It was Halloween night, and nature was cooperating in spectacular fashion. The air was cool, crisp, and clear. Trees were showering the sidewalks with amber-colored leaves, some gold mixed in for good measure. And a crescent moon, when it wasn’t obscured by a passing cloud, glowed an orangish yellow in the night sky.
Thomas was wending his way on foot toward the large quadrangle that sat at the center of campus. He and Sophia, whose arm was wrapped around his, were seniors. It would be the fourth and final time that they joined the mass gathering of students for the retelling of the story behind the ghost that haunted the school’s iconic chapel.
All of the upper-level students knew the story by heart. In the Fall of 1911, when the school was still in its infancy, a freshman named Abigail Elizabeth Hargraves was singled out by the other girls in the college’s lone women’s dormitory for a bit of innocent hazing on Halloween night. Or, perhaps, it was not entirely innocent. Abigail was apparently the prettiest of all the girls at the school, and the seemingly endless stream of suitors clamoring for her attention hadn’t been sitting well with her female cohort.
Motivations aside, the mischief began at precisely 10:00 P.M. The campus chapel was empty, silent, and completely dark. Abigail, receiving a boost from two of her sisters in crime, clambered into the building through a side window—the latch had been turned earlier in the evening by a co-conspirator who had dropped in for a bit of “prayer time” before curfew. Taking hold of the lit candle that was passed up to her, she was to navigate her way to the back of the church, climb the spiral staircase to the choir loft, retrieve a small porcelain ghost that had been planted there by one of the other girls, and then return to the window by which she entered.
What Abigail did not know is that there was no porcelain ghost. Rather, the girls in the dorm had fashioned a life-size specter out of a bed sheet, affixed it to a pulley, and left it suspended from a length of twine that ran across the ceiling of the loft. Abigail’s second step out of the staircase tripped a wire that released the ghost and sent it streaming directly toward her.
The resulting blood-curdling scream echoed throughout the school grounds. Abigail bolted for the staircase but, disoriented, she instead hit the railing to the choir loft at full speed and somersaulted over the top. By the time help arrived, there was nothing to be done. A very pretty but very dead 18-year-old freshman lie on the floor of the chapel’s center aisle. The priests who had founded the school were aghast. After holding a funeral Mass a few days later, the entirety of the women’s dorm was suspended for the remainder of the semester. None of them ever returned.
