Authors: David Jack Bell

The Girl in the Woods (18 page)

BOOK: The Girl in the Woods

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No laughs. They didn't know what Geritol was.

But it didn't matter. He spotted a tentative hand in the third row, a young man with a baseball hat obscuring his eyes.

"Yes, sir?" Ludwig said, pointing at the kid.

"I heard that if your roommate dies or commits suicide, you get a 4.0 for the semester. Is that true?"

"You must not like your roommate very much," Ludwig said, earning his biggest laugh of the day. "Or else you doubt your ability to get a 4.0." Even more laughter. They were warming up. "I hate to disappoint all of you who have been plotting to kill your roommates, but no, you don't get a 4.0 if your roommate dies during the school year. On the bright side, they will let you re-take your classes without penalty, so if you find yourself struggling and thinking of withdrawing..." They all laughed again. "But you're correct. That's an excellent example of campus folklore, and it isn't just found at Fields. Almost every college or university in America has some variation on that story. Are there others you can think of?"

A young woman in the middle of the hall raised her hand, and Ludwig pointed at her. "Yes, ma'am?" The woman had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and appeared to be blushing.

"I heard that if you kiss someone in the Holtman Gazebo at midnight while the bells in the clock tower chime, you'll be with that person forever."

The women in the room cooed, while the men laughed, which caused many of them to receive playful punches in the arm from nearby female students. Ludwig nodded.

"Another excellent example," he said. "And also a good example of a piece of folklore that has stood the test of time here at Fields. You may not know this about me, but I attended Fields as an undergraduate many years ago, back during the Civil War." Some laughs, but Ludwig also knew that some of them were racking their brains, trying to remember if it were possible for him to have been alive during the Civil War. "My college sweetheart and I tried that out. We kissed in the Holtman Gazebo on the night of our six month anniversary."

"Awwww," the women said.

"And it worked, we were married shortly after graduation."

"Awwww." Even louder.

"Of course, we divorced seven years after that. So when I started dating again, I brought my next lover back here to Fields for a visit, and we too kissed in the gazebo. And we married soon after. And divorced soon after that." They were all staring at him now, not knowing how to take his tale of woe. He didn't know whether it was a tragedy or a comedy either, so he shrugged. "That's why I gave up on marriage and came to teach at Fields instead. Now I'm married to my work. And we've never kissed in the gazebo."

They laughed, a little nervous, a little relieved. For a second, they thought they were going to witness some sort of meltdown by one of their professors, the kind of thing they could talk about for weeks at the cafeteria table or the frat house or in the bars.

"Any other examples come to mind? Anything?"

A long pause. Ludwig thought that perhaps the discussion had run its course, that he was going to have to return to lecturing. But just as he was about to turn his eyes back to his notes, a hand went up near the back.

"Yes?" Ludwig said, nodding.

It was a female student wearing glasses and looking too shy to speak. She cleared her throat several times before speaking.

"I live in Maxwell Hall," she said. "And they've been telling us there's a ghost there."

Ludwig smiled. "Ah, I'm so glad you brought that one up. The Maxwell Hall Ghost. What have you heard about it?"

The girl looked around nervously. "Just that there's a ghost, and she lives on the top floor."

More hands went up. Ludwig pointed to another woman.

"I live in Maxwell, too," she said. "And I heard the same thing. They said she was a music student who hung herself in a closet, and at night you can hear a piano playing. And there's no piano in the building."

"I heard you can see her in the courtyard when the moon is full," someone said.

"I heard she's crying for her boyfriend who died in the war."

"This is all bullshit," a guy in the front row said.

"Okay, okay," Ludwig said, signaling for quiet. "For weeks you guys don't talk, and now you explode." He waited until they settled down. "It's true, there is campus folklore that says the ghost of a young woman haunts Maxwell Hall. And that story has also been around since I went to school here as an undergraduate. But none of the details you gave me are the real story behind the woman whose ghost supposedly walks through Maxwell at night. Do you want me to tell you the real story?"

"Yes," they answered in unison.

"Very good. The woman who supposedly haunts Maxwell Hall is named Faith Brenner. She went to school here in the 1830s, when Maxwell Hall was not part of Fields, but rather a dormitory for the Holly Ridge College for Women, which merged with Fields at the turn of the twentieth century. Back then, you understand, there were different expectations for women. They couldn't go on a date unsupervised. To hold hands with or, God forbid, kiss a boy, would have been scandalous."

They all groaned, just as he knew they would.

"Well, it seems that Miss Brenner fell in love with a young man who went to school at Fields. Now, Miss Brenner was from one of the most prominent families in the New Cambridge area at the time. It's long gone now, but her grandfather founded the Brenner Furniture Company, which at one time was the largest furniture manufacturer in the Midwest. Needless to say, they had a lot of money and a lot of power. But the young man whom Miss Brenner chose to fall in love with wasn't so fortunate. His father was a farmer, and a rather poor one at that. Looking back, it seems somewhat remarkable that such a young man would be attending college at all, but apparently he had some gumption. Little is known about him, really, and I ought to know. I've been researching this story for the past fifteen years." He cleared his throat. "Miss Brenner's family didn't approve of the match, and they forbade the young woman from seeing this young man. But they interfered just a little too late. Do you know why?"

"They got married?" someone said.

"No. Better."

"She was pregnant?"

"Exactly. Miss Brenner had become pregnant. And you all thought no one had sex outside of wedlock back in the old days."

They all laughed.

Ludwig smiled as well, but he didn't continue with the story. He waited, letting their curiosity grow until someone shouted out, "Well, what happened?"

"Oh," he said. "You want to know what happened to Faith Brenner?"

"Yes!"

"You really want to know?"

"Come on..."

Ludwig shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "Nobody knows. She disappeared from her dorm room one night. Her body was never found. She didn't leave a note. Nobody saw her go, at least not according to any records that I've been able to find in my research, and believe me, I've looked."

"So she ran off with the guy," a student said. "The poor guy."

"A good theory," Ludwig said. "Except he was still around after she disappeared. The police questioned him extensively, and he claimed not to know the girl's whereabouts. He eventually graduated from Fields, married, and had a life of his own, one without Faith Brenner."

"Then she ran away," a woman said.

It was always the female students who wanted to believe Faith Brenner ran away and had the baby on her own.

"Think of how difficult that would be for a woman today, someone your age. Leaving everything she has ever known, with no family support, no money and no real education to speak of, to go and have a child and then raise it on her own. And I know a woman today might have an abortion, but back then...No, I find it hard to believe that Faith Brenner simply ran off to start a new life with her unborn child and no means of supporting herself. In a rural area with no transportation and only the clothes on her back." Ludwig shook his head. "Most unlikely."

The question hung in the air then—
what really did happen to Faith Brenner?

Ludwig waited, thinking to himself,
Come on, it can't be this hard to make the connection...

"Are you suggesting," one of the students said, "that Pioneer Club thing you talked about had something to do with it?"

"Why would I suggest such a thing?"

A ripple of enlightenment spread through the room. The students whispered and buzzed among themselves.

"Connections, right?" Ludwig said. "Everything's connected?"

Their buzzing grew louder, so Ludwig raised his arms for quiet. When they settled down, he continued.

"Some people do think she was murdered. They think that the scandal of the pregnancy and the relationship with the farm boy was too much for her family to bear. They had her killed to avoid the public disgrace and associated drop in social standing they knew would come. Faith Brenner's mother, Eliza Brenner, was never the same after the girl disappeared. She was inconsolable, wailing away her days in the upstairs of the Brenner family home, which still stands by the way on the corner of Ohio Avenue and Grant Street. Her father, Hiram Brenner, never spoke of the girl again after she disappeared. He focused his attention on his work and the three children he still had, the ones who had the good sense to marry the right people and stay out of trouble. Oh, and something else about Hiram Brenner, her father? The rumor has always been that he was one of the most powerful and important members of The Pioneer Club."

He paused. They were all paying attention to him now, most of them thinking some variation of,
Why can't school be this interesting all of the time?

"But ever since Faith's disappearance, the folklore around campus has been that Faith Brenner wanders the halls of Maxwell, waiting for her lover, the farm boy from Fields University, to come and take her away." They watched him in silence for a long moment. "Do there seem to be any themes running through these stories we've shared today?"

"That this is a weird place," someone said.

"Not quite," Ludwig said. "Not quite. You see, folklore often plays on our deepest fears, as well as our greatest desires. We all wish to fall in love and live happily ever after, so we kiss in the gazebo and hope the magic works. Conversely, we all fear an early end to our lives, a snuffing out of all of our hopes and dreams before we've had the chance to realize them. And if those hopes and dreams do get snuffed out early, we hope that there's someone there to help us pick up the pieces. Someone to help us with our grades. Or maybe we just wish that some part of us lives on after death, wishing for the possibility of a reunion with the person we loved in life. Because, the truth is, our lives don't always turn out the way we hope they will. And sometimes young people die, often in horrible ways.

"Well, now that you're all cheered up, maybe we should go on..." But Ludwig saw a hand up in the back of the room. It was the same young woman who had originally brought up the ghost of Faith Brenner. "Yes?"

"Maybe there will be a ghost story about the girl who just disappeared," she said.

"Excuse me?" Ludwig said. "I don't know to what you're referring."

"You mean you didn't hear?" the woman said. A ripple went through the room. Some seemed to know what she was talking about, while others craned their necks to look at her as though they didn't know anything. "Some girl, a student here, she disappeared yesterday. Vanished into thin air."

"Are you joking?" Ludwig said.

"No, not at all," she said, and many other heads nodded in agreement as though they had heard the news as well.

It took Ludwig a moment to realize that his mouth was hanging open. He could imagine the color disappearing from his face, like water running out of a drain. The class was looking at him now, a hundred sets of eyes expecting a response, something profound, something adult.

But he didn't have anything to offer.

He looked at his watch. They still had twenty minutes to go.

But he couldn't wait.

"Okay," he said. "That's good enough for today."

BOOK: The Girl in the Woods

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