Jeffrey Dahmer's 'Haunting' Presence In The Halls Of Ohio State's Morrill Tower

Jeffrey Dahmer may not have been America's most prolific serial killer, and he's certainly not the most recent. But when the annals of American serial killer history are compiled, his may very well be the first chapter simply due to the gruesomeness of his crimes. That he may be America's most popular (and here "popularity" simply refers to how much space he occupies in our collective consciousness) serial killer is evidenced by the fact that he became big again in the summer-fall of 2022, with the release of the Netflix series "Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story."

Dahmer doesn't just live on in the popular consciousness, however. He is also rumored to "live on" (and the definition of "live" here is being used loosely, since he died 30 years ago) in a building at The Ohio State University. Specifically, according to campus newspaper The Lantern, rumor has it that he lived in a specific room in a specific dorm building, and students who have had the misfortune of being in or near that room — or even that building — have reported ghostly happenings, seemingly due to the incorporeal presence of the departed murderer.

Jeffrey Dahmer had already committed his first murder before he ever set foot on The Ohio State University campus, although that wouldn't be known for another couple of decades (via University District History). By the time he enrolled in 1978, he was also an alcoholic, living alone in his estranged parents' home and directionless. His parents, keen to see him do anything at all with his life, enrolled him at the venerable institution.

According to The Lantern, rumor has it that he lived in Morrill Tower, specifically in room 541 (University District History claims that it may have been either 540 or 541); although why that's rumor and not verifiable fact is unclear (perhaps OSU's student housing records don't date back to the Carter administration, or perhaps simply no one has thought to look). Dahmer's time at OSU was brief: Attending class was his lowest priority, at the bottom of the list after getting drunk and wandering aimlessly around town. After failing most of his classes and earning a GPA of .45, he was sent packing.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of students have passed through the doors of Morrill Hall since Jeffrey Dahmer might have briefly lived there. And at least a few have claimed that he never left.

For example, as The Lantern reports, a man named Trevor Thompkins was assigned to the dreaded Room 541, and he claims that the ghost of Dahmer tormented him in his sleep. "One night, I woke up and nearly yelled out because I thought someone was staring at me from my closet and was moving towards me," he said. Samantha Michalski doesn't report being tormented by the ghost directly but says that she and other students who passed through the building were well aware of the rumors. "I was told they shut down the 13th floor because it was so creepy to live on," she said, although The Lantern noted at the time (2013) that the 13th floor was open. The publication neither confirmed nor denied that it had ever been closed.

Dahmer isn't the only ghost believed to hang around OSU, according to the university's College of Arts and Sciences. For example, the ghost of a female student, purportedly murdered by a professor, allegedly haunts the fifth floor of Denney Hall. Similarly, "angry messages scrawled on scraps of paper" can supposedly be found in a certain elevator on campus, in which a female student was supposedly trapped for a night (but isn't rumored to have actually died there).