Haunted literature at Harvard

In Briggs-Copeland Lecturer Laura van den Berg’s creative writing course, “Haunted: Writing the Supernatural,” students put their imaginations to work creating their own tales of demons, monsters, and ghosts.
For Halloween, van den Berg’s creative writing students wrote a collaborative “exquisite corpse” story set in a haunted house on a rainy night. They read their story in the Harry Widener Memorial Room at Widener Library, under the watchful eye of the room’s namesake.
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Text written by: Amanda Gorman, Emily Gordon, Karina Gonzalez-Espinoza, Stuti Telidevara, Christian Wagner, Margaret Butler
Forget what they told you. The house was red that fall. Not blue. I know because when it was all over the panes matched my rainboots.
We snuck in one afternoon, because nighttime was a step too far. Inside, though, the house was shrouded in midnight’s darkness.
We walked into the first and only room. It had as many but no exits to return us to the rainy street. In the pitch black, I smelled tears and felt my bones vibrating from the screams that had never been heard.
The screams clung to my ears, screams whose keepers had long passed from this earth. They scratched stories into the surface of my brain, overwriting parts of myself with their brief moments of existence.
The screaming dulled, and something akin to sense came back to me. Looking around the room, I saw that I was the sole person left standing. The red had seeped into my socks, beyond the boots.
The house was still and lifeless, so unlike what it had been only moments before, but I was the one to truly change. Lost and never to be found again. If you see me in the window, stare if you’d like, but when colors start to shift or your ears ring, run as fast as it lets you.