We all love a good ghost story, but brace yourself for a chilling tale of Harding’s very own ghost and legend. Introducing: Galloway Gertie. Various accounts of the Galloway Ghost litter haunted histories and supernatural stories of the south.
If you have never heard the tale of Gertie, here is a basic description commonly believed to be true. Legend has it that Gertie, a student at Harding (which at the time was still Galloway College) tragically fell down a dorm elevator shaft to her death. While the dorm has since been torn down, the same bricks were used to build the old music building, which is currently the Lee building. It is rumored that she still haunts these halls. Our very own Jim Johnson, director of student support services, tells his account of his own introduction to Gertie.
“In 2004 I accepted this job and they put me in the Lee building. I did not believe any of this initially. Having just moved in, I had no furniture in my office at the time, but my phone was hooked up, and out of the blue, my phone went crazy. It was a brand new phone, and then the speaker part came on. I did not touch it. I just walked in and there was this rasping sound and then my name. It was like Stephen King. My name went across the screen – hundreds of times – and I couldn’t get it to turn off. So I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and it did it again. So I just unplugged it and left the office. I called the phone company, Harding’s phone service, and they told me ‘Oh, it’s gotta be Gertie, she tends to mess with things.’ And I said, ‘I don’t need this today. My new boss in Washington D.C. is supposed to call today,’ and so I said ‘if you guys have done this on purpose, you will pay. God will find you. You’re gonna pay for that.’ But I really didn’t think much about it anymore. About two months later, my wife and I and a student were repainting the hallways and the building was locked up, and we ran out of paint. The student and I had not had supper, so my wife said ‘you just go on and get more paint and come back.’ When I got back, she was locked in my office, in a different part of the building, and I when I got to where she was, I said ‘What’s going on?’ She said, ‘the doors were opening and closing upstairs. I could hear somebody in the building. I hollered, but no one would come down.’ We finished painting the hallways, but I heard similar stories from other people after that.
Another time, when I came in the front door, the light, the fluorescent light right over where the hallways come across would flash, hundreds of times, very quickly. When I would step out from under it, it would all stop. So I called someone who used to work in the building years ago and I told her about the light. She said ‘oh, that’s just Gertie.’ And I said, ‘no,” and she said ‘Jim, is she only doing that for you? No one else has complained about the light flickering?’ I said ‘No, it’s just me.’ And she said, ‘Have they tried to repair it?’ and I said ‘yeah,’ and she said ‘it won’t matter.’ And I’m like, ‘sure.” So I walk in the next morning, after the guy had fixed it and it did it again. And it only did it when I went under that light.
Then, once when I was in the old band room on that side, (I was a club sponsor back then and we were all gathered together in that room) and everyone left, and I’m putting equipment in the old closet in the back, and I hear music. I hear the run of the piano and it’s this woman’s beautiful voice. All I thought was, ‘man, that is so pretty,’ but then I remembered that there are no more pianos in the building, and I was alone. And I did hear it. And it didn’t really scare me, but I definitely thought, ‘it’s time to go home.’ There were other things too…but those are some of my stories of Gertie. And it’s the truth. Now, how you explain it away, I don’t know. I think she liked us because we repainted and got new carpet.”
