In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Girl on the Third Floor
  • Paul Crenshaw (bio)

Click for larger view
View full resolution

The upper floors of the Nyberg Building are locked and deserted now, but her ghost is said to live there still. It is not hard to imagine a ghost filtering down the long hall and disappearing into the distance, although I do not know if she walks through walls or simply appears and stands looking sad and lost, perhaps trying to find someone to help her.

The Nyberg is part of the Human Development Center, a cluster of buildings whose construction began in 1910, in the hills of Arkansas, as a tuberculosis sanatorium, which was later converted, in the 1970s, to a home for the developmentally disabled. Those who live near the Center, or have worked there, tell tales of phantom lights in the buildings at night, strange noises, pockets of cold on the upper floors. Almost nothing is known of the girl’s origins, not her name or age or when she lived there, not the reason people began to believe in her ghost in the first place. Yet the stories of her persist, stories I heard as a child living in a rented house on the grounds of the Center, only a short walk from the Nyberg. Paranormal groups have visited over the years and left toys for the girl: a writing tablet with the word Hello and a smiley face drawn on it; a once-white teddy bear that has grown brown with dust; a stuffed tiger missing one eye. In the late ’70s the building was cleared of asbestos, and the ceilings are open to rafters and pipes. Electrical cords hang down like vines, or vipers. The halls drip with heat. Dust hangs in the air, coats the floors and windows. On the higher floors dead birds line the hallways like stones, having been unable [End Page 189] to find their way out once they got in. In this way they are like the tuberculosis patients, many of whom called the Nyberg their final home. Their presence lingers. It is hard to breathe inside the building, and though I know it is the dust and heat, I imagine tuberculosis hanging like the motes in shafts of light or the spirits of those who once lived here. There are more than a dozen other buildings among the pines at the Human Development Center, most of them boarded over now. If there are such things as ghosts, they would come here. I tell myself I do not believe in ghosts, but the Nyberg is a strange, sad place.

I came in mid-summer, driving south from Booneville through a browned pasture, across an orange river, and up a winding hill where the road curved around ridges that looked out on other hills blue with distance. Past a final curve the Center rose through a forest of pine. From far away the buildings looked bone-white, but up close were nearer the color of old dirt. Bradford pears lined the sidewalks. The manicured lawn, and the dorm-like buildings among the rows of pines, looked more like a college campus than an old sanatorium.

I had not come to look for ghosts, except for the ones I already knew. My mother worked here for most of her adult life, and for three years we lived in one of the small houses on the grounds. That was just after my parents divorced, and the house seemed empty without my father there. Every morning my brother and I walked through the long shadows thrown by the buildings to catch the school bus, and every afternoon crossed back again, avoiding the residents, whose strange faces and various afflictions unnerved us. Many of them had speech impediments, and could not form words correctly, so it often seemed they were grunting, or yelling. Some nights, when all the buildings turned dark and the voices of the grunting or yelling residents drifted over the grounds, my brother and I crept out of our house and slipped through the trees to climb the water towers or crawl through broken windows into abandoned buildings. We sneaked into the old chapel and the...

pdf

Share