, Indiana's Memorial Stadium, is said to be routinely rattled by the revenant of a student who in 1960 was discovered hanging from the west-side stadium rafters. His death was ruled a suicide, but his family has long argued it was foul play. Stadium staffers say he still appears in that section of the stands seeking the truth about his death. In the Little Apple, a former Kansas State player known only as "Nick" suffered severe injuries during an on-field practice incident. Nick was carried to a cafeteria next to the stadium, where he died. Today, it is the site of KSU's Purple Masque Theatre, where Nick is said to shake the seats, fiddle with fire extinguishers and at least once sent a box floating across the room. At Notre Dame, there are those who say they have also spotted a spirit, and it's a spirit who enjoyed his spirits. George Gipp -- yes, the "Win one for the Gipper" guy -- was the Fighting Irish's first superstar, and he was also a notorious pain in Knute Rockne's neck because he liked to sneak out and have a good time after hours. In 1920, the halfback died of pneumonia caused by strep throat (antibiotics were still a few years away), and campus legend has it that he contracted the illness sleeping on the step of Washington Hall, locked out because he had missed curfew. That's not true, but it hasn't stopped students from claiming to have seen the Gipper's ghost dashing through the halls of the Hall. Students and staff have reported phantom footsteps, mysterious music, unexplainable noises and even friendly (but puzzling) pats on the back. "I don't remember any ghosts coming up and saying 'Boo!' during my time at Notre Dame," Lou Holtz recalled when asked about the Gipper apparition in 2021. "Some weeks he was the only one not booing me." From booers to Boomer, beneath the field where Oklahoma's Sooner Schooner will roll out to face the Gamecocks on Halloween is buried a small casket holding the body of Mex, OU's unofficial dog mascot who was so beloved that when he died in 1928, the university canceled classes for three days. Mex is far from the only canine to be gridiron entombed. At Sanford Stadium, the very tunnel where the Dawgs enter to play between the hedges is lined by a mausoleum housing the remains of every Uga bulldog, complete with their names, years of sideline service and championships won on their scrunchy-faced watch. And at Texas A&M, every Lady Reveille is laid to rest where she can keep an eye on her Aggies. Their headstones line a raised, sloped area outside the north end zone of Kyle Field that was originally positioned so they could see inside the stadium, but once that area was closed off, the school installed an electronic scoreboard so that the First Ladies of Aggieland can stay updated. I now have this picture in mind of Cal Naughton Jr. from "Talladega Nights." "It's creepy, ain't it?" One must wonder if there was any Gig 'Em consideration given to having the A&M scores delivered to the Reveilles by way of passenger pigeon ... or rather, passenger bat. Kyle Field is -- and this is for real -- a "bat-friendly stadium" thanks to the thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats that have claimed the "Home of the 12th Man" as their home since it opened in 1927. When the school tried to deter the flying mammals from holding up in their football home (fun fact: bat guano is super expensive to clean up), the furry flyers simply took over other campus buildings, including dorms. Down the road in Austin, a.k.a. The Joker to A&M's Batman, DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium hasn't had as much of an issue with flying vermin taking up upside-down residence in Arch Manning's digs. But anyone who has tried to walk back to their hotel after taking in a Horns game or taking in one too many on Congress Street is all too well aware that you'd better watch your noggin. An estimated 1.5 million bats live under the Congress Avenue Bridge that spans the Brazo River, and they just love to swoop down out of the darkness to buzz the towers of burnt orange fans as they stroll the streets of the Texas capital. And when is the peak bat viewing/ducking season in Austin? Why, October, of course. But the all-time All Hallows' Eve college football moment belongs to the other venue known as Death Valley. That's where 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, though that trophy also came with a bit of a Halloween curse. Cannon went on to suffer legal troubles, went to prison and at one point had his Heisman on display at a rib joint. Ultimately, he turned his life around 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, five years before his death. "The emotion of that Ole Miss game, it caught up with us." Talk about curses. Cannon's statement about '59 sounds all too familiar for the teams of 2026, who keep following up big, field-storming victories with big, 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 list goes on and on, and on a Halloween Saturday in what has already been a haunted mansion of a college football season, who knows what fright might jump out from behind the next corner route to scare the CFP out of someone. This is, after all, the sport of Blue Devils, Demon Deacons, Pirates and whatever metaphysical mass Big Red is, who already kicked off this Halloween week by nearly throwing down with a Delaware Blue Hen on Tuesday night. "My kids asked me once if I liked to go to haunted houses," Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz said over the summer. "I told them I don't need to do that. I'm a college football coach. That's plenty scary enough."