With Halloween falling on a football Saturday, ESPN writer Ryan Mc Gee takes readers on a haunted trip to college football's spookiest places. Week 9 on All Hallows' Eve brings a season of scary stakes, from playoff hopes to coaching jobs, and the sport's history is full of the macabre.
One of the most colorful tales involves South Carolina running back Boo Williams in the 1990s. Not long after a group of fans hired a self-described witch doctor, Archibald Thibeaux of New Orleans, to perform a "chicken curse" exorcism in the parking lot of Williams-Brice Stadium, he filled a black cauldron with chicken feathers and orange dust and proclaimed, "Go back to where you belong!" His intended target was Clemson, the rival located up Interstate 26.
Clemson's Cemetery Hill sits just outside Memorial Stadium, known as Death Valley, and the Woodland Cemetery lies directly across from the student ticket entrance. Students stumbling out after a night game might trip over a headstone. In Tuscaloosa, Evergreen Cemetery, dating to 1841, sits less than 1,000 feet south of Bryant-Denny Stadium, where plots have sold for as much as $32,000. One headstone greets Alabama fans with the inscription "Hi, thanks for stopping by!"
The eeriest story may come from Knoxville. Beginning in the 1940s, Tennessee's forensics team kept skeletons in a classroom building beneath the Neyland Stadium grandstand. More than 1,000 skeletons were housed there after study at the university's "Body Farm," where donated bodies decompose in dirt to reveal how they return to the earth.
Source: ESPN General · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing