When I asked my informant M about any stories they might have had about surrounding legends, they thought of the time when their high school English and Creative Writing teacher was sure that her old classroom was haunted. M said that she would always stay late after school was over to finish work, and suddenly one day, people started asking her if she was at school when she wasn’t there because they saw someone in the window of her classroom. The description of the figure was always the same, a woman dressed in white. She told them that it wasn’t her that they saw and that they must have mistaken her for someone else, but it kept on happening and people would joke that a ghost was haunting her classroom. She was staying late one night, as usual, when she suddenly encountered the womanly figure that everyone was talking about. M said that nobody knew exactly what had happened, but apparently, things started to fall over in her classroom. The experience spooked their teacher enough that she made the administration give her a different classroom the next year and now she always leaves the school as soon as the bell rings. 

I found this story funny, but I also felt bad for their poor teacher. I’m not going to deny that her classroom was haunted, but she might have also been especially tired after a long day of work that day and her brain conjured the figure up. I also don’t think people telling her that a woman-like figure dressed in white is always inside her classroom when she is not there helped her imagination. It sort of reminds me of Sydow’s term, memorate, where she is relating a personal experience to a spoken narrative. I never thought a classroom of mine was haunted, but a lot of people, including myself, in elementary school thought that our language teacher wasn’t human. She was not a nice person and she had a way of smiling and staring through to your soul that frightened many of us and we thought that she was a creepy alien in disguise as a human.