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Reported

They call her Vera — and on the Pacific University campus, that name carries real weight after dark. Legend says she was a music student, mid-song upstairs in Knight Hall, when she rushed to meet her boyfriend and tumbled down the stairs, breaking her neck. Students swear she never quite left: a disembodied voice singing from an empty stage in Warner Hall, lights that respond to questions, cold drafts in locked rooms. Some say she isn't haunting a building at all — she's haunting the whole campus, and she's been listening the entire time.

Pacific University was founded in 1849, making it one of the oldest universities in the American West — and its crown jewel, Old College Hall, holds the title of oldest educational building west of the Mississippi. Knight Hall, the Victorian home at the center of the Vera legend, was built in 1879 for the university's first president, Sidney Harper Marsh, who died of tuberculosis before he could move in. The university annexed the house in 1944. The record is tidy enough: a president's dream deferred, a building repurposed. The folklore, as ever, filled in the rest.