A Mystery on Oyaron Hill: The Legend of Ira Babcock
For generations of Hartwick College students, Saxton Hall has been more than a residence hall. Since around 1970, students have passed along stories of Ira Babcock, a local man believed by some to haunt the building.
Babcock, a member of one of Oneonta’s founding families who lived from 1810 to 1840, had no known connection to Hartwick during his lifetime. According to campus legend, fraternity pledges in the late 1960s attempted to exhume his grave, only to flee before finishing the job. When they returned to their fraternity house, they allegedly found it vandalized, and a member who had stayed behind was babbling incoherently. Years later, after the house was condemned and its occupants moved to Saxton Hall, the story goes, Babcock’s spirit followed.
The late Hartwick professor Wendell Frye, who researched the legend in the 1980s, noted that students often described the apparition similarly: an elderly man with a long white beard, a red plaid shirt and brown pants, despite Babcock having been only 30 when he died. Frye later offered a more skeptical take during a campus Halloween event in 1991, suggesting that 90% of the stories were likely invented or the result of suggestion. But he left room for mystery: “However, the other ten percent – who knows?” Whether a ghost story, a product of campus imagination or something students prefer not to explain, the legend of Ira Babcock has endured as part of Hartwick’s lore.
Undated shot of the exterior of Saxton Hall, originally called Seneca Hall. It opened in the Fall of 1966 and was renamed Saxton in memory of Andrew B. Saxton of Oneonta through the generosity of his daughter, Anna Bernice Saxton, a Hartwick alum.
A photo from the June 4, 1966 dedication of Seneca Hall, the new women’s dorm. Rev. Charles E. Deitz ’42, member of the Board of Trustees, officiated the ceremony. The residence hall was renamed Saxton Hall shortly thereafter.
An undated picture of a bearded man without shoes, sitting on the edge of an upper Saxton window. Perhaps the photographer has unwittingly captured an image of Ira Babcock.
Likely dating from the 1970s, this image portrays a peaceful moment in Saxton’s lounge.
Students appear unconcerned with vengeful ghosts as they congregate at a Saxton party in 1970.
An image of Dr. Wendell Frye, professor of German at Hartwick College, who told the story of Saxton’s ghost at a campus Halloween event in 1991. At the time of his death in 2017, Frye was Hartwick’s longest-serving faculty member.
Photos are part of the collection in Hartwick College Paul F. Cooper, Jr. Archives.
