Assigned Post: Ghost Stories

In English, we are currently reading The Woman Warrior by Maxing Hong Kingston. In the chapter that we just read, Maxine's mother tells many ghost stories to Maxine and her siblings. In class, we told our own ghost stories, and Mrs. Watson asked us to post them on our blogs.

Many years ago, my high school was a boarding school, and students lived there for the entire school year. Castle Hall, a building now used for art, was the location of the girls' dormitories. The following story is one that people in my school love to tell-- among our other school ghost stories-- and takes place in Castle Hall during the old boarding school days.

Late one night, during the last few months of school, a girl woke her room-mates in a panic, telling them that the school was on fire. The girls looked up at the long, thin windows at the top of the wall that separated them from the hallway-- and sure enough, they could see flickering firelight through the glass panes. But before they could do anything, they also heard chanting-- chanting in Hawaiian.

"It's the Night Marchers," one dark-haired girl said in a hushed voice.

[To anyone who does not know what the Night Marchers are, please read this short Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_marchers ]

"What are you talking about?!" snapped the first girl. "Don't be so superstitious! It's a fire, and we need to warn people!" With that, she ran to the door and seized the handle. As soon as she touched the knob, she screamed and jerked her hand away-- it was horribly burnt.

Almost instantly, the chanting stopped, and the firelight disappeared. Soon after, the girls could hear people running to their room to see what had happened. Teachers took girl with the burnt hand was taken to the hospital, leaving the others to whisper about what had happened.

The dark-haired girl told the others about the chanting and the light of the torches, and how she suspected it was the Night Marchers.

"But why would the Night Marchers be up here on the second floor of Castle Hall?" asked another girl skeptically.

"Well, there used to be a hill here, right? But they bulldozed it to make the building. When the Ancient Hawaiians were here, the ground was probably around the same level as this floor is. So they're still marching where the ground was then, when they were alive."

A few of the girls remained disbelieving, but most of those who had seen their friend's burnt hand were not so quick to deny that maybe the legend was true, and that their school-- like so many stories told-- was haunted.

There are many tales of ghosts in our school, but I chose this one because I spent a year in the same classroom where this story takes place.