Haunted Morristown

Morristown College


417 N. James St Morristown 37814, This 52-acre, late-Victorian campus is perched on a hill in the middle of Morristown. Most of the college buildings have fallen into disrepair, with broken windows and deteriorating facades. One building was burned in 2008, due to arson. A second building burned in October 2010, cause unknown. This is an extremely active paranormal site with structures ranging from Dormitories, the Cafeteria, Gymnasium, Administrative Building and multiple classroom structures. Although the stories are endless about this property, many people who have been beneath the Gymnasium and into the underground corridors of locker rooms report seeing large men follow and appear within close distances. A few stories have even involved violent activity. Most people who know the property will not step foot beneath the Gymnasium because of the active spirits.

In 1881, the Methodist Episcopal Church founded Morristown College, a historically African American two-year institution of higher education, located in Morristown, the seat of Hamblen County, Tennessee. Prior to the civil rights movement, the college held the distinction of being one of only two institutions in East Tennessee for African Americans, the other being Knox College, founded in 1875. Although Morristown College was officially founded in 1881, Almyra H. Stearns, a New Jersey missionary, planted the seed for the school twelve years earlier when she moved south to start a small Freedman’s Bureau grammar school for recently emancipated blacks in the same general area where the later college stood. By 1881, the Methodist Episcopal Church decided to expand Stearns’s school into a seminary and normal school to supply ministers for black Methodist congregations and teachers for black schools.

The church appointed Judson S. Hill, a twenty-seven-year-old pastor and missionary from Trenton, New Jersey, to be the first president.

Hill’s death in 1931, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression, brought dramatic changes to the college. After two years of searching, the Board of Schools of the Methodist Church selected Edward C. Paustin as the new president. During his three-year tenure, Paustin changed the direction of the school from industrial training to a more traditional liberal arts education. It is likely that the expense of maintaining the shops during a time of economic crisis drove some of these policies. Despite his efforts, Paustin was unable to turn the school around financially and he resigned in 1937. J. W. Haywood, Morristown’s first black president, succeeded Paustin and managed the college for seven years.

In 1944, Miller W. Boyd became the first Morristown College alumnus to become president of the institution. He sought funding for the school by establishing relationships with Morristown’s business community and instituting financial support from alumni. Through his efforts, enrollment rose to 435, the largest in the school’s history, and the college’s finances improved. In the fall of 1952, Boyd died and his wife, Mary Whitten, served as interim president for the remainder of the year. H. L. Dickason succeeded Whitten in 1953.

After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, African Americans were able to attend previously all-white, state-supported colleges and universities. As a result, Morristown College found it increasingly difficult to compete with the larger public institutions that could offer cheaper tuition and received state and federal funds. Over the next twenty years, the college continued to struggle financially. In 1989, Knoxville College acquired Morristown and began operating it as a junior college. But Knoxville College also had its challenges, and it closed the Morristown College in the mid-1990s. This property is privately owned.