Built in the Gothic style with doorways that look like monster mouths, Hamilton looks like it ought to have a ghost or two and supposedly it does. Hamilton was erected in the early 1920s to provide office and clinic space for doctors and dentists affiliated with the new hospital. The building was first occupied in 1924 and was named after Dr. John Waterman Hamilton (1823-98), a prominent Columbus surgeon and one of the founders of the Ohio Medical College, the precursor to Ohio State University's College of Medicine.
Currently, the building is host to faculty laboratories and offices from a number of medical departments. There are also a couple large lecture halls in the building. The Department of Pathology has its office there and the Department of Anatomy is headquartered on the second floor. In the basement are the laboratories where medical students dissect cadavers to learn the intricacies of the human body. Many decades ago, the Ohio State equivalent of the Mütter Museum was housed on the 4th floor. A half-dozen skeletons hung from hooks near racks holding dozens of grinning skulls representing every race, religion, gender, and age. Display cases and shelves groaned under the weight of alcohol-filled specimen jars that were the final resting place for hundreds of organs, tumors, growths, deformities, and malformed fetuses. Those specimens are mostly gone now but maybe something lingers from those days...
Over the decades, occupants of Hamilton have reported all sorts of strange occurences. Elevators arrive and doors open when no one has summoned them. Gurneys roll by themselves on a level floor. Doors are opened and closed by unseen hands. Something misplaces small items from where their user left them or knocks them off tables and desks to watch them fall to the floor. The random and pointless actions seem like something calling out for attention--something trying to be noticed. Other people have reported feeling a presence when there is no one around. Riders on the south elevator say they have felt like someone is in the elevator with them when no one is there. Scientists and students working late nights in the building have become convinced that someone else is in the laboratory or office with them when there is demonstrably not another living soul around. Some people have said they get the feeling that someone is watching them. A very rare few have reported catching a glimpse--never more than a glimpse of something. Out of the corner of their eye, at the end of a long corridor, disappering around a corner, in an empty room as they pass by, a very few have said they witnessed the figure of a young woman, apparently a patient, face obscured by long dark hair, perhaps dressed in some kind of a hospital gown.
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