When All the Girls Are Sleeping

by Emily Arsenault

  Was there possibly someone else in the room with her? No one replied. So it seemed Taylor was just talking into her phone.

  She looked away from the camera, her brown hair falling over her face as her neck turned.

  She got up and staggered over to the window. Her face looked weird from the upward angle. Although the screen was blurred, I could hear the sound of blinds being raised. Taylor steadied the camera phone to focus out the window. You could see the lamppost that lit the walk outside Dearborn.

  I clenched my teeth and paused the video.

  I didn’t like seeing Taylor near that window.

  The window she eventually jumped from.

  The window that was open this morning.

  But I felt compelled to keep going.

  Next there was a faint sound on the video, like a sigh or a whisper. It felt like there were words in it, but I couldn’t make out what they were.

  The screen was jostled again, then blurred again.

  I heard a bang and a clatter. And then the camera seemed to be still, taking in a bright light, high ceiling, and cream-colored wall that I recognized as the hallway of Dearborn.

  And then for a whole minute the screen showed the empty hall. And then a minute more. There were six more minutes of the video. I skipped ahead. Still the empty hall. In the final seconds, there was the sound of a door groaning open. And Taylor came out of the bathroom, scooped up the phone, and stopped the camera.

  I closed my eyes. Above all else—even the scratches and whispers and the creepiness—it stunned me to watch someone in such swift and familiar motion and know she was, nonetheless, gone. And yet there was something about this Taylor that was unfamiliar. She seemed manic and frightened. I was used to Taylor being coolly detached.

  I restarted the video and watched the first minute again. I paused it a few seconds after she turned her light on. There was a black and aqua-blue object leaning against the wall near her window. Her new snowboard. We weren’t friends anymore when she’d bought it, but I’d seen her make a big show of carrying it into Dearborn from her car. When had that been? Two weeks before she died, maybe? Even less?

  I’d rolled my eyes at the sight because it was her second snowboard. The old one had been orange and pink. And she hardly ever used it. I’d always secretly thought she had no real interest in snowboarding—just liked for people to think she did. Or liked to waste money on snowboarding stuff. I’d seen a couple of unused bars of snowboard wax lying around her room.

  I felt a pang of guilt for having judged her. Because now it seemed a relatively small thing—throwing away some money, getting a little joy out of a spending spree before she died.

  I shook my head. There were only a few minutes left until my next class, so I opened up my email to Thatcher’s note and started to reply.

  Hi Thatcher,

  I am not sure what this is. Was there a time/day stamp on it? That would help.

  Because her new snowboard is in it, it must be January or early February of last year, right?

  All best,

  Haley

  I hit Send.

  I’d waited a week to open the video and now felt bad. Had it bothered him as much as it did me, and he was too polite to say so?

  There was some dispute about what happened to Taylor the night she died.

  The school administration essentially blamed her death on some “potent marijuana brownies” she’d been enjoying alone in her room. And there’s no disputing that the edibles were there, and that they were made with a generous amount of a very potent strain of weed. And the story was consistent with the picture most people had of Taylor by then. She broke a lot of rules. She’d been given a couple of chances after minor offenses—probably because her family gave a lot of money to the school, although no one wanted to admit that directly. She was kind of a loner at that point—she’d hung out with upperclass students most of her time at Dearborn, so she was a little bit at sea her senior year. Kind of like me this year. But she, unlike me, spent weekends visiting college friends.

  Those brownies—she’d possibly eaten more than one and then left a half-eaten piece on her desk—let the administration off the hook in a number of ways. There wasn’t really a significant drug culture at Windham-Farnswood per se, except for the occasional outlier like Taylor. But the pot brownie made it so there didn’t need to be a particularly thorough discussion of the suicidal possibility of Taylor’s jump. If they could reasonably claim she’d had a bad reaction to the brownie, then there wasn’t a suicidal tendency that staff or students could’ve perceived or reported. Never mind that pot isn’t LSD, and that people don’t usually leap out of windows after doing weed. It was a particularly potent edible, cooked up by her other brother’s college friend, and that was apparently close enough in the eyes of Windham-Farnswood’s conservative administration.

  How much of this explanation I believed came and went depending on the day, depending even on the time of day, how pessimistic I’d been feeling, how much sleep I’d gotten, how much light was coming in the window at any particular moment.

  And I certainly didn’t know how I felt now.

  5

  October 28, 2017

  WINDHAM STUDENT WEEKLY

  “Haunted Halls and White Nightgowns: Ghost Story Traditions at Windham-Farnswood Academy”

  BY BRITTANY FORD, ’20

  It’s that time of year again. Everyone’s planning their costumes for the annual haunted walk through the Upper Pond path, and the culminating party at the assistant dean’s house.

  But another spooky Windham tradition is, of course, its ghost stories, most often told about the three oldest buildings on campus—Mary Putnam Hall, Cole Auditorium, and Dearborn Hall.

  Students report feeling inexplicably cold sometimes in the Mary Putnam student lounge. And there’s the occasional flickering stage light in Cole Auditorium. But everyone knows that the vast majority of the ghost stories at Windham involve Dearborn Hall.

  Dearborn is the senior dorm and the oldest building on campus. It was built in 1879 as a gift to the school by Jonathan Dearborn, in honor of his wife, Sarah Dearborn, who had attended Windham in her youth. It was built in the style of the Elizabethan renaissance at his request. The architectural style of the building—with its high, stepped brick gables and mullioned windows—gives it a stereotypical “haunted castle” kind of look, which has probably helped maintain its reputation over the years.

  The most frequently told Dearborn story is that of the Winter Girl. The Winter Girl is a ghost who is said to haunt Dearborn—but only ever at the beginning of a new year. Legend has it that she must have died in January or February. As seniors return from holiday break each year, they can only try to prepare themselves for the Winter Girl’s late-night visits—sometimes it’s her humming or whispering in the halls. Others say she knocks on your door in the wee hours—slowly, three times—a night or two before she intends to haunt you or your room.

  For some historical background, I talked to Eugenia Noceno, our school librarian and archivist.

  “The story I’ve most often heard is that a student hanged herself in her room at some point in the late 19th century,” she said. “The story usually involves something about her being jilted by a boyfriend—and in the seedier versions, she was pregnant at the time. And now she comes back to haunt the place of her final dark moments—pale and haggard and in a white nightgown, of course. It’s never been clear to me which room or even which floor she supposedly occupied. But in any case, there is actually no record of any student ever dying by suicide on campus, in the 19th century or otherwise. There have been about five student deaths on campus in the school’s entire history. None of them were suicides, and none of them occurred in Dearborn Hall.”

  Dearborn residential director Donna Yeager reports that there were no W
inter Girl sightings last year or the year before that. The previous year—Ms. Yeager’s first as a residential director at Dearborn—was a different story, however.

  “First and last time I heard a story about her, she was humming and whispering to a student who decided to break the room curfew to go down to the basement to do laundry by herself at two a.m. That was in ’15. No actual sighting. I have to say, I think that particular student was pulling a string of all-nighters and was under a lot of stress—as seniors often are during the storied ‘haunting’ time of late winter.”

  According to Ms. Yeager, students sometimes refer to the ghost as “Sarah.”

  “Not everyone calls her ‘the Winter Girl,’ ” she reports. “I’m not sure why they call her Sarah. Maybe since the plaque on the doorstep mentions Sarah Dearborn, the building’s namesake. Maybe that’s where that comes from. But Sarah Dearborn died of natural causes in Philadelphia in 1936.”

  Conflicting ghost stories notwithstanding, most of the current seniors I spoke to say they’re not worried about the Winter Girl, aka Sarah.

  “I think Dearborn is really cozy,” said Heather Mesloff, ’18. “I just don’t get a haunted feeling from being here. It looks a little spooky from the outside, maybe. But when you’re in the building, it’s got the usual dorm sounds and smells, like the Imagine Dragons playing and burnt microwave popcorn stinking up the kitchenette and lounge. It just doesn’t feel ghosty. You’ll probably feel the same way when you’re a senior.”

  “I’m not going to worry about the Winter Girl until winter,” said Amy Liu, ’18. “I think it would be cool to see her, actually. Last semester at Windham, see the ghost. That’d kind of be a nice finale at the end of this whole Windham experience.”

  It was pretty easy to call up this cheesy old article from the newspaper archive online. I remembered it well since I’d proofread it for Brittany after she’d written it. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Sometimes I felt like Windham-Farnswood was obsessed with its own dumb traditions.

  Nonetheless, after class I read and reread the article in one of the dusty library carrels in the stacks, nibbling a contraband granola bar out of sight of the librarians. I was hungry now since Taylor’s video had wiped away my appetite at lunch.

  Of course I’d known about the Winter Girl since I was a firstie. It seemed like girls talked about the Dearborn ghost until they actually lived in Dearborn—when they were mostly too old and jaded and distracted to care about an old ghost story. It was certainly true of me; I’d really not thought that much about the Winter Girl this year. Not yet, anyway. I’d forgotten the detail about how she was supposedly most active in January and February.

  I stuck my earbuds in my ears and called up Taylor’s video again. Holding my breath, and putting the volume up as high as it would go, I waited for the part where there seemed to be whispering in the room.

  Saaaaa, it seemed to say. And then something like mule.

  Was it Taylor whispering? Playing a prank on someone she’d planned to share this footage with later? Was the whisper maybe saying Sarah?

  I backed up the video and played that part again.

  It didn’t sound like Taylor to me, but with whispering it can be hard to say.

  And no. It wasn’t saying Sarah. Because there was an mmm sound after the Saaaaa.

  Saaaaam. Mule.

  I listened longer.

  Saaaaam. Mule. Washing.

  That’s what it seemed to be saying. Or rather, Samuel? Samuel Washing?

  Someone’s name. There was some garbled stuff after Washing. Maybe Washington? Maybe that was the name of the storied lover of the jilted girl in the newspaper story?

  Maybe. And maybe I needed to give this Winter Girl thing a little more attention now.

  I knew exactly who I’d talk to about it first.

  * * *

  By nine o’clock, Star was in her octopus pajamas, gazing at the Caroline Bromley papers scattered all over her bed—as usual.

  Caroline Bromley was a Windham student in the early 1890s who eventually became a journalist and a relatively influential figure in the women’s suffrage movement. Star, a history buff, was doing a senior project on old Caroline—on her life at Windham, and Windham’s possible influence on her as a social reformer and a suffragette.

  I wonder which room she stayed in when she lived in Dearborn, Star would randomly muse sometimes. Or I wish I knew who her roommate was. Or I wonder if the girls had access to newspapers back then.

  But tonight Star was so engaged in her work that she said nothing—just occasionally flipped between pages and then leaned over and typed something on her laptop, which she had wedged between her hip and the wall. When I heard her yawn, I started to worry she’d want to turn in early. I definitely wasn’t ready for the lights to go out.

  “I wonder if Caroline Bromley believed in the Winter Girl,” I said.

  Star looked up, surprised.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “I’ve wondered if it was a thing then, or if that all started later.”

  “Dearborn was probably a brand-spanking-new building when she stayed in it,” I pointed out, just to get Star talking more. “People don’t usually tell ghost stories about new buildings.”

  “Maybe they did then, though,” Star said, studying me. She was curious where I was going with this. I wasn’t sure myself.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We often think of the 19th century as the source of all our ghosts in old houses. People didn’t think of the 19th century that way when they were in it.”

  Star seemed to be considering this. “Of course not,” she said, “but they were definitely into the supernatural. Have you heard of the spiritualist movement?”

  “Um…I don’t think so,” I admitted.

  “It was the mid-19th-century craze for doing séances, trying to speak to the dead. Anyway. Never mind. I guess it helps to remember, though, that for them this place wasn’t a creaky old spooky building.” Star glanced up at the crack in the ceiling. “It probably felt very different,” she said, sighing. “New. Fancy. State-of-the-art.”

  Star’s eyes settled on me for a moment—before they darted back to the ceiling. Maybe she’d heard about what had happened with Taylor’s room this morning—since Maylin had mentioned she’d told a few people. Star probably wasn’t sure if she should say anything, given that I’d been Taylor’s friend.

  There were a couple of things I wished I could explain to Star. For one, that she didn’t need to tiptoe around me. Something that Anthony, Alex, and Maylin knew—but few others—was that Taylor and I weren’t really friends when she died. We’d drifted apart a few months earlier.

  But I’d never been sure how much I should explain this to people, when they regarded me with such care and sympathy. It would be gross to say out loud.

  We weren’t really friends anymore when she died.

  And it felt terrifying to even think it. Because wasn’t the next logical step to wonder, Would she have died if we were still friends?

  “You want to Twizzle?” Star asked.

  I tried to smile. Some nights, Star liked to split a Coke. She’d pour it into mugs and give each of us a Twizzler as a straw. I had a feeling, based on a few things Star told me about her hippie-ish parents, that they didn’t let her have much sugar when she was a kid and this was one of her little boarding school rebellions.

  “I maybe shouldn’t have caffeine,” I said. “Since I couldn’t really sleep last night.”

  Star puckered her lips skeptically. “Coke doesn’t count as real caffeine. Coffee would be another story.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, just a few sips.”

  Star grinned and opened her little fridge. After she pulled out a can, she turned to me.

  “Funny you should ask me about Caroline and the ghost,” she said.

&nb
sp; “Funny how?”

  “Well, you know how I’ve been doing a lot of research in the archives?”

  “Yeah?”

  The school archives were in a special part of the Windham Library on the top floor, and Star hung out there whenever it was open. Not all private high schools have archives, but because of Windham’s unusually long history and status as one of the earliest girls’ secondary schools in the country, it had a fairly big special collection of old letters and other documents.

  “I found something in November that I thought was kind of cool.”

  Star put down the Coke can and opened one of her desk drawers.

  She pulled out a paper photocopy of a large black-and-white photograph. I recognized the photo as one she used to have on the corkboard behind her desk earlier in the year. It was a photo of about forty girls—Caroline Bromley among them, presumably—assembled in front of our dorm.

  Dearborn Hall, 1891 was written lightly below the photo, in elegant slanted handwriting.

  “Caroline’s in the picture?” I asked.

  Star pointed to a girl third from the right in the second row. She was one of the few girls in the photo who wasn’t looking directly at the camera. She seemed to be looking beyond it, off to the side. She actually looked slightly confused.

  “She’s fairly easy to identify in photos because she was so short. But in this one we don’t have to because it’s labeled.”

  She handed me another photocopy.

  “On the flip side of the paper—someone wrote all the names.”

  They were written in tiny, almost unreadable script.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “The girl on her right is her friend Abigail Ashton. Abigail was a big letter writer her whole life, and lots of the letters—mostly to her parents and her friend Eleanor at home—ended up here in the Dearborn archives. There are even a couple letters to Caroline when they were adults.”

  “And on her left?”