Although it has been more than a century since dead bodies were regularly carried in and out of Adams Hall, recent renovations in the building have uncovered remnants from one of its past uses as home of the Maine School of Medicine.
As workers unravel the secrets of Adams' past, some can't help but wonder if the ghost stories about the building are true.
In 1820, when Maine became a state, a medical school was established at Bowdoin. Despite the closure of the school in 1920 and subsequent renovations, artifacts, including coffins, body tags, and undertaker certificates have been discovered during the course of this most recent renovation.
Construction workers, from Ouellet Associates, Inc., the construction company on site, have found death certificates attached to the underside of floorboards, which are actually made of excess coffin covers.
"Whenever the medical phase stopped and they renovated the space, they still had coffins or coffin covers that they used as lumber," said Dean Ouellet, the vice president of Oullet Associates, Inc. "The certificates of coffin lids, one from 1908, are pasted to the underside of the floor boards."
Workers have discovered the death certificates of a woman from Lewiston and a man from Bangor. According to Secretary of Development and College Relations John Cross, the corpses that arrived on the lab benches at the Maine School of Medicine had no next of kin or lacked the financial resources to have a burial. The bodies were sold to the school morgue by morticians who sought to recuperate losses incurred from embalming the bodies without compensation.
According to postcards, written by Guy Farrar from the class of 1910, to a Miss Flora Murch of South Paris, Maine, Adams Hall is where the Maine of School of Medicine stored its cadavers. In a postcard describing Adams Hall, Farrar wrote, "Adams Hall?here is where they keep the 'stiffs' in pickle. The only Freshman recitation here is hygiene."
The term "pickle," from Farrar's postcard, refers to how bodies were preserved for transport to the school. Cross said that most of the bodies originated from Maryland where grave robbing laws were less stringent.
Among the more grisly reminders of the building's past use as a medical school was an eyeball hook that some speculate was used to hoist bodies to fourth floor dissection labs.
"I think the dissections were done on the fourth floor for security reasons," Cross said.
However, Ouellet disagreed because the placement of the hook makes it unlikely that it would have lifted bodies to the fourth floor.
"There was one eyeball mounted in the roof of the stair tower, but the hook was too offset to lift the things up," Ouellet said.
According to Cross, none of these findings confirm a supernatural presence in Adams.
"The hook is not much of a ghost story. While it's gruesome, it doesn't necessarily mean ghosts," he said.
However, it remains unlikely that the rumors will disappear for lack of evidence.
"There have been occasions when facilities staff felt shoved, pushed, and tripped on the stairs," Cross admitted.