My Former Neighbor Said She Saw a Ghost….
This is what she told me.
“There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5
October 1983 was a weird month.
A starving graduate student at the time, I’d been living in a cramped, studio apartment in a converted hotel. There were around 60 of these postage-stamp, one-room apartments in a single long building that looked like an Army barracks from a distance. Two floors, concrete sidewalks, metal stairwells here and there. Blacktop parking lots lid by floods all night. This wasn’t the best part of town. Rent was $120/mo., if you can imagine that today.
The place was in a working class neighborhood, but close enough to campus that roughly half the people who lived there were university students. The other half we affectionately called “townies”: folks who worked downtown somewhere.
The town: Athens, Ga. The music mecca of the early ’80s. B-52s, R.E.M., and so on. Most of us were into that back then.
Among my neighbors were two girls, both students. I’ll call them Marianna and Vicki. I was on the ground floor. They lived above me, a couple doors down, their apartment in front of a stairwell, a big floodlight on a pole in front of them shining from across the lot.
