Midnight has passed, and in the stillness of these hours, the hauntings are never silent.

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

The first complaint came in a little after 3 in the morning.

At that point in the semester, Marcus had been a resident assistant in Whitcomb Hall for barely six weeks,

which was just long enough to understand that college students treated emergencies differently than everyone else.

A clogged toilet could become a crisis if it happened during a party.

A real crisis could be shrugged off if nobody wanted to get written up. Most of the calls

he received after midnight involved lockouts, noise complaints, drunken arguments, or someone

crying in the laundry room because their life had briefly become too much to manage. So when someone

knocked on his door that night, he expected one of those things. Instead, he opened it to find a freshman named Elise standing barefoot in the hallway, with her room key clenched in one hand and tears running silently down her face.

For a moment, Marcus thought she was sleepwalking. She wore flannel, pajama pants, and an oversized sweatshirt, and her hair was tangled around

one shoulder as if she had just sat up too quickly in bed.

Behind her, the corridor stretched long and dim beneath the fluorescent ceiling lights,

quiet except for the soft electric hum that never fully disappeared in old dorms.

Elise kept looking past him toward the stairwell.

It took nearly a minute before she could explain what had happened. She had woken up because

she felt someone in the room, not heard someone, felt them. Her roommate had gone home for

the weekend so Elise knew she should have been alone. The door was locked, the chain was latched,

the window was closed, but when she opened her eyes, someone was standing near the foot of the

empty bed across from hers. Marcus asked if she got a good look at him. Elise shook her head

immediately. That was the part that bothered her most. The room had not been completely dark because the parking lot lights outside spilled through the blinds.

...