The Paris Review

Priscilla: A Ghost Story

The most distressing of my mother’s ghost sightings took place while she was in college. Eager to get the facts right, on a recent visit I asked her—we were finishing dinner—about the exact circumstances. Had it been her freshman year? I asked.

No; her freshman year, she’d worked as a live-in au pair for an acquaintance of her father’s, a professor. My grandfather had always made it clear that if my mother chose to attend a four-year university rather than the local community college, she’d be on her own financially. He

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