My Former Neighbor Said She Saw a Ghost….

This is what she told me.

Photo by Pete F on Unsplash

“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.

Marianna was whom I talked to the most. She liked to go to the music clubs. Vicki was the more studious of the two: quieter, more reserved.

I’d successfully defended my MA thesis the preceding spring and was ready to party that summer. Marianna was my favorite companion during those summer months.

Fall came. With classes starting up again, I saw less of her. We still passed one another coming and going. We’d stop and chat about our classes and R.E.M.’s Murmur LP which had been out a few months.

Then, in November, she and her roommate disappeared. Utterly, completely. Without even saying goodbye.

After Halloween that year: nothing.

Next spring, I ran into Marianna on campus. I asked her what happened.

I could tell she was uneasy saying anything. I asked if she wanted to go into town for a coffee.