When All the Girls Are Sleeping by Emily Arsenault

Author:Emily Arsenault [Arsenault, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2021-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

SUMMARY/CONCLUSIONS

As always, I am hesitant to draw any conclusions in matters of the paranormal. In this case, I am doubly so.

Dearborn Hall appears to be a place with multiple afflictions—a ghost, an intermittent poltergeist, confused adolescent psychic tensions, with possible telekinetic results—or none, in which case the student population has a peculiar talent for storytelling and imaginative self-deception. Either way, it is a place of convergence of much tension and conflicted psychic energy—that much is clear. The unique problem of this setting is that so many of these usually isolated phenomena appear to be occurring in one place—intertwining with each other, almost competing with each other.

What is most stunning to me is the possibility of a unique form of group delusion that appears to span over more than a century. The unusual persistence of the Dearborn ghost stories appears to have brought about consistent—almost yearly—experience of the paranormal within the student population in this dormitory. Whether that ghost story tradition makes some individual students more sensitive to actual paranormal activity, more apt to interpret uncomfortable or unusual experiences as paranormal, or more susceptible to mild to moderate delusions of ghostly experiences is undetermined.

In drawing tentative conclusions, one cannot ignore the curious factor of the portrait of Sarah Dearborn that hung on the wall for several decades, and which appears to have resulted in the ghost stories about a young woman in a black dress—Sarah in Black—until years after its removal. It is indeed a severe and arresting portrait—Kathleen and I viewed a photograph of it. Interestingly, in the years after its removal (due to water damage), stories about “Sarah” appear to more often feature a girl in a white nightgown. This suggests that the student population’s stories—and their experience of the ghost—were influenced by the portrait. This indicates that over the years, the ghost has changed along with student lore.

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