Hughes Hall, Fordham University

This French Gothic structure is one of Fordham University’s original buildings. Hughes Hall can strike terror into the heart of anybody sitting for a final exam—particularly anybody who perhaps recognizes their surroundings from The Exorcist.

It was built for the growing institution once known as St. John’s, established by an Irish immigrant known as “Dagger John” Hughes, due to his sharp wit, sharper tongue, and piercing persona. A feisty champion of Catholicism (who later became archbishop of New York), he bought 100 acres at Rose Hill in the Fordham area of then Westchester County for less than $30,000 in 1839, though he later admitted that he had  secured it with “not so much as a penny to commence the payment.”

St. John’s opened its doors to a grand total of six students. The college had zero capable teachers and a series of failed presidents—so Dagger John happily sold it to the Jesuits. The ones who arrived were exiled French Jesuits who had been running a failing college in the wilderness of Kentucky and were desperate to move from frontier America. Suffice it to say, transforming St. John’s into Fordham University was a fraught transition, spread over several decades. In time, the college achieved visibility and respect, and in 1935, Hughes Hall was renamed for the man who had first gambled on its potential.

By the ’70s, the school had outgrown this vintage building and moved most of its classes to the more modern Lincoln Center Campus. Hughes Hall was primarily used for storage until the ’80s, when it became a dorm. During this shift, its basement was rented out for scenes from the cult classic The Exorcist, about a young girl possessed by demons. If being used as the set of a horror flick wasn’t enough, the building has seen multiple rumors and reports filed by people claiming to have glimpsed an apparition of a boy wandering the halls.

In 2009, the college raised hundreds of millions of dollars, with the largest contribution coming from Mario Gabelli, which resulted in the state-of-the-art Gabelli School of Business inhabiting Hughes Hall. It was gutted, with everything transformed other than the exterior. The changes were so extreme, one could argue they were trying to purge Dagger John’s looming spirit from the halls of the building.

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