The ghost stood at the top of the stairs. She was a tall ghost, with long tawny hair swirling on top of her head, with some strands slipping down to her very pale, very bare, very lovely shoulders.

Alive, she used to worry constantly about how she appeared to other people. Now it was no longer the old question her rivals asked — “What do men see in her?” — but a far more fundamental question of whether anyone saw anything of her at all.

Yet no one could deny that she had tremendous presence.

It was as if she carried with her a sense of expectation the way she once wore scent; those within reach experienced the indefinable nearness of her as part of their own sensibility. She did not possess them; they sought her. Several people from the party below looked towards her without knowing what caught their attention.

The dress she had worn simply forever. The only part of her ensemble she could alter was her hairstyle. Naturally she spent enormous amounts of time putting her hair up, taking it down, braiding it, seeing if she could make it curl into appealing tendrils that would hide the marks on her neck. She couldn’t dabble with any face paints. She couldn’t even change her shoes. She was stuck with the jewelry she had worn on that fateful night. Thank goodness she at least had her hair to manage because otherwise what would she have done to pass the time?

The ghost wasn’t one for reading. Every now and then, she would drift into the library, especially if there were a handsome young man already there, and wiggle a book off the shelves. She favored Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Not that she actually enjoyed these authors but she felt that they were appropriate, what with “Goblin Market” and all. Although she couldn’t lift the books and hold them prettily as she might have liked, she was nevertheless capable of nudging them slightly out of alignment. She could call attention to them.

And to herself.

She craved attention with the urgency of thirst. She wanted men to fall eloquently and elegantly in love with her and for women to worry about and envy her or, if the woman was suitably aged, to feel benevolent towards her.

Precisely those things she wanted when alive continued as desires after death. Tonight was the 104th anniversary of her murder. That’s why she was at their party, drawn to it like iron filings gathered up by a magnet. All this energy, all these people, all those clinking glasses. Not that her death was the reason for tonight’s celebration; it was merely the 15th wedding anniversary of the couple living in the house. They lacked courage as fully as they lacked grace or originality. Had they read anything of local history, they would never have bought the old place.

But haunters can’t be choosers.

Not even famous ones.

Strangled by her husband in their marital bed right after a gala of her own, the ghost vividly recalled the newspaper accounts of her murder. In this quiet small town, the death of its most glamorous inhabitant by the hands of its richest not only made news but stayed news for many years.

Was her fame already struck from the book of history? Was she forgotten so soon?

Her husband was arrested, naturally. There was little question about his guilt and hardly more about his motivation: When an old man marries a young girl, there’s not much people feel they don’t know about the plot.

Although they do like details. Everything from the fabric of the dress she wore (a raw silk damask in a light moss green, from Worth) to the grisly disquisition concerning the maker of the rope around her neck (Hawthorne Industries, Ohio) was considered fascinating by those poor souls whose only interest in life was the sort of jam they put on their toast and at what hour they went to bed.

It was difficult for her to acknowledge that her life could be summed up in a few pages of newsprint, but she consoled herself with the fact that she was only 23 years old, after all. Had she lived, she might well have accomplished great things, become a genuinely important woman, traveled the world, and made significant contributions to it.

Instead, she was stuck in an outdated evening dress with shoes that pinched her feet and a longing to be loved that outlasted the lifetimes.

(Brainstorm illustration, with gown transformed from this one at vintagetextile.com)