X: I started to feel out of control, not knowing when I might see her or hear her again. I didn’t want to sleep in that room, by myself. Anywhere was better than that room.
D: Did you see her anywhere else in the building, once you stopped sleeping in your room?
X: Yes. When I slept on the couch in the sitting room on the first floor, I saw her slip by. I felt like she was pursuing me. That she wasn’t just sad. She was targeting me for some reason.
D: Did you ever think of talking to her?
X: No. I don’t want to talk to a dead person.
D: Why not?
X: I just don’t want to. It scares me. Like it scares most people.
D: Okay. That’s fine. I understand.
X: After that it felt like I couldn’t sleep anywhere.
D: Why didn’t you go back to sleeping in friends’ rooms?
X: They kept making excuses why I couldn’t. They didn’t want to get in trouble.
D: Would Ms. Finneran have punished them for it?
X: Yeah. Ms. Finneran is a bitch and a freak of nature.
D: Okay. Well, did you share with Ms. Finneran your concerns about the ghost?
X: No. Not at first. Only when things got really bad. I was really tired, so I was probably babbling at that point. It scared the old battle axe.
D: How do you know?
X: She sent me to the nurse right away. We didn’t have a long conversation.
D: Okay. And now, about a year out from all of this…do you still believe you saw and heard a ghost? Or do you believe something else was happening?
X: Since Mrs. Bradford says you’re trying to help the school, the girls in Dearborn, I’ll tell you the truth. Yes, I still believe I saw a ghost. I still believe she meant me some kind of harm. I had to say something different to the nurses and therapists, so I could go to college. My parents and I don’t discuss it, and if they asked me, I would lie. But I’m telling you what I still feel. I wasn’t crazy. Except until the ghost drove me crazy. And since I’m not there right now, she can’t get at me. She can’t make me crazy again. But I remember how it was. She was there. She was real. I don’t know what she wanted, but I’m glad I got out of there.
If I stopped reading, I would have to think about this Samuel consistency, which I could already tell was terrifying me before I had even let my mind fully process it.
So I kept reading:
STUDENT Y
Student Y came to Kathleen’s attention early on in our stay at Dearborn Hall. From the beginning of our stay, we noticed Student Y’s behavior was markedly withdrawn, to the point of being concerning, given last year’s incident. When asked how she was, or asked about her schoolwork and activities, she gave minimal answers. According to other students and faculty, she had a reputation of being a high academic achiever in previous years but seemed less engaged this year. Having ascertained this early on, we watched Student Y carefully for signs that residence in Dearborn was affecting her adversely.
One of our challenges was to observe and check in on the wellness of students throughout our stay. Kathleen’s attempts to befriend Student Y eventually bore fruit. The interview roughly transcribed below occurred on March 31, 1986. This is the discussion that took place between her and Student Y when Kathleen brought up Student X’s incident last year. (Y is Student Y and K is Kathleen.)
Y: I hope she’s okay now.
K: We hear she is.
Y: Good. I’ve heard that, too.
K: Did you have any concerns about living in Dearborn, after hearing what happened?
Y: Not really.
K: Have you experienced anything here yourself?
Y: Yeah. I’ve experienced a lot of things.
K: I mean, have you observed anything you couldn’t explain…anything that felt like it could be supernatural?
Y: Yeah, actually.
K: Yeah? I’d love to hear about it.
Y: (After some hesitation and coaxing) Well…I saw her.
K: Saw who?
Y: The ghost.
K: When? Where?
Y: A few weeks ago. In the hallway.
K: How do you know it was the ghost and not just some other student?
Y: She was there and she was gone. She was wearing a white nightgown. She didn’t look like anyone who lives on my floor.
K: What did she want, you think?
Y: What most ghosts want, right? Just to be…seen? To let us know they exist?
K: You seem remarkably calm about this.
Y: Everyone makes way too big a deal about the ghost.
K: You say ghosts should be acknowledged….What makes you say this?
Y: Well, isn’t that what everyone says? And it’s not like this is the only ghost I’ve ever seen before.
K: When have you seen others?
Y: In my house growing up. There was a ghost who’d stand near the couch and make faces at me. I stopped seeing him after I was like five.
K: You weren’t scared?
Y: I think I was a little too young to realize this was something that should freak me out.
K: What do you think he wanted?
Y: I think he was bored. I think ghosts come out and play with kids for the same reason some living people kind of light up when they see a kid. It’s a chance to be fun, to get something besides a regular humdrum grown-up reaction. Ghosts get used to being ignored, but know they might get something more out of a kid.
K: If the ghost you saw was the same ghost that (Student X) saw last year, why do you think it had such a profound effect on her, while for you it just feels like a casual encounter?
Y: Probably she was denying to herself that she even saw anything. The more she denied it, the more she pretended she didn’t see it, the more the ghost wanted to get something out of her.
The ghost probably didn’t mean to freak her out that much. She probably wanted to have a civil interaction. By freaking out, it was like running from the ghost. So the ghost chased her, I guess, in a way.
K: Do you think you’re clairvoyant, perhaps?
Y: No. I don’t think you have to be clairvoyant to see Sarah. So many people have talked about seeing her, I don’t think it’s a matter of clairvoyance.
K: So how do you know Sarah saw you and was satisfied with your interaction?
Y: Well, I haven’t seen her since. I don’t think anyone else has, either. This year, I mean.
K: Did you say anything to her?
Y: No, just kind of nodded and smiled.
K: But she’ll come back next year.
Y: Yeah, maybe. That’s what they say.
K: Why do you think she keeps coming back?
Y: I don’t know. Maybe she can’t help herself. Or maybe she just likes tradition. Windham girls are like that, I guess.
It was too late to call Kathleen, but I wondered if Kathleen had Student X and Y’s names somewhere. Or if maybe I could track them down. Maybe they were in the Haunteds Facebook group. They would be about my mother’s age now—or just a little bit older. I wondered why one was so much more frightened of the ghost than the other.
I was intrigued by Student Y’s casualness.
But I had a feeling I—and Taylor—could relate more to Student X’s terror.
I was too tired to read on. Or just afraid I’d find something further in that would scare me even more than what I’d already read, and I’d never sleep again.
I closed my laptop and slid into bed. And then I started counting goats. I hadn’t tried this since I was a kid. Even then I always counted goats instead of sheep because I thought goats were so much cuter. This time I named the goats as I counted:
Luna, Odysseus, Brawny, Harriet, Mathilda, Nibbles, Nugget, Thor, Johnny, Gl
oria.
Cool names, dumb names, cute names. After a while I was just thinking of names and not picturing any goats. Since a few minutes in, I knew it was all just an exercise to keep one particular name out of my head until the morning:
Samuel.
26
Once I was Taylor’s friend, I couldn’t change my mind.
Because if I was not her friend, I would be in her sights.
And I could not bear to have that sinking feeling again.
I was better at Windham than I’d been at home. And yet I didn’t know how to swim on my own, not really. Taylor helped me stay above the surface. Not so much Taylor herself, consciously—but the fact of being Taylor’s friend.
So when Taylor posted a selfie of herself and me in which Layla Lawson was in the background digging up her nose with a tissue, I had to assume she’d chosen that out of twenty other shots because she liked our smiles in that particular one.
When Taylor privately called Hannah Fort a “blobfish,” I did laugh, because she does in fact have a morose resting face.
And when Taylor asked Toni Escobar, right after her big history presentation, if she’d had tuna fish for lunch, I figured it was some kind of private joke between them.
And so on and so forth.
I was used to Taylor’s casual meanness by the end of sophomore year. And still I was a little stunned when she showed me that video right before the summer.
The footage was of Jocelyn Rose making out with Charlie Bronner in his room the night he’d had a party.
Charlie Bronner had the most parties of any day student. Technically his house was in walking distance to campus—although it was a long walk. His parents went away a lot, and he didn’t have any siblings.
Taylor had been with him a little while when they were sophomores—until she got an older boyfriend. But they’d stayed friends, and she was always at his parties.
I’d been to a couple of his parties, but I hadn’t gone to the one where she’d gotten the footage. Taylor hadn’t mentioned it to me, saying later she knew how swamped I’d been with work that weekend. It was probably a lie. Sometimes she just didn’t want me around. Or just neglected to invite me to things occasionally to make sure I would never assume, never take her power of invitation for granted.
The thing was—she knew Charlie and Jocelyn had been flirting with each other.
But Taylor had never liked Jocelyn much. And when she saw them cozying up on the couch early in the evening at the party, she told me, she knew Charlie’s MO well enough that she had a hunch what was going to happen next. He was going to sneak Jocelyn up to his room and lock the door.
Taylor herself had been behind that locked door a couple of times.
And no, Taylor never explained the impulse very well—the impulse to go up there first, prop her fancy new iPhone up against his desk lamp, and hit Record. It was not an impulse I understood.
The party had gone on for several hours. But of course, Jocelyn had the same curfew time as all the other boarding students. When the couple left Charlie’s room, Taylor retrieved her phone before rushing out so she could catch curfew, too.
What she ended up with was three and a half hours of footage. More than half of it was of Charlie’s empty room. But some of it was of Charlie and Jocelyn on Charlie’s bed. Kissing at first—and then with both of their shirts off.
In the video, Charlie assured Jocelyn that he liked big nipples.
And Jocelyn told Charlie that no one had ever touched them before.
I watched it in Taylor’s room. My mouth was hanging open by the end of it. Not so much because of what I’d just seen but the sheer audacity of Taylor managing to film it.
“Taylor,” I said. “You need to delete this.”
“Well, of course I will,” she snapped. “What do you think I’m going to do, make a YouTube remix of him saying he likes big nipples?”
I was too stunned at these words to speak.
“But why…”
“I was bored, Haley. Why do I ever do anything?”
“Why did you even show me?” I put her phone down on her bed, screen down, horrified.
It took her a while to reply. She was busy scraping gray wax from her radiator. She’d accidentally left a bar of snowboard wax there and it had melted.
“I thought you might find it kind of interesting.”
Typical Taylor. A twenty-dollar bar of wax and she’d let it melt. Oopsie!
“Why would I?” I demanded.
“Never mind,” she mumbled. “I should just delete it.”
“Yup,” was all I said.
It was obvious later—the following fall—that I should have said more. But I don’t think it was obvious then.
27
Seven Nights Left
And so.
Whatever fight she might have had left in her before Windham—that was gone by the end.
She was bitter and depleted by the night she died.
She was only sixteen.
So young, so tragic—how could she not become a ghost?
28
Sunday, February 3
THUNK THUNK THUNK!
I sat up. My heart raced.
“Star!” I gasped. Was that a knock at the door?
“Mmm…huh?”
“STAR, DID YOU HEAR THAT?” I yelled so she would wake up.
Despite the darkness, I could see Star stirring.
“What?” Star sounded groggy. “What is it, Haley?”
I tried to catch my breath. “Someone was knocking on the door.”
“Then…shouldn’t we answer it?” Star asked, still sleepy.
I’d found my phone under my pillow by then. “It’s three a.m.,” I hissed.
“Yeah.” Star was getting out of her bed. “Only Anna would knock in the middle of the night. Like maybe this is…”
Star was almost at the door.
“Don’t open it!” I gasped.
“Hello?” Star said to the door.
When there was no answer, she opened it. There was no one there.
“I was going to say that maybe it was some kind of drill.” Star stepped out into the hallway and looked around.
“A drill? Then they’d use the alarm system.”
“Well, I don’t know. A lockdown drill? Anyway. No one’s in the hall. Didn’t you say you haven’t been sleeping very well lately?”
“You didn’t hear the knocking?” I said.
Star closed the door.
“Do you want me to turn the light on?” she asked.
“Maybe you should,” I said.
The instant our beds and messy desks and Star’s beluga whale poster were all in bright view, I felt dumb for being so scared.
“Maybe somebody needed, like, a tampon or something,” Star said.
“There are a lot of obnoxious girls on this floor, Star, but no one obnoxious enough to consider that a three a.m. emergency.”
Star shrugged. “If you say so. Do you know that houses make more noise in the coldest months? It has something to do with the dry air, and the contracting of the wood, or something. Houses make more pops and groans and maybe you just thought you heard knocking?”
My heart was no longer pounding in my ears.
“Where did you hear this?” I asked. “About noisy houses in the winter?”
“My dad told us that once, when we were staying at a rental house in New Hampshire where we used to ski. My sister said she heard pops.”
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “Maybe that’s the reason there’s a ghost in Dearborn only in January and February.”
We were silent for a moment.
“Also, I used to dream of someone pounding on my door,” I admitted.
Long ago, when I
was eleven or twelve or thirteen. When I was a different girl.
Star looked puzzled for a moment, then looked away.
“Well, then that’s probably what it was,” she said.
Star was staring at her feet, scrutinizing the chipping purple paint on her toes. It seemed like I needed to say something more.
Earlier, I had been considering showing Anthony the Darkins papers first. But I felt an urgency in this moment. I was still shaking, and I didn’t want to have to try to go back to sleep yet.
“I have something I want to show you, Star,” I said.
* * *
It was a relief to have an excuse to keep the light on.
Sitting up on my bed with my fleece blanket wrapped tight around me, I watched Star scrolling through the paranormal report on my computer, her lips moving and her eyes widening.
“This is amazing,” Star said. “Is there any chance that it’s a joke?”
I had to admit I hadn’t thought of that.
“Umm…the lady who gave it to me…I don’t think she would have a reason to mess with me.”
Star grunted and kept reading.
“Did you see the part about the headmistress’s mother yet?” I asked. “It shows that the ghost story was already circulating between 1905 and 1909.”
“Yeah, I saw that,” Star murmured. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“So your girl Stella, who died in 1918, probably wasn’t the ghost. Or the original one, anyway.”
Unless the original ghost selected Stella as her replacement, and then…I pushed the thought away.
“Right,” Star said softly.
I had the feeling she wasn’t listening to me.
“I’m really interested in Student X and, actually, even more, Student Y,” I said. “I wonder if there’s any way to find them. We know at least that they graduated in 1985 and 1986.”
Star didn’t reply. She got up, put my laptop back into my hands, and opened one of her desk drawers.
“They called her Sarah in Black,” she said, snatching a couple of overstuffed manila folders out of the drawer. “And maybe sometimes Sarah Black.”
When All the Girls Are Sleeping Page 16