Overview
The Faculty Club at the University of California, Berkeley, was built in 1902 to Bernard Maybeck's design, a redwood Arts and Crafts hall in a wooded glade of Strawberry Creek, its great hall hung with heraldry and its upstairs keeping a few guest rooms from the era when bachelor professors lived in; the campus's cherished ghost story belongs to one of them — Henry Morse Stephens, the beloved history professor who resided at the club for years until his death in 1919, and whose room later guests made famous. In the best-told account from the 1970s, a visiting scholar woke to a professorial figure regarding him kindly; staff and guests since have described footsteps in the upper corridor, a presence in the Stephens room, doors and lights misbehaving and murmurs in the empty great hall. The club treats the story with donnish affection. It remains a working club and events venue — access is for members, guests and functions, not tours. These accounts should be presented as campus telling around a real and fondly remembered resident, light and hedged.