Spin

Jolene was a freshman at Haverford College in 1982 and 1983. She had lived in Woodside Cottage during that time, a nice cosy red bricked, white washed house, which was known to people at the time as the Margaret Guest House. It was an old house on campus, and had already been standing there decades before the college was built. Jolene was on a student internship programme and thus shared the house with an Indian professor of philosophy and his wife. Her room was connected by an adjoining door to the room of another girl who was on the same programme. Her name was Keri, and she was studying the same subject.

It did not take very long for the two to realize that something was amiss with the third floor, which they stayed on. Jolene would hear an unusual amount of noise late at night, and sometimes would even hear voices. What sounded like mice's footsteps would be heard after midnight every night, despite the fact that everyone was sure that the house had no mice. Keri would have nightmares regularly, which she had never had before. After telling the professor about it, he placed a picture of the Indian god, Murugan over her bed, and the nightmares ceased to occur. But a month later she removed the picture. On that very night, Jolene was reading in her bed when she was jolted out of her concentration by a grating noise, which seemed to be coming from overhead. She looked up, wary of the fact that the noise was coming from the roof, but rather from inside her own room. To her shock, she saw the square, ceramic ceiling plate under the ceiling lamp route counter clockwise and as it turned, it made a horrid, screechy noise as it scratched the rusty, metal pipe. She knew that the plate must have weighed at least two pounds.

She stared at it in horror, rooted to her bed, the book still in her hands. unable to move, she screamed out for Keri, who came rushing in to see the exact same sight. The first thing Keri did upon glancing at the rotating square was to look up at the window to see whether a draft was coming in. The very fact that the windows were closed and that the square was so heavy made the sight that they were seeing virtually impossible. The twisting stopped about a minute after Keri walked in. The uncanny incident seriously spooked them. But they stayed on. One day however, Jolene was reading in her room when she heard her roommate who had retired about two hours before at midnight, scream in her room. It sounded as if she was arguing with someone. There was an enormous crash, so loud Jolene even felt its vibrations through her head. She hopped off and knocked on Keri's door. The light was off, the door was locked and no one answered. Jolene kept knocking on the door, but no one answered. There was a graveyard silence.

When confronted, Keri had no idea what Jolene was talking about the next morning. Christmas vacation soon came, and was over on the twenty ninth. Jolene was supposed to come back and stay at the house for two more weeks. Instead of dreading it, she was rather looking forward to it, anticipation instead of anxiety filing her being. She felt light headed and walked up to the door. But just as she put her hand on the doorknob, she felt someone throwing their weight against the door. 'Shit!' She exclaimed, realizing that some of her stuff was still in there. She tried to push the door open with all her might but failed as it was locked as well. She ran down the stairs, yelling for the professor to come up and see what was wrong. He unlocked the door and they both found that everything in the room was perfectly fine. The windows were locked from the inside and nothing was out of place. There was not the slightest trace of forced entry and nothing was missing. Although Jolene leaves the story at this point, the story does not end with her. She still writes to the professor, who corresponds with her on a regular basis. Some Tibetan monks who spent the night there claimed to have been pulled out of their beds at night. a Tibetan professor who also stayed there a few months later said he would wake up to the sensation that someone was sitting on his chest, trying to suffocate him.

The professor, who was aware that something resided in his house, finally decided to take action against it and called in a Buddhist monk who performed some ceremonies on it. Nothing strange has happened in the house since then, although Jolene has stumbled across some valuable information. She had told no one till now. A professor of mathematics had lived in the house in the late 1840s and was caught one day having an affair with one of his male students. Disgraced and remorseful, he hung himself one floor down directly below the lamp fixture which had been spinning.