The Fall and Other Stories

The Ghosts Are Getting Out Of Hand

The ghosts in the hallways really had to go.

We were used to them, for the most part. They had always been there—at least no one could remember a time when they were not—and we had all accepted them as a part of the educational experience. Pale, translucent, and dressed in clothes from varying time periods, they wandered aimlessly down the halls, some humming quietly, others murmuring anxiously to themselves. We learned to step to the side when they passed (they would go right through you if you didn't, and that was an uncomfortable feeling) and avoid eye contact when possible.

Once, we heard Laura (Laura from Arizona, not Laura from Montréal) ask, where did all the ghosts come from, anyway? The next day we saw her in her bright pink sweatshirt and a pair of black leggings, faded, hovering two feet off the ground next to the west staircase in the humanities building, and we thought, "Huh." And then we went to class, and forgot about Laura until the next week when someone had to tell the chemistry professor she was dead so he could adjust the exam average accordingly.

We never had an issue with the ghosts until recently. Usually, they stayed in the halls and made minimal noise, but now they were getting out of hand. They floated through classroom walls in the middle of lectures and started shrieking, disrupting class (though many students were not too upset about this). A few of them started hanging out in the labs, where they randomly broke pieces of equipment, and a freshman had to go to the hospital for stitches after a beaker shattered in her hand. They followed students from class to class, hissing in their ears, and some students refused refused to leave their dorms because of this. One professor threw a book at a ghost after it interrupted her presentation on fourteenth century Russian poetry, but it didn't seem to be bothered by this.

We couldn't even file complaints about the issues, because all the ghosts were dead and you can't take disciplinary action against dead people. We complained anyway, but no one did anything about it.

The university constructed new buildings to house ghost-free classrooms, but the ghosts just migrated to them and caused even more havoc. One managed to knock down a half-finished lecture hall while the workers were still inside. After that, it became quite difficult for the university to find people willing to work for them.

Several professors quit their jobs, and many students transferred to other schools. With each passing day, the ghost-to-human ratio increased and eventually the university was full of almost no one but ghosts. Some people thought this was a good thing, as there were plenty of human universities in the area but none for ghosts, and they deserved an education, too. We agreed that there should be more educational opportunities for ghosts, but believed they should have started their own university instead of taking over ours.

We moved to a new campus across the city, where there were no ghosts, and classes were able to proceed more normally. Sometimes we heard stories about our old buildings and what the ghosts were doing there, but we didn't pay much attention to them. We had exams to study for, after all.