Notebook

Notebook

A Year of Ghosts

a september ghost story

how emily came to leave vernon hall

BDM
Sep 01, 2025
∙ Paid
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Every girl at St. Monica’s wanted a friend who had been assigned to Vernon Hall, but nobody wanted to live there. A month before the end of each school year, when the new housing assignments came down, the girls were in silent agony as they received their envelopes. They slid their french-tipped fingernails under the seal, they bit their glossy lips, they braced themselves. A few had even been known to pray: it was known that the Director of Student Services listened to no appeals, but perhaps God was different. (Despite its name, St. Monica’s was not, and had never been, a religious school.) For Vernon Hall was the dormitory with St. Monica’s only ghost.

Twenty years ago, every dormitory at St. Monica’s had had a ghost and Vernon Hall had not been special. You would have been hard pressed to find a school, a hotel, a hospital, or even a gym that didn’t have at least one ghost. If you went back forty years before that, you would have found a world in which ghosts were not thought to be…

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