The Samuel Alexander Building at the University of Manchester takes its name from Samuel Alexander, an Australian-born philosopher who held the university's chair of philosophy from 1893 until his retirement in 1925, and whose 1920 work Space, Time and Deity attempted an ambitious synthesis of philosophy with contemporary evolutionary and physical science. Alexander had already broken ground earlier in his career as the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college, and the university has commemorated him since 2007, when the building formerly known as Humanities Lime Grove was renamed in his honour; a bust of Alexander by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, presented to the university in 1925, stands in the entrance hall.
According to reports from teaching staff, Alexander's ghost has been seen in the building that now carries his name, with the sightings that have been specifically dated in the sources consulted for this entry clustering between 2008 and 2012, some seven decades after his death in 1938 and shortly after the 2007 renaming brought his name and likeness back into daily view around the building.
No individual witness is named, and no specific description of the reported apparition beyond its identification as Alexander himself has been traced for this entry, so this should be read as a piece of internal university folklore rather than a documented case, reflected in the single_report confidence given. It is nonetheless a distinctive example of a genuinely scholarly, comparatively modern ghost story, tied to a real historical figure with a well-documented career rather than to an unnamed servant or vague historical tragedy of the kind more common in this register.
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