Terrence Building

This entry exists because of a single edit, and the edit can be timed to the second. On 9 July 2024 at 15:23 UTC an editor signing as Wikiuser17 added 356 bytes to the English Wikipedia article on the Terrence Building, with no edit summary: one sentence ("The Terrence Building is considered to be one of the most haunted places in Rochester, New York by Rochester locals"), one footnote pointing at a commercial ghost-listicle consulted that same day, and the category "Reportedly haunted locations in New York (state)". This atlas is compiled by walking that category and its subcategories, and the category is the only reason the building is in it. On 1 October 2026 the article had 50 revisions, from its creation on 3 November 2021 to 11 June 2026. The word haunted appears in 10 of them, all from that edit onwards. Ghost, paranormal, spirit and apparition appear in none of the 50. As controls in the same sweep, hospital, patient and demolish each appear in all 50. The editor's contribution log is about western New York, the Buffalo Bills and military units. The cited page, "Most Haunted Places in Rochester, NY", was published in 2017 under the byline "admin" and sells ghost-hunt gift cards. Downloaded in full on 1 October 2026 it runs to 238,611 bytes, and the string Terrence appears in it zero times. Controls in the same file: haunted 387, Eastman 20, ghost 16, Rochester Psychiatric 5, Valentown 5. The place the page actually names as the city's most haunted is the Rochester Psychiatric Center, the hospital that is still open beside the tower. The footnote does not support the sentence it is attached to. The same editor had done the same thing seven months earlier to another building in this atlas, A.D. Oliver Middle School in Brockport: 15 December 2023, +336 bytes, no summary, one sentence about paranormal activity, one link to a site that publishes what visitors type into a box, and the same category. That one was deleted on 19 August 2026 by an editor whose summary read "remove user-generated source". This one is still standing. And the people who have actually been inside report nothing. The anonymous explorer whose 2013 account for RochesterSubway.com is the most widely read first-person text from inside the tower wrote: "I'm not one for paranormal experiences, but in several places in this building I felt a comfortable connection, as if the story of life in this vertical world was to be told." The photographer behind Freaktography, whose gallery is Wikipedia's own source for the tower's floor plan, uses the words ghost and haunted only in his site's navigation menu, naming other galleries; in the body of the page he debunks his own picture, explaining that a shape over a bed was a curtain flapping in the wind, and describing that same room as "most likely 100% a staged room". Tom Kirsch's history of the hospital on Opacity runs to 765 words with haunted, ghost and paranormal at zero and Rochester at 12. The Campus Times reporter who wrote the harshest account of the place in 2019 mentions no ghosts either. The belief itself is older than the edit. The comment thread under that same 2013 post runs for years, and on 2 May 2017 a commenter signing James Doyle wrote there: "I think the real reason that building has never been bought and rehabbed is because they're afraid that place is haunted, as do I." The 2024 edit moved that local feeling into an encyclopaedia, with a footnote that does not support it, and from there into gazetteers such as this one. The same thread also holds a first-hand memory of the building in use: on 4 July 2016 a commenter signing David wrote that his parents had put him there in 1969, that he left in 1973, that he had been on the children's ward, that everything was always locked, even the lifts, and that he would love to walk through it now. The ghost material that circulates today, with cold spots, moving shadows and feelings near the basement morgue, surfaces in a folklore blog post by M. A. Kleen of September 2025, fourteen months after the Wikipedia sentence, and even that post concedes that "detailed ghost encounters are rare" and calls the claims "vague yet persistent". Two smaller claims in circulation do not hold. The Wikipedia statement that the tower was "one of the largest mental health facilities built in the United States" carries no source and does not survive arithmetic: it held about 1,000 to 1,100 beds, while Pilgrim State Hospital, in the same state and the same decade, held 13,875 patients in 1954. And the published measurements disagree with one another: 15, 16 or 17 floors; 160, 204 or 221 feet; 1165 or 1201 Elmwood Avenue; completed in 1957 or 1958 and opened in 1959. Kleen's post also names a 24-year-old patient found dead in a fourth-floor seclusion room on 3 January 1989, and cites for it a Democrat and Chronicle report of 6 January 1989 by Craig Gordon, "Possible suicide at psych center under review". The newspaper's 1989 issues are held by Newspapers.com, a subscription archive; the report was not read for this entry, and the patient's name is not repeated here. What the reporting that can be read does document is neglect. The Campus Times reporter wrote in 2019 that one blog's claims of torture and rape by security staff have "no credible record", and that the accounts available, including those of former patients, "speak only to the effects of their subpar, neglectful treatment".