Berkeley Faculty Club

The story

The Faculty Club sits at the west end of Faculty Glade, a sloping lawn shaded by oaks and edged by Strawberry Creek in the heart of the University of California's Berkeley campus. It is a private members' club for university faculty and staff, and one of the oldest buildings on campus.

Long before the university existed, the Ohlone people camped in the glade, gathering acorns from its oaks in the fall, and buried their dead there. When the ground was dug for the clubhouse, workers turned up Native American tools, ornaments and other objects, along with human skeletons, according to the 1982 National Register nomination.

The club grew out of a faculty Dining Association which, in the words of founder and president Edmond O'Neill, offered "warm lunches at reasonable prices." Paid for by subscriptions from professors, the original clubhouse was designed by Bernard Maybeck and dedicated in September 1902. It began as an all-male dining and billiards club and was long known as the Men's Faculty Club. Maybeck's building predates the 1908 Howard Plan for the campus and follows the landscape rather than the formal axes laid out later. Its exterior is natural sand-colored plaster with redwood shingles on part of the upper walls, a Mission tile roof, heavy wooden corbels and projecting trellis beams, and arched openings that recall California's missions.

The building has more than doubled in size since then. John Galen Howard added a lounge with a double fireplace in 1903-04, Warren Perry added a kitchen and dining rooms in 1914 and 1925, later remodeled by W. S. Wellington, and further work followed in 1958-59, 1972 and 1977, when the foundation was replaced and Maybeck's Great Hall was bolted together and reinforced against earthquakes. The National Register nomination still judged the whole architecturally harmonious, a building that had grown organically.

The club has always offered lodging as well as meals. Its most famous resident was Henry Morse Stephens, a professor of history, who privately commissioned Maybeck to design a tower room over the north entrance and lived at the club from about 1902, under 17 years and not the "over two decades" Wikipedia gives, until his death in 1919 at 61. (Wikipedia places his rooms in the west wing; the nomination describes the tower.) Many rooms are named for famous members, including Clark Kerr, John Galen Howard, Wendell M. Latimer and Edward C. Tolman, and Berkeley's Arts Club, its Folk-lore Club and the selective History of Science Dinner Club have all met here. National Register listing came in 1982, and the club is also a California Historical Landmark.

The legend

The club's ghost stories revolve around Room 219, nicknamed the "Spirit Tower," and around its best-known resident. In A History of the Faculty Club, James Gilbert Paltridge records that students said they heard Henry Morse Stephens reciting poetry from his window. The book's date is not given in our sources, so it is unclear when that story first circulated.

The first dated account is from March 1974. Noriyuki Tokuda, a professor from Keio University in Japan who was staying at the club, told The Berkeley Gazette (in Richard Ramella's article "A haunting at the faculty club," March 19, 1974) that while half asleep he saw a "very gentlemanly" man sitting in a chair and watching him. Tokuda was described as having been a skeptic. He was told afterward that his room had been the home for 36 years of a professor who had died in March 1971. This is an important detail often lost in retellings: the 1974 ghost was not Stephens, but a much more recent resident whose name the sources do not give. Wikipedia also gives the room as Room 19 rather than 219, which may be a typo or a different room. The club framed a copy of the Gazette article and hung it in its offices. Dennis William Hauck included the club in his 1996 directory Haunted Places.

In 2009 a psychic medium, Charles Peden, spent time in Room 219 with a UC Berkeley journalism graduate student preparing a story for the campus radio station KALX. By the medium's own account on his blog, Stephens never showed up, but he claimed to have contacted a figure tied to the 1920 football team, either its captain or its coach, who said he had died of pneumonia, complained about the modern game and signed off with "Go Bears!" That claim rests on the medium alone. The Daily Californian revisited the stories in 2014.

No television investigation or skeptical study of the club was found, and the club itself makes no mention of ghosts on its website. What exists is a small, gentle body of campus lore: a resident professor who supposedly never left, and a courteous figure watching a visitor fall asleep.

What remains today

The Faculty Club is still in daily use, and Maybeck's original room survives as the Great Hall, now the dining room. It is the part of the building that has changed least. Eight columns built up from rough 2 x 10 boards carry half trusses that meet over the center of the room, creating a high open space without horizontal ties, an inventive solution that suggests Gothic timber framing. The walls are redwood board and batten, band-sawn trefoils decorate the gable, a huge hearth clad in matte-glazed tile fills the west wall, and the beam ends that poke into the room are roughly carved into dragons' heads. Artworks by Ray Boynton, Chiura Obata and Jacques Schnier hang in the meeting rooms and main corridor. Faculty Glade, which the nomination calls one of the loveliest landscaped settings on campus, still hosts receptions and graduation gatherings.

Visiting

The Faculty Club is a private members' club, not a public attraction, and we found no ghost tours. The club lists 23 hotel rooms and says it welcomes "all visitors who wish to dine with us"; check the club's website for its current rules. Please do not wander the corridors or try to reach Room 219 uninvited.

Anyone can enjoy the outside of the building from Faculty Glade on the campus grounds and take in Maybeck's plaster, shingles and tile roof against the oaks. The glade was an Ohlone camp and burial ground, so treat it with respect. The UC Berkeley campus around it includes other historic buildings from the same era, such as Sather Tower and the Hearst Greek Theatre.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #82004641 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #82004641) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : The Faculty Club at UC Berkeley — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Briones Valley, CA 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for San Francisco, CA 1895 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1895 · Public domain (USGS)
6. "A haunting at the faculty club" (Richard Ramella, 19 Mar 1974) — The Berkeley Gazette via Newspapers.com (not read directly)
7. "Ghost 'Hunting' at the Faculty Club at UC Berkeley with a Journalist for a Radio Story" (27 Oct 2009) — Charles Peden's blog — Charles Peden's blog (weak source
8. "History" — The Faculty Club, UC Berkeley (official site) — The Faculty Club, UC Berkeley (official site
9. Official website
10. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.