Chapter One: Voices from the Shadows
The Phantom Roommate.
I always thought college would be the start of something new, a new chapter where all the weirdness of my small town would be in the background. The unknown has a way of finding you, even when all you’re doing is trying to make it through freshman year.
I am Emily. When I first moved into Larkin Hall at Western State, I was so nervous I could barely hold my student ID. My roommate Cora, she was the kind of girl to make friends with everyone in the first week. Blonde. Athletic. Always laughing at something . I envied her at first. I thought if I could just keep riding on her outgoing energy the homesickness would go away.
It was a typical cinderblock cave, with two beds, two desks, a window to the quad, and the loudest radiator in the world. We put fairy lights and old band posters over it. It was not much. I knew it would feel like home soon enough.
But I saw some weird shit even before class started.
At first it was the small things. In the middle of the night I’d wake to footsteps in the hallway, but heavier and slower than the usual drunken stampede. Sometimes I could hear faint laughter and thought someone was playing a joke outside our door. But every time I looked the hall was empty and silent except for the hiss of the radiator and the distant hum of the vending machine.
Cora slept like a log. She slept with earbuds in her ears, hardly moving when my alarm went off. If she ever did hear the noises she never said anything. I started wondering if I was just nervous and making things up to distract myself from missing home.
One night in late September, I woke up to giggling. Not from the rooms down the hall. But in our room. I sat up, heart pounding, and looked into the dark. Her laugh was high and soft, almost childish. I squinted. Two figures: Cora, asleep on her side, and someone else, standing at the foot of her bed.
I blinked and the figure dissolved into the shadows.
My skin crawled. I tried to wake Cora but she was oblivious, snoring. I did not sleep till dawn, Jamek magnifying every sound and movement by my dread.
The next morning I tried to talk about it. “Did you hear anything weird last night?”
Cora yawned, shrugged. “Nah, just you going round and round. “Nightmares?”
I disregarded it, but the dreams went on. Dreams of someone crying my name, of cold hands on my face, of a shadow between our beds.
A week later I came back from an all-night study session to find Cora sitting cross-legged on her bed, her face pale.
“ Uh, you moved my desk chair? ” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, why not?”
She pointed. “ The chair had been pulled out and was facing her bed, as if someone had been sitting there watching her sleep. A shiver ran down my spine. "Maybe the RA got in? I feebly tried.
Cora bit her lip. "Perhaps. Or maybe it's our ghost.
She tried to laugh. It was all wrong.
Then it got worse. The steps were closer, the laughter louder. Sometimes I woke up and saw the closet door swinging softly and knew we'd shut it. Other times our textbooks would get shuffled around or little things, hair ties, pens, the picture of my dog, would go missing only to show up somewhere weird. “I started keeping a sleep journal, writing down everything I saw or heard. They were all the same. Footsteps. Laughter. Waking up feeling like someone was standing over me.
One October night I had enough. I woke up to hear heavy breathing in the room. It was loud enough that I thought it was right next to my ear. I switched on my phone flash light and looked around the room.
Cora was awake, eyes wide with fright.
Did you hear that?” "I whispered.
Her voice shook, and she nodded. “I’ve seen someone here, Emily. I thought it was you, but… ain’t.”
We sat frozen, the laughter echoing around us. Mocking. Taunting. Chilling.
Then said Cora, in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “Sometimes I see three shadows in this room..” She pointed at the wall where the streetlight turned us into silhouettes. “But it’s always been the two of us.
My blood turned to ice.
The next morning we went to the R.A.F. He gave an awkward smile. Told us tales of students getting spooked in old buildings. They say Larkin Hall is haunted. Students disappeared in the 70s and rumors of a girl who never left after her roommates accident.
We tried to act like it was nothing, but the tension was there. Sometimes the laughter would die away, then start up again, louder and angrier. The third shadow would hang behind, just out of my sight; watching, waiting.
At the end of the semester Cora asked to be moved to another room. “She was leaving a week before finals but we would keep in touch,” she said. Mostly, I stayed because I am stubborn. But the ghost roommate never did.
Now I see three shadows on the wall each night. Laughter is less. Sadder. I whisper sometimes into the dark, We see you, and I hope that’s enough.
If you ever enter a room that seems too full, with laughter that is not yours, do not miss it. Some room mates never leave. Even if they’re not here.
And sometimes the loneliest shadows are the ones that want to be seen the most.