So my friend goes to college in the southwest and there is a girl on her floor who is convinced her dorm room is haunted. Apparently, a girl died there a few years ago, I don’t know if it was suicide or just a mysterious event. Well, they know for sure that it happened on her specific floor but no one knows the room it happened in. But as I said before, my friend knows a girl who is certain she has the room. She says she feels like she always is being watched and the biggest thing is how cold her room always is. Like apparently no other room on their floor is like it. She can have no fans on and the room is always freezing. If fact, my friend said she and a bunch of other girls would hang out a lot in the room when the days got hot because there isn’t any air conditioning in their dorms and yet this girl’s room was always so cold.

I heard this story in a USC cafeteria around 3:30pm during a late lunch. The informant is a good friend of mine. He heard this story from a friend of his, who lived on a college dorm floor where one of her classmates claimed to have a haunted dorm room. My friend mentioned how thankful he was that he did not have the same situation in his dorm room.

I found a multitude of ghostly motifs in my informant’s tale. These motifs include suicide, college life, and cold rooms/sensations. Suicide, or otherwise a mysterious death, is common in ghostly tales because a popular cause of hauntings is when an individual does not receive a proper, natural death. When there is murder, suicide, or an event that cuts someone’s life short than naturally intended, the victim’s spirit is known to roam in this world for some time afterwards. Also, college is considered a liminal period in everyone’s lives. One is neither an adult nor child. It is the transition in between two worlds. Because ghosts are and manifest around liminal objects, locations, and events, it is no surprise ghosts haunt college settings. And finally, the mentioning of cold sensations felt inside the girl’s dorm room. Yet another ghostly motif, as cold temperatures are often associated with cold, dead bodies.