Seton Hill’s cemetery: do ghosts really linger there?

Not so far from here, a little boy waits in a corner, occasionally running like someone is chasing him, screaming all the while.
A woman forces a car to stop on the road so she can cross, but when the car’s driver looks for her, she has disappeared into the fog. None of this would be too out of the ordinary, except that these stories are not of ordinary people. They are rumors and tales of ghosts that inhabit Seton Hill University’s (SHU) own cemetery.


By Meredith Ponczak,
Contributor
Not so far from here, a little boy waits in a corner, occasionally running like someone is chasing him, screaming all the while.
A woman forces a car to stop on the road so she can cross, but when the car’s driver looks for her, she has disappeared into the fog. None of this would be too out of the ordinary, except that these stories are not of ordinary people. They are rumors and tales of ghosts that inhabit Seton Hill University’s (SHU) own cemetery.
The predominant gossip flying between students who have heard anything is that the cemetery is haunted by ghosts like the little boy, the woman who caused the car to stop in front of Brownlee Hall, and past sisters who have lived on the Hill.
The idea of men being buried on the campus of what was once a women’s college circulates throughout the student body. Headstones arranged in a peculiar circular shape raise questions as well.
The truth behind these rumors vary. For instance, no record of the burial of a young boy on Seton Hill property exists. The purported female phantom could be any of the cemetery’s inhabitants, of whom 785 are sisters. The remaining plots belong to former presidents of the college, such as Farrell Hall’s namesake Eileen Farrell, a Spanish professor named Hersilia Donis de Dardano, and a handful of men.
Yes, the cemetery does have men buried in it. Three of them – Monsignor William Granger Ryan, Rev. Daniel R. Sullivan, and Rev. J.A. Reeves – were presidents of Seton Hill College. Another reverend, N. Albanese, albeit not a president, was very close to the sisters and was thus buried in Seton Hill’s cemetery. The only two laymen buried there are Arthur Hutchinson and John Vasilchak, a carpenter and a watchman, who lived on the property.
Additionally, in 1895, the remains of those interred at the original mother house in Altoona were moved to Seton Hill. As for the arrangement of the headstones, they are circled as �each sister was allotted her own place in order of priority,� as noted in the book Mother Seton’s Sisters of Charity. According to Sister Mary Alma Vandervest, Seton Hill’s archivist, priority is the date the women entered the community, and they are then buried by seniority within these groupings. The first class of sisters are nearest to the central monument to Mother Aloysia Lowe.
Despite the legends surrounding the cemetery, Vandervest believes having the cemetery on campus is important. �[SHU] is the center of the community [of sisters] and since the mother house is just across the hill, this is still the center of the community. This way, the sisters are still buried at home,� Vandervest said.
Sister Louise Grundish, the archivist at Caritas Christi, said, �This is holy ground.�
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