Short horror stories

living in a haunted sorority

I never understood why ghosts are always depicted as creepy little girls in Victorian dresses. Real ghosts are never like that.... Or at least, my ghost isn't.

My ghost killed herself in my sorority house in the eighties, so it would be weird if she was wearing a Victorian dress. I only ever saw her once, sitting on the edge of my bed in the reflection of my mirror. Her hair was black and curly, it looked as though it had been teased to hell before deflating into limp, knotty locks of badly permed hair. She was wearing an over sized collared shirt tucked into mom jeans, and from the mascara streaming down her face I could tell she had been crying.

She didn't look like a ghost; at least not what ghosts are supposed to look like. I turned away from the mirror, thinking a drunk friend of one of my sisters had snuck in after a theme party, but when I laid my eyes on the corner she had been sitting on, she was gone.

I'm getting ahead of myself. I had never actually seen her until my Junior year. In fact, she didn't even seem to exist the whole first semester of my freshman year, although that could have been because my sisters didn't want to scare me away from my newly joined sorority, Tri Delta. The first time she was mentioned to me I was hanging out with some other sorority sisters in my friend Summer's room at the house. She was older, a senior, and her roommate was hardly ever home because she always stayed over with her boyfriend.

"There was a ghost in my room last night." Summer told us in a hushed tone.

"Bullshit." My friend Amy laughed, throwing a pillow at her.

"No, really! Ok, well, not a ghost, but maybe one of those orb things, you know? Like the kind they see in those ghost hunter shows?"

"I think you've been watching those shows too much." I scoffed. I didn't believe in ghosts then, let alone those dumbass orbs. Besides, Summer was one of those air brained hippy types, this hallucination was easy to write off as some sort of side effect from her last acid trip.

"I woke up in the dead of the middle of the night for literally no reason," she told us, completely ignoring our skepticism. "I was completely paralyzed, like I couldn't move at all. And it was pitch dark too, right? And I just see this orb of light moving back and forth, like a pendulum." She traced the orb's supposed motion in the air with an outstretched finger, eyes focused above our heads.

"Sounds like sleep paralysis." Amy shrugged, hopping off of Summer's bed, "Paralysis, hallucinations... yep, definitely not a ghost."

Summer's nose crinkled up, and her expression twisted, "Wait, do you smell that?" Amy and I both inhaled through our noses, and sure enough a distinct, fiery smell had inexplicably filled her room.

"Ok, why the fuck does it smell like fire?" Amy asked, her face turning white.

We all had a mini freak out until we exited the room in a panic only to be informed by a sister that the fraternity next door's dumpster had caught on fire and everyone was going to the balcony to watch the firemen.

I was happy to put the embarrassing incident out of my mind until a few months later, when Summer brought the ghost up again, "This time I could see her, like, all of her, and I could feel her too. Not just the weight on my bed but the sadness. She was really sad. I think she was crying. And she looked way different from a normal ghost, like, I've never seen a modern ghost before, you know?"

This time, Amy was gone and I decided to play along for shits and giggles. "Well is there any record of a death in here? Maybe we can go to the library and look at old newspapers with one of those machine thingies."

"How the hell would I know how to use one of those? We should just ask the house mom."

"Ooh! Let's find her in the composite pictures!" I jumped up excitedly, Summer following me to the back hallway. Each year, every year that Tri Delta had been on campus, everyone in the sorority would go out front and get their photos taken by the old oak tree to be put in a giant frame that showed all of the members. The composite would be displayed in our living room that year until it was replaced with the new one and shuffled off to the back hallway. A long, narrow hallway lined up with giant frames filled with hundreds of tiny sorority girl faces smiling manically at you got pretty creepy at night, but it was always fun to look at decades past and make fun of the various phases of hair do's.