“The Ghost of Smith Hall”

By Christine Stoddard

The hall stood black and silent. All of the other girls and boys had
retreated to the warmth of their beds for their soothing beauty sleep.
They breathed calmly, in and out like normal, with dreams to spice up
their young heads. Only one remained awake but only because she
could never sleep.

Her name was Belle Weingarten. This night, she lied crumpled on the
floor in her great mass of a white nightgown. The diaphanous cloth
consumed her. From a distance, one would not have guessed that a
girl sat there at all. She appeared like a single heap of unwashed
sheets with her face buried into her cool thighs. But this pile of sheets
wept fiercely.

Belle had been crying so hard and so long that her hair had matted
itself to the tears smeared across her cheeks and chin. Her eyes, only
partially visible through her dark tresses, shone bright red. Her little
lips chapped and bled from the salt hitting them. Belle’s skin, so clear
and pale, appeared translucent. She was not like the other girls of
Smith Hall.

In fact, earlier in the evening when another student left her room to
use the bathroom, she did not stumble over Belle; she walked right
through the girl of the fairy glow. Belle, undisturbed, continued crying.

After a while, however, her eyes could cry no more, so she rested her
head in her lap. A spindly tree branch tapped the window at the end of
the corridor. It seemed right in rhythm with the girl’s sighs and sniffs.
Eventually Belle lifted her head and gazed out the window, at the
lightning brewing in the star-speckled sky. She shuddered at the sight
of each bolt that illuminated the heavens. Slowly, Belle pushed herself
off of the floor and wandered to the window to stare at the storm. She
fervently pressed herself to the glass.

The pelting rain and swirls of wind brought back a memory Belle knew
she’d never forget. It was the reason, after all, why she haunted this
hall. She closed her eyes and stepped into that fateful day exactly one
quarter of a century ago.

She and her sweetheart, Daschle, were quarreling in his room. She perched
herself on the edge of his bed and studied the hardwood floor while he
studied the cracks in the ceiling after a passionate argument. Both remained
tensely quiet until Belle dared to talk again.
“Really, I just wanted to--”

“Please, Belle.”

“We never even--”

“Don’t say anything anymore. Please just leave. I’m done.”

Belle gathered the belongings strewn across the bed, got up, and left without
a word. She slammed the door behind her to leave Daschle in peace and
went to find some peace of her own.

A few minutes later, Belle reached her own dorm and quickly bolted the door.
She did not want anyone to disturb her. She threw her coat, sketchbook, and
purse on her own bed and huddled up into a corner of the room. If she sat
there for an hour or two, the anger would dissipate, Belle told herself. She
began by diverting her thoughts but somehow her mind always returned to
her spat with Daschle. She couldn’t stand to seem him so upset, so defeated
looking.

So Belle pulled out the shoeboxes from under her bed, the ones containing
photos of her with Daschle, and flipped through them. They were all
Polaroids. Some had already begun to fade. At first Belle thought the little
sunlight she allowed into the room may have eaten colors but then she
noticed that only Daschle had faded. She appeared in full color, just like the
day the photos were taken. Belle shoved the photos back into the boxes and
decided she had sulked enough.

It was time to see Daschle, regardless of what he had said. By then, it was
the depth of night and the campus was desolate. The clouds lightly drizzled
the college town. The grass felt slippery beneath Belle’s fast feet.

The girl marched over to her sweetheart’s dorm, breathing heavily and
clenching and unclenching her fists. But just as she stepped into Daschle’s
building, the lights flashed out. She gasped. Then Belle felt for the handrail
and climbed up the stairs. Once she had tumbled onto Daschle’s floor, she
stretched out her arms like the unaided blind. Yet she quickly stopped when
she saw Daschle dancing at the end of the hall, haloed by the moonlight.

“Daschle!” she called but he did not respond. He just kept swinging around
and around. His arms thrashed about wildly; his head rocked back and forth.
His shoulders fell loose. It was a perturbed dance.

Belle started running toward her sweetheart until she shot straight through
the open window at the end of the hall. For Daschle was not in the hall at all
but rather beyond it. Nor did he dance. Daschle was not even alive. He
dangled from a noose of his own creation, a noose Belle had not seen in the
blackness of the stormy night.

Belle immediately became a jumble beneath Daschle’s hanging body, dead.

He hovered above her curled up self like a white angel; she, the sinner so
ashamed she could not bear to look at his holiness. And yet while Belle’s
physical self remained still, her spirit became lively. It sprang out from her
gray breast and embraced Daschle’s limp form in the rain. The spirit kissed
the cold cheeks and squeezed the cold hands. She said his name over and
over, summoning Daschle’s but it had already escaped. So until sunrise,
Belle’s spirit held onto Daschle’s frosty body.

When the spirit heard the other college students’ voices the next morning as
classes started, it retreated to Daschle’s former dormitory. It hid in the hall
broom closet so as not to be seen. Soon enough, someone noticed Belle and
Daschle’s bodies. Members all across campus started to crowd around the
cadavers of a promising young poet and a prolific illustrator.

“That’s the sickest art project I’ve ever seen,” one student murmured.

One of the professors called the police, who came a few minutes later. The
joint funeral followed three days later. Everyone wore black and ate cheese
cubes, like normal. No one discussed the strange deaths.

All this time, Belle’s spirit stayed in the dormitory. For a while, she rummaged
through Daschle’s things until his parents came to collect them. After that,
she moped around his room, dredging up any memory of him that she could.
Sometimes she heard echoes of the first time they made love. Occasionally
she heard their past quarrels but she tried her best to ignore them because
they reminded her of their relationship’s tragic end. Not once did she return
to her own room.

The main reason why Belle’s spirit so faithfully occupied Daschle’s dorm was
not for the reminders, however. As an artist, she was already a sentimental
creature. Rather, Belle’s spirit spent days and years and decades in Daschle’s
dorm in the hope that his spirit would one day return and she could
apologize. Then they would clasp hands and fly into the sky together.