A Ghost Story.

I lived in a haunted dorm room for one semester, and that was long enough. 

It was at small private college just south of Des Moines, with buildings made of tired brick crawling with ivy, a college with a bell tower in the center of campus whose bells rang at indiscriminate and unexplained moments. A bride was rumored to have leapt from its heights on her wedding day after learning that her spouse had been unfaithful. 

I lived on the third floor of a historical dorm building, a red brick monstrosity that looked, smelled, and felt collegiate. I shared a corner room with three other girls, a room that was the envy of all freshmen: four built-in bunks, a huge walk-in closet, a large dormer window, and enough floorspace to turn several cartwheels. At first, we relished our good fortune—the other dorm rooms were the size of our closet.  

But it was not long before the older students told us of the room’s dark past. 

There was a crawlspace at the back of our room, just to the left of the dormer, where the ceiling above began to slant. Its door was wide, but it could not be opened.  

A girl was said to have crawled in there years ago, intending to end her own life. But after she had turned her blade against herself, she had a change of heart. She tried to open the door, but it would not budge. She spent her final moments scratching at the stubborn door, trying in vain to free herself.  

It was said that this girl haunted the crawlspace, that her final, ragged breaths could still be heard in the middle of the night, that her desperate scratching could still be heard against that crawlspace door.  

I figured this story was concocted as some sort of freshman hazing ritual, and I half expected a group of sophomores to hide in the crawlspace just to scare us, so I tried to ignore it and enjoy the fact that I had the biggest dorm room in the building. 

Urban legend or not, this terrified two of my roommates so much that they wanted out—within a week, one of them left the school (the ghost wasn’t the only reason), and within a month, another found a different room on the second floor. That left me and a Mississippi girl who was used to the haunts of the deep south.

She’d heard more terrifying tales as childhood bedtime stories, so this rumor did not bother her. Instead, she seemed to revel in it.  

After the other girls left, I tried to enjoy the extra space in our already enviable suite, but I could not pretend that I did not hear it —a noise coming from that crawlspace, one that could only be described as a scratching sound. 

Scritch, scritch, scritch. 

I wanted it to be my imagination, but my ghost-loving Mississippi roommate confessed that she heard it, too. 

Scritch, scritch, scritch. 

I told myself it was mice, even rats—an infestation was preferable to a ghost. I grew up in an old country farmhouse and was used to the sound of critters in the walls. Sometimes, this made it hard to sleep. My imagination would get the best of me, and I could not help but picture bloody fingernails raking across that crawlspace door.  

Scritch, scritch, scritch. 

But this noise was the cost of our prime real estate, so I tried to smother my fears with the blanket of logic. It was mice. It was the wind. It was the pipes.  

It was a prank—it had to be. 

Scritch, scritch, scritch. 

I held onto that belief.  

After a few months, it became background noise. We got used to the sound. Eventually, it didn’t even frighten me anymore. Sleeping became easier.  

Until the moment it became impossible. 

One night, when we were both asleep, everything on top of my nightstand crashed to the floor at once. 
It was a lot of stuff: a lamp, a green cordless phone, my dog-eared copy of The Autobiography of Malcom X, a stack of papers, a notebook and some pens, all fell the floor at the same time, as though someone had swiped an arm across the top of the nightstand.  

Like someone—or something—was trying to get our attention. 

It felt urgent. It felt deliberate. It felt sinister. And there was no explanation for it.  

It startled us both awake, and I was so terrified that I ran across the room and crawled into my roommate’s bunk with her, and she was so afraid that she let me stay there with her until the sun came through that dormer window.  

That was the day we put in a request to be transferred to another room.  

We moved just across the hall at the semester’s end, and we never heard those noises again.  

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