Some possible explanations for my ghost sighting

I don’t believe in ghosts and even though I saw one, I still don’t. I know that’s probably the most counterintuitive thing you can say at the start of a ghost story but I thought I’d just lay my cards on the table right at the start.

It was my first year at university. About six months in. I wasn’t doing well. Aside from the odd bit of conversation with my flatmates, people had mostly stopped talking to me. I was feeling lonely and isolated. I liked my lectures, but I was starting to lose hope in my degree actually leading to anything.

I lived on the fifth floor of a new block of student flats that had recently been finished. I think we were the first cohort to move into the building. I know this doesn’t sound like a typical setting for a ghost story. The place was composed of chipboard furnishings and every room looked exactly alike. It was basically a high-rise budget hotel.

We had fire drills on an almost constant basis, and they were always in the middle of the night. At the time it was incredibly annoying, but looking back now after incidents like Grenfell, I appreciate that the building managers were taking fire safety seriously. It seemed like they always chose them on days I was nursing a hangover, but y’know what, young Stuart? That’s your fault. Deal with it.

Anyway, I’d been having a dream in which I was dressed in a patient’s gown and was walking down an empty and seemingly never-ending dark corridor in a hospital. I’d had an operation on my eye for a detached retina about a year before. I ended up having two of these operations after the first one failed. I think I was between operation 1 and operation 2 at this moment in time.

I was pulled out of the dream corridor by the sound of the fire alarm going off. The anonymous room with chipboard furnishings and no personality that surrounded me felt as unreal as the dream as I was forced back into the waking world.

There was a girl standing at the foot of my bed, towering over me. She was wearing white pyjamas with fuzzy grey dots. Her dark hair was covering her eyes. Her face was a pale white, and she didn’t have a mouth; just a blank patch of skin on the bottom of her face. I couldn’t hear the fire alarm anymore. It was as though the still constantly-sounding sirens faded into the background as I looked at this strange faceless figure.

I screamed in shock at first, but then, when I stopped and the girl hadn’t vanished, I just paused and stared at her for a moment.

I then said this:

“What are you doing?”

I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know what I expected her to say or even if she could say anything at all. As said, she didn’t have a mouth.

The silent girl shook her head and held up a hand. She backed away slowly towards my bedroom door. She kept walking, and melted through the wood.

I shook violently in terror and almost fell out of bed.

The fire alarm seemed to fade back up at that point.

Shaking myself into action, I grabbed my key card and left the room to join everyone else down in the freezing cold car park, the icy floor stinging my bare feet.

I was still shaken when I got back upstairs at the end of the ordeal and failed to get back to sleep again.

I did bring my ghost sighting up in conversation with the few people who still spoke to me, and they told me other stories they’d heard about people seeing ghosts in the older student halls that were due to be torn down and replaced with new buildings. They’d connect these sighting to stories of girls who’d died on campus from accidents. I also heard a rumour that in a town just over from ours, a serial killer used to operate out of a local cinema. I never heard the name. Don’t know if its true.

I do find it interesting that the building had only just been built and it apparently already had a ghost in it.

A possible story is that when she was alive, that girl had been seeing someone who worked on the building site as it was being constructed. Maybe her partner wanted to get rid if her, and the easiest way to do it and get away with it was to drown her in cement drying in the foundations. Her body would be perfectly hidden at the base of the building and no one would ever know. She could only appear occasionally as this hazy mouthless figure to re-enact her final moments as her assailant pushed her under the wet cement and left her to die. The cement had dried across her mouth, sealing it shut forever.

Makes for a good story I suppose.

And its a story that’s more compelling than the much more likely explanation. I was depressed, lonely, stressed, had just been woken up in the middle of the night for what felt like the fifty-sixth night in a row. I watched nothing but cheap horror movie DVDs I’d been buying from a shop down the road with my student loan money in my spare time and I hallucinated, basically the girl from the ring, let’s be realistic here.

So that’s two posible explanations. Let’s treat them both as equally plausible because that’s what balance is, isn’t it?