Rebecca started shivering and couldn’t stop. If someone had convinced her she was seeing a ghost she would have felt nothing but relief. As it was, she walked home in a cold sweat and went straight to bed. She didn’t fall asleep for hours.

On campus at quarter to twelve, a crowd of martyrs flickered into existence atop Blanket Hill... not the usual martyrs celebrated for clinging to their beliefs in the face of death, but the ones who died meaninglessly, without the chance to take a stand. Innocent women accused of witchcraft, hanged and drowned and burned. Civilians whose homes lay in the path of marching armies. Tribespeople who succumbed to disease, starvation, and sorrow in the cargo holds of slave ships. Hundreds of unmoving bodies appeared on Blanket Hill, many of them touching or overlapping: a young widow cremated in suttee, lying with her head on the chest of a teenage boy who froze in Siberia because his uncle denounced Stalin; a drowned passenger from KAL 007 linking arms with one from the Iranian Airbus A300.

As midnight approached, more and more bodies accumulated: in the roadways, on the Commons, inside buildings. Fearing panic, university security evacuated an on-campus pub when Bhopal gas victims began piling up the dance floor. “Nothing to worry about,” the security guards said as they hurried students out. “We’ll take care of it.”

“What are you going to do?” someone asked. “Call in the National Guard?”

That was my question too. What was I going to do? Call in the National Guard?

Look: ghosts appear because they have unfinished business. And if anyone has unfinished business, it must be those who were killed senselessly. But what can they do to finish their stories? Should the four Kent State students haunt the living National Guardsmen and torment them for their acts? That’s so cheap: just crude revenge.