History & local legend
Merion Hall is Bryn Mawr College’s oldest residence hall, designed by Addison Hutton and completed in 1885, the year the college opened. Its ghost story centers on Lillian Vickers, a student who died there in a fire in 1901.
Contemporary newspaper reports described her death as an accident. A 2011 Philadelphia Inquirer article, drawing on a letter from college president M. Carey Thomas to Vickers’s father, reported a different account: Vickers had been experiencing serious distress and died by suicide.
Students have associated unexplained noises, power interruptions, and doors opening on their own with Vickers’s presence. The Inquirer interviewed Rachel Ohrenschall, then a Bryn Mawr junior, who recalled hearing a woman singing while walking through Merion with a friend. When they looked into the room where the voice seemed to originate, they found it empty.
