A PRL Anthology Series
There is a building being constructed in the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, home of Winthrop University. The site of construction is at the corner of Cherry Rd and Oakland Ave, where the Archives and Special Collections building still stands; it seems that contractors hope to extend the building for commercial business and it’s not clear if the Archives building will remain.
Construction on the lot of the Archives Building has disturbed something deep in the basement of the building.
“We promised this project would be done in less than six months!” the general contractor barked into his phone.
The supervisor of the construction crew was on the other end.
“We didn’t promise nothing, you and your jackass, celebrity dad made promises to get on the news. We told you something like this could happen. Didn’t we tell you?”
“We’re not making million dollar business decisions based on urban legends,” the contractor said.
“Whatever, make all the decisions you want, but you should see by now that you ain’t the one dictating when this project is done.”
The contractor hung up the phone in a huff then called his secretary into his office.
“Any messages?”
“Only from the people you don’t want to talk to. The City Manager is furious, she said you need to call her ASAP. And someone from Winthrop called, they’re demanding an end date to the construction, and students are starting to complain.”
The contractor groaned loudly.
“Great!” he yelled. “I’ll make some calls thanks Karen.”
The secretary left and the contractor cursed aloud when he was alone.
“Fucking ghost!” he yelled and then threw his office phone at a wall, leaving a hole the size of his head.
There are no ghosts in the Archives and Special Collections Building, what is there instead had been a ghost many years ago, but since that time, the entity, the spirit, has evolved into something much more.
Thelma Puttes was born in Rock Hill and attended Winthrop upon her graduation from high school on 1950. She was a beautiful young lady with dark brown hair that bobbed at her shoulders and was usually accented with a red bow that she wore in her hair.
She worked at a soda shop near main street and she had enough time after work to walk to the campus where she would earn her degree in education.
Thelma was very much a product of her time. Even though she had ambitions of becoming a teacher, she wanted a husband much more than she wanted to be a teacher and she was sure to avoid places in town that weren’t safe for a girl as pretty as her, namely the negro parts of town. There were distinct communities for whites and blacks then, and another mixed community of the truly impoverished. Thelma knew her place and she was happy to maintain it.
Until she was walking on Main Street toward the library and saw two practically grown men giving a little negro boy a hard time. She crossed the street and shoved get way between the men and boy.
“You stupid or something?” one of the men asked.
“Must be, pretty but dumb as rocks,” the other said.
“What kind of men gang up on a little boy,” Thelma asked them with clear disgust toward their behavior.
Both men were taken aback by her boldness and they looked at each frowning.
“This ain’t no boy,” one of them said finally, “this a little hard-headed nigger…”
“That may be so,” she said and stood sternly before them and they saw their own mothers or grandmothers in her, “but two big, strong men like yourself should know better than to beat up on a little thing like this.” She turned to the little black boy, “Run along now,” she said and smiled as the boy took off down a road.
“You two,” she said, looking at the men again. “Y’all gotta know by now, them niggers listen better when they think we like and respect them. And there ain’t never no cause for two men to be beaten up on a little thing like that.”
The man actually hung their heads and offered apologies to Thelma who smiled and continued on her day.
When she turned up dead a few weeks later, those same two men were the most vocal in blaming the black community and its predatory men, though it was the two white men who had beaten and raped her in a wooded area, in the spot that would eventually become the Archives and Special Collections Building.
A ghost is the spirit of a person that dwells the land of the living, making appearances or disturbing things of physical space to make its presence known.
After her death, Thelma became aware as a disgruntled spirit, but rather than haunt anyone, she pouted in the spot if get death. Other spirits approached her and Thelma realized that there were more spirits of deceased black people than white in the area.
“You just gone sit there all frowned up?” the spirit of a black woman who had died decades after Thelma asked.
Thelma had sat for decades without talking or engaging anything but something about the black woman made her move for the first time. She stared at the black woman who smiled at her.
“You can do something if you want to, it’s up to you what you do with this sorry excuse for existence we got here.”
Thelma nodded.
“I don’t even recognize this place no more ” Thelma said, looking around herself.
“That’s what places do,” the woman said, “they change. If you just sit there, it change around you. If you move, if you make your presence felt, you can shape the change. That’s the best we can hope for.”
Thelma never saw the spirit of that black woman again, but she took her words to heart. By then, it was 2000 and there was a building on the spot of her death. She explored it and came to respect the people who collected history there.
About twenty years later. Thelma heard whispers of new construction that would see the Archives and Special Collections Building disturbed, if not demolished. She did haunt any person or reveal herself to them, but she sabotaged the project every step of the way and severely delayed progress.
The contractor pulled along the sidewalk one evening next to the building that was slowly going up. Even though he knew better, he slipped through the fence that surrounded the site and he stood staring up at the steel beams and cinder blocks that had been put into place.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” the contractor heard and startled, looking around himself until he laid eyes on what seemed to be a ghost.
“You’re the ghost?” he asked. “Why are you ruining my building?”
“I haven’t been a ghost for a long time, young man. I found my purpose here, and now I am the spirit of this place. I’m more than the woman I was in life, and this place deserves better than restaurant chains and escape rooms.”
The contractor grabbed the closet thing he could lift, a cinderblock, and hurled it at Thelma, but it didn’t hit her. It banged loudly against a steel beam and before the contractor knew what was happening, a large beam fell on top of him and smashed him into the dirt.
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