Camp Columbia

From 1903 to 1989, this 600-acre site was Columbia University's rural summer campus, where engineering and surveying students got hands-on field training, at first living in tents. A 60-foot fieldstone water tower with an observation platform, built in 1942 and gifted by the Class of 1906, still stands along with the old boathouse and instrument house — the university itself once described it as "a land-locked lighthouse." Most other camp buildings were demolished after the state bought the property in 2000. Visitors to the tower and surrounding grounds describe an unusually strong, unsettled feeling, though no specific haunting has ever been documented here.