There was a ghost haunting the piano in the locked basement of the theater building. Or, more accurately, that was the rumor.

The said piano, was tucked away in the theater department's basement, collecting dust, likely with the unused, obligatory tower window combo that every theater department seemed to have stowed away somewhere for their amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. From all accounts, no one seemed to know how it had gotten down there, since it was -apparently- a full grand piano. The stairs leading down to the basement would not accommodate its size, and the elevator didn't go down to the basement, didn't even have a button for it, or even a hidden button that needed a key to get to. This also transversely made it impossible to take the piano out of the theater building's basement. If it was actually down there at all, which seemed to be up to debate.

But on late nights, when the theater students were working late into the evening to finish up a set, or when they were just goofing off behind the building, they reported that music could be heard coming from the locked steel door that led to the basement. Interestingly enough, by all official statements, there was no way for any sound to escape such a place. The basement was an old abandoned bomb shelter, built back when everyone was still afraid of the Russians dropping more than superior ballet and highly acclaimed literature on their doorsteps. It was built of concrete and steel and probably able to keep five people from turning into mutant ninja turtles should some form of nuclear fallout happen to pound on its locked door.

By all accounts, sound didn't escape from it, not now and not ever. You could get locked down there, and starve to death, because there wouldn't be a damn person to hear you screaming and pounding on the door.

Of course, by all official accounts, there actually wasn't a grand piano in the theater building's basement, because it simply couldn't be down there. There was no record of it. The music department had no word on the subject -other than to adamantly want it once it was mentioned that there possibly was a spare full grand piano somewhere on campus that they couldn't get their hands on. Yet, there it was, a haunted piano that played lovely music to scare the liberal arts majors dedicating their time to collage productions.

Of all the rumors he'd heard, Leo thought that certainly, this was one of the silliest. Music rumors, tended to have very rational, albeit boring, conclusions.

He was a logical, rational person, and like all good logical, rational people, he had a healthy disdain for things that embodied the unknown and the supernatural. Despite that very blatant statement, Leo Baskerville did seem to have a vested interest in the unknown and the supernatural. He enjoyed horror books and films, his favorite holiday was Halloween, at which time he always volunteers at haunted houses, and went through as many as he could find; he even traveling long distances to go see ones with higher production value. And when he had the time, he'd brighten his day by visiting his old orphanage, and scaring the small children that lived there. Lovingly of course; with his favorite mask and plastic butcher knife. He blamed all the Scooby-doo VHS tapes that someone had donated to the orphanage. Little did that good samaritan know that while he did save space in his attic, he'd inadvertently turned on a small child to scaring his fellows, and all manner of mysterious things that should all have logical explanations in the end.

This was not to say that Leo was at all inclined to believe in spooky things, just that he seemed to find a great deal of pleasure in seeking them out. In fact, his job consisted of finding, and writing about said spooky rumors from their highly prestigious, but arguably very haunted, Nightray University. The very haunted part might have played into why he'd picked it, but it did happen to have an excellent philosophy department as well, so there was that to consider, among other things, of course.

Leo worked for the weekly campus newspaper. At first he'd been stuck writing about local museum exhibitions, art galleries, and the occasional concert, all of which had been far more interesting than the piece he'd had to write on the changing trends in student eating habits, or which spots to stay away from at night if you wanted to keep your wallet. But all of those subjects were not what he really wanted to write. Despite his half finished degree in philosophy, Leo wanted to write horror. Guts and blood and hauntings and serial killers, and really, just any manner of frightening content would suffice. And once it had become obvious that he had a deep seated love for all things that would make a normal person's skin crawl, his boss had dismissively told him to check out the ghost sightings off in the aerospace tower. His part time career of writing about ghosts and rumors started there.

Leo fell in love with the project, largely because he was highly invested, and also because he already had a great deal of information on the subject. Affectionately called 'Humpty Dumpty' -yes, he'd been the one to name it- the shadowy figure of a man would appear at the top of the aerospace tower, and crash to the ground, inadvertently freaking out whatever drunk student happened to be trolling campus at an ungodly hour. One poor girl had even seen a body once, broken into pieces, with glowing eyes and blood. She'd been drunk, but that had sobered her quickly. She'd called 911, only to have the body reach out and grab her. Of course she'd screamed, and high tailed it, but when she returned later, the body had simply disappeared. She'd wandered over to inspect it again, and had heard an inhuman scream above her. She'd looked up, only to see the same body tumbling off the tower again, but this time it looked like the body was going to fall on top of her; she'd ran. When the EMTs arrived, they found no body, no indication that anything had happened, and were not amused. As far as Leo could see it, if the ghost existed, it obviously had a positively wicked sense of humor.

The article he'd written hadn't really disputed Humpty Dumpty's existence, because the more he looked into it, the more he enjoyed the story of it. He knew the ghost didn't exist, but if it did, it just liked harassing drunk college students at night, and that in and of itself was amusing. Leo was sure the traumatized girl did not agree with him, but he could forgive her for not seeing the beauty in it, or the humor. As someone who enjoyed scaring -harmlessly of course- Leo could appreciate Humpty Dumpty's style of it. By all accounts, he didn't show up for teachers -other than in one case, where she swore up and down she hadn't been drinking, and Leo knew she was lying- and only showed up in the early morning hours, usually between 2 and 4. The piece he'd written had simply given all of the information he could find.

The article had done so well, that he'd been granted a column, to be published every third week, about anything spooky he could dig up on campus. Such an honor was both a blessing, and a curse. The first time he'd written, he'd very much enjoyed it. The piece had been easy, and on some spiritual level -pun entirely intended- he'd thought of Humpty Dumpty as simply a weird guy who just enjoyed harassing students that were up way to late at night. Something he could relate to, on some levels. The article had been easy and fun to write, and obviously enjoyable to read, because there had been such a positive response to it. Nightray had attracted more of its student body by its bloody and gruesome past than Leo had first imagined.

The second article had been easy too. He figured that since it was going to become a regular thing, Leo would start from the beginning, so he had. He'd started with the Nighray curse, a very old, very silly little wives tale about the well endowed family that had started the university, and transversely, the university itself. The exact specifics of the curse were shrouded in mystery -seeing as curses didn't actually exist, and if they did, were sort of a personal thing- there were few actual records of it. The Nighray curse existed in mostly rumor and speculation, the worst of which starting with the Nighrays having to sacrifice their youngest child to the devil, and the least of which implied that all students with an N in their name were doomed to do poorly in PE classes. Anything of slight misfortune was blamed on the curse, as well as anything of huge misfortune.

To say the least, Nightray University had a fair share of horrible tragedies in its past, all of which were at some point or another, attributed to the curse. The most recent tragedy to be placed under the curses proverbial umbrella, had taken place 8 years ago, when the Nighray blood line, for very mysterious and gruesome reasons, all died. Before that, the curse had been mostly silly, spooky rumors about the reclusive and illustrious benefactors of the university. That was until the details of their untimely, tragic deaths had surged through the local papers. At that point, the curse had made a resurgence in popular thought among the campuses residents. The Nightray family had quite tragically all been hunted down, and murdered, from the oldest to the youngest, like a matryoshka doll loosing it's pieces one by one. Almost always a week apart, each member had been brutally murdered, one at a time, and always more gruesome than the last. But perhaps one of the oddest things about it, was that the Nightray family did not allow obituaries to be published in the papers, their small funerals were private, and literally no information about the crimes were ever released to the media. For all intensive purposes, for about two months, the illustrious Nightray family, all five children and parents alike, seemed to just thin, and then disappear. It was only months after the last had simply vanished from the public eye, that the local paper got wind of the story, and published what details they could dig up. And even then, those details had been vague and unsatisfying, to say the least, and that had only encouraged speculation and rumors to run rampant.

There were only two adopted Nightrays that continued to wander the halls of the living, but that was a side note for a different exposition. The article in question had taken Leo a long time, for a variety of reasons. Leo had done a great deal of research, both in the archives, and interviews, of the two remaining Nightrays -likely a huge mistake- and faculty and staff that had been around at the time of the Nightray deaths. It had been hard, dredging up old skeletons, but Leo had been even more invested than he had been on the first piece, so once he had done the research, the article had mostly written itself. And it had been a damn good article too. Painful to write at certain spots, but well worth the effort he'd put into it. It had talked about the various rumors involved with the Nightray curse, the past deaths attributed to it -and there were seeeeveral of those- and finishing up with the unsolved, unexplained, mysterious culling of the Nightray bloodline.

It had been a long article, five times his allotted slot, and even then, Leo had left out many fascinating details, and far too many personal ones as well. His boss had threatened to cut it up into pieces, but after reading it, grudgingly agreed that the weekly food reviews could wait until next week, and that the coverage of water polo could be considerably shortened. It was fair to say that Leo had poured his heart and soul into that article, and for his efforts, it had done even better than the one preceding it. The campus seemed to want gruesome, and mysterious works, and Leo couldn't help but be pleased with himself.

He'd reached the apex of his collage, column writing career, and it was all downhill from there.

His next project had been about some strange singing in the biology building late at night. Very creepy, eerie songs about chopping off heads and all manner of gruesome things. That had sounded promising, but when Leo had looked into it, it had simply ended up being the anthropology teacher. Dr. Barma liked to stay in her office late into the evening, twirling around in her lab chair, the white lab coat she always wore swirling around her, and her favorite head -yes you read that right, skeletal head- held lovingly in her arms. She'd named it after her favorite student, Oswald, and for whatever reason, she liked stroking and singing to it late at night. The sound would bounce around her office, before dissipating in the biology building, and the surrounding streets. It had spooked more than one student on their nightly trips home, but was not an excellent story.

The next one had been of a small child's ghost. The rumor stated that if you left a stuffed animal out, anywhere on campus over night, that the next day it would be ripped to pieces. The story was that some malevolent child spirit loved ripping them apart, or something like that. Another solid sounding story, but that had ended badly as well. As it turned out, Vincent Nightray -number one creep of the campus, hands down- had a strange, unexplainable urge to rip apart small plush toys every time he saw them. Being a Nightray, -one of the two pair set that remained- Vincent had full range of the whole campus, and for all intensive purposes seemed to have a cute plush toy radar, similar to how a predator could sense prey, but for adorable plush toys. It was weird, and really not something Leo could bring himself to publish. Vincent Nightray was weird, maybe mental, but that really didn't merit a story. He also didn't want to get kicked out of the university, which was something Vincent could very well do if he happened to dislike what Leo wrote.

He'd moved onto another eerie song rumor. This time, from the music department -who would have guessed. Lacie Baskerville -no relation; for whatever reason the last name Baskerville went through their town like a recessive gene- music student, had twin girls at home, who had a relatively early bed time. While her brother Oswald -yes, the one who the head was named after- stayed home with Lacie's girls, Lacie would make the late night walk to the music department, break in, and stow away in one of the practice rooms, which oddly, were not entirely sound proof. Just sound proof enough to make her voice sound distant and otherworldly. His research done, Leo had reported the break ins to the proper authorities -who did a whole lot of nothing- and did not write an article about it. It had been so similar to the one in the biology building, that Leo had almost dismissed it at the onset, and after he'd finished the leg work, wished he had.

Then there'd been the tarot card reader that had been far to accurate for her own good. It likely had more to do with the fact that tarot cards scared a lot of the students who came to Nightray University for the academics, and not the spooky back-story, but that went unsaid. He'd looked into that too, but found Ada Vessalius to be an overly sweet girl trying to fund her eccentric hobbies, with different eccentric hobbies. Again, not story worthy.

Those were only a few of the highlights in his unsuccessful quest for article worthy material. There had been a litany of very poor rumors and ghost stories that had taken even less time, and had given even less satisfying conclusions. The only good part about his various failures was that they took very little time to look into, and even less time for Leo to realize they simply were not worth his time. And though they had expanded his knowledge of the odd characters that a cursed school attracted, he didn't waste a whole lot of time on them.

He desperately needed a story this time. He'd pushed back his submission date three times, and the piano in the theater building was really all he was coming up with. So, reluctantly, Leo had decided that he was going to make the mysterious piano story, work. One way, or another. His part time career depended on it.

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