The Paint on the Eighth-Floor Landing

In the autumn of 1984, I was a sophomore at Meridian State College, nestled in the rust-belt town of Ashford, Ohio. I lived in the old high-rise dormitory, Thornwood Hall, a brutalist concrete tower that had seen better decades. My job was weekend desk clerk, a solitary post from Friday evening to Monday morning. The building felt even more cavernous on those empty weekends, with only the hum of fluorescent lights and the occasional groan of the elevator for company.

That particular Sunday, my roommate, Danny, and his suite-mates, Marcus and Pete, returned from their homes with duffel bags stuffed with home-cooked meals and Tupperware containers. Our suite was a peculiar arrangement: two rooms connected by a bathroom, which itself had a small anteroom leading to a narrow shower stall. I was helping them lug their loads up the stairwell—the elevator was perpetually out of order—and when we reached the eighth floor, I ducked through our door to drop off Danny’s heavy bag.

As I came back through the bathroom, I decided to cut through Marcus and Pete’s room rather than tramp down the hallway again. The antechamber to the shower was a cramped, windowless space with a cracked tile floor and a drain that always smelled faintly of mildew. I stepped in, and my gaze drifted to the right, toward the shower’s frosted glass door. There, standing in the corner, was a young woman.

She was of average height, with long, black hair that fell straight past her shoulders, parted in the center. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and she wore a threadbare beige dress that looked decades old. She didn’t move, didn’t blink. Her lips were slightly parted, as if she was about to speak, but no sound came. I froze, my heart hammering. I opened my mouth to ask who she was, but before I could form words, she slowly raised her right hand and pointed a finger at the shower drain. Then, with a motion so faint I almost missed it, she shook her head—a tiny, deliberate gesture—and vanished.

I stumbled back into Pete’s room, gasping. Danny looked up from his bag. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ he joked. I laughed weakly, but I couldn’t shake the image. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I told myself it was a trick of the light, a play of shadows from the frosted glass. But the memory of her pointing at the drain, and her silent warning, gnawed at me.

Monday morning, the maintenance crew came to fix a leak in the shower. They pulled up the tiles, and beneath the drain, they found a small, rusted metal box. Inside was a child’s paintbrush, a dried-up tin of green paint, and a yellowed photograph of a young woman with long, dark hair parted in the middle. The back of the photo bore the date ‘1958’ and the name ‘Edna.’

Later, I learned from an old janitor that a student named Edna had lived in that very suite in the late ’50s. She had been an art major, known for painting murals in the stairwells. One night, she fell down the elevator shaft—the same one that was ‘out of order’—and died. They said she was painting the walls of the eighth-floor landing that night, and she’d been missing for two days before they found her.

I never saw Edna again, but every time I walked past the shower, I felt her presence, a cold spot that lingered near the drain. And on certain quiet evenings, when the building was empty, I could swear I heard the soft, rhythmic scraping of a brush against concrete, coming from the stairwell—the sound of someone painting a door that wasn’t there, a door that led nowhere.