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Published October 19, 2009 08:55 am - Oct. 18, 2009 Following Florence The Haunted Seminary Hall tour at Northeastern State University features tales of its longtime principal, Florence Wilson. By BETTY RIDGE Press Special Writer
On a crisp, clear October night, in the dark of the moon, the imagination takes flight. Under the stately trees, a light flickers. Footsteps shuffle through newly-fallen leaves. A voice whispers, “Sssshhhh!” More than a century ago, Florence Wilson gazed from her Seminary Hall window down the hill to the young town of Tahlequah, pondering the future of the young women she mentored and nurtured within the stalwart walls of the Cherokee Female Seminary. Perhaps she still does. Or so some like to think. Many of the people taking the “Haunted Seminary Hall” tours Friday and Saturday nights certainly were open to the idea. And Bryan Jones, a graduate student in English, was all too eager to oblige as, carrying a lantern, he led the first tour Friday evening. “This was the institute and the home for the Cherokee girls’ school, before it became NSU,” he said, standing on the porch of the historic structure. Opened in 1889, it replaced the first Cherokee Female Seminary, built in Park Hill in 1851 as the first institution of higher education for women west of the Mississippi River. That building burned on Easter Sunday in 1887. Any discussion of the history of Seminary Hall, and the Female Seminary, has to include its longtime principal Florence Wilson. She lived and worked in Seminary Hall for much of her life. “The building looks mostly the same. The archway is original, the doors are original,” Jones said. “On the side of the building you can see some strange things.” While many of the architectural details are not visible in the dark, Jones pointed out traces of where a porch used to be, and a longer window near the west side of the front facade. That used to be a doorway to the chapel, a space now occupied by the writing lab. Then, there are some strange things that couldn’t be seen as he spoke. “People have seen a ball of light criss-crossing the building late at night in a fairly logical pattern,” he said. Like many of the odd tales surrounding Seminary Hall, this one has been attributed to Wilson. 
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