A snowy Burleson Hall scene from early in the spring semester (Abby Trembeczki/East Tennessean)

No one ever fully tells the story of dead girls, or more appropriately, dead women, as I’ve learned in my Women Authors class, which Instructor Danielle Byington teaches at ETSU. Sometimes, it’s not even an actual woman; it is the woman you read about in your favorite crime novel, that you watch in the murder mystery movie on Netflix or hear about in a true-crime podcast. The problem is not simply that she died, but how her story is told, and the parts untold, by its narrators. It is usually told through the lens of a male protagonist whose character arc depends on said dead girl. But what about her story? Does the ghost of her former self linger on and haunt the hallways? That’s the story often told about Christine Burleson, a woman whose father, David Sinclair Burleson, is the one for whom Burleson Hall is named.

As the hall receives its final touches on its interior renovation, it’s a fitting moment to revisit the legend surrounding it. According to campus lore, “her spirit has inhabited the portrait of her father…Students believe the eyes of the picture follow them as they walk by. It is believed the eyes are those of Christine Burleson.” While ghost stories are fun and exciting, they often overshadow the achievements and struggles of the person behind them, and in this case, the woman. It’s time to set the record straight about the remarkable woman who taught, not haunted, the students in her hallways years ago.

Dr. Robert Sawyer, professor emeritus of English, believes the ghost rumors stemmed from a play called Cancell’d Destiny by Pat Arnow, Christine Murdock and Steven Giles, which was shown at the Methodist Center on campus. “In the first 20 years following her death,” Sawyer explains, “there is no record of ghost stories or incidents related to Burleson.” When the play came out, however, the ghost stories started. While the endeavor was creative and perhaps well-intentioned, it overinflated aspects of Burleson’s life while undermining other parts of it.

Specifically, the play pins Burleson’s suicide on her inability to get published and a doomed romance with Pulitzer Prize winner T.S. Stribling, all the while shrouding Burleson’s achievements and contributions at ETSU.

“It was about 35 years between the breakup with Stribling and when she killed herself,” Sawyer notes. “Drama compresses time,” he adds, pointing out that the play failed to capture the extended period or the complexity of her life beyond the romantic relationship. Both Sawyer and Byington, recipients of Huffman Grant awards, have conducted extensive research on Burleson’s life and death by sifting through artifacts in the Archives of Appalachia, here at ETSU, and the Tennessee Archives in Nashville, where Stribling’s letters are located.

“Through the letters we traced between Christine and Stribling, we learned that she met him through her father, Dean Burleson,” Sawyer explains. “Stribling would go to Johnson City and go golfing with him. That’s how they started this long-distance letter romance.”

When Dr. Sawyer attempted to contact one of the playwrights in 2021 to express concern about how the play misrepresented Burleson, she reportedly hung up on him. But the question remains, what more can we learn about the real woman behind the overdramatization and residual lore?

While Christine Burleson never got published, she studied at Oxford, taught at ETSU for nearly forty years and became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Faculty Award. “She directed As You Like It at the Amphitheatre on campus,” Dr. Sawyer recalls, emphasizing her deep love of Shakespeare.

“She was really strong-willed and she did a lot of interesting things,” he adds. One of those was her insistence on fully experiencing Shakespeare–not just reading it. “She was adamant about getting funded to experience plays in person,” Dr. Sawyer highlights. “She asked for travel money to go to the renowned Antioch Shakespeare Festival in Ohio,” close to the northern edge of Appalachia, “to fully experience Shakespearean performance.”

In addition to Burleson’s life in academia, she also cared for her ailing father. As her health declined and she became dependent on a wheelchair, her sense of burdensome responsibility and limitation likely weighed heavily on her.

And yet–how can a dead woman, who died at home and loved to teach, be said to haunt the hallways on our campus? “She took great care preparing for her death,” Sawyer explains. “She tidied everything up in the bathroom and then sat in the tub before pulling the trigger. She was always worried about someone having to clean up after her.”

We may never know the full story of Christine Burleson’s life or her final decision, but we can choose how we remember her. She was a prominent teacher during ETSU’s beginning for four decades and was well-loved by her students. She deserves to be remembered not as a ghost but as a woman who shaped students’ lives, not haunted them.

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