Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story
“One need not be a chamber to be haunted.”
—Emily Dickinson
Drown Memorial Hall was only a decade old when it was converted into a field hospital for students stricken with the flu in the autumn of 1918. A stolid, grey building of three stories and a basement, Drown Hall sits half-way up South Mountain where it looks over the Lehigh Valley to the federal portico of the white-washed Moravian Central Church across the river, and the hulking, rusting ruins of Bethlehem Steel a few blocks away. Composed of stone the choppy texture of the north Atlantic in the hour before a squall, with yellow windows buffeted by mountain hawks and grey Pennsylvania skies. Built in honor of Lehigh University’s fourth president, a mustachioed Victorian chemistry professor, Drown was intended as a facility for leisure, exercise, and socialization, housing (among other luxuries) bowling alleys and chess rooms. Catherine Drinker Bowen enthused in her 1924 History of Lehigh University that Drown exuded “dignity and, at the same time, a certain at-home-ness to every function held there,” that the building “carries with it a flavor and spice which makes the hotel or country club hospitality seem thin, flat and unprofitable.” If Drown was a monument to youthful exuberance, innocent pluck, and boyish charm, then by the height of the pandemic it had become a cenotaph to cytokine storms. Only a few months after basketballs and Chuck Taylors would have skidded across its gymnasium floor, and those same men would lay on cots hoping not to succumb to the illness. Twelve men would die of the influenza in Drown.
After its stint as a hospital, Drown would return to being a student center, then the Business Department, and by the turn of our century the English Department. It was in that final purpose that I got to know Drown a decade ago, when I was working on my PhD. Toward the end of my first year, I had to go to my office in the dusk after-hour, when lurid orange light breaks through the cragged and twisted branches of still leafless trees in the cold spring, looking nothing so much like jaundiced fingers twisting the black bars of a broken cage, or like the spindly embers of a church’s burnt roof, fires still cackling through the collapsing wood. I had to print a seminar paper for a class on 19th-century literature, and to then quickly adjourn to my preferred bar. When I keyed into the locked building, it was empty, silent save for the eerie neon hum of the never-used vending machines and the unnatural pooling luminescence of perennially flickering fluorescent lights in the stairwells at either end of the central
