Honestly If You Don’t Believe In Ghosts At This Point I’m Not Sure What To Tell You

Organized by Will Dryden

It’s Halloween weekend, and you know what that means: time to be spooked out of your mind for three days straight! To help you get started, we’ve saved our best ghost story for last, and this one is vintage- it comes all the way back from when Southern Virginia University was just Southern Seminary. Without further ado, our final story…

SWEET ISABELLA

“20 years ago, it wasn’t unusual for an alumni of Southern Sem to visit campus. They were easy to spot — a woman in her 50s or 60s, walking around campus alone, looking up misty-eyed at the buildings, lost in memories. My friends and I loved to talk to them. They were eager to tell their stories and share their memories, and their stories were always wild, funny, mischievous, or otherwise entertaining and interesting. Here’s my favorite, and most chilling experience that I personally experienced with a friend:

My friend lived down the hall from me in a private room. She often dreamed vividly, and one day before class she shared with me a dream she had the previous night. In her dream, she was standing in the corridor outside her room and saw a little girl. The girl was wearing a dress and seemed sweet and said her name was Isabella. That was it. That’s the dream, nothing else to it.

Later that same day, she was sitting in her room working on her computer at her desk with her bedroom door open (that wasn’t unusual), when a woman in her 50s walked by and knocked on her open door (that was unusual). No one was allowed on the dorm floors except the girls who lived there and their same-gender friends, and most of the time when someone who didn’t live there entered the floor, they would have to announce their presence by shouting something like “Security on the floor!” or “Man on the floor!” Random adults couldn’t just walk onto the floor, but this woman managed it. She was friendly and introduced herself to my friend, saying she had gone to Southern Sem and this had been her room and she just wanted to see it again. They chit-chatted for some time — friendly, light-hearted, sharing experiences. After about a half hour the women turned to leave, then paused, turned back, and said with an air of heaviness, “Have you met Isabella?” My friend’s blood ran cold, her breath caught in her throat and she told the woman about her dream. That’s all the women needed for assurance, and left without seeming surprised.“

-Melissa W.