As most of y’all know, I can see/speak to ghosts, which really is not as cool as people think it is. Really. It’s not. I promise. It’s also not like you think it is—no Ghost Whisperer action going on. I can’t even make the ghosts move on, I have to hand them over to Delta, my Guide, who hands them on to those in the spirit realm who handle such things.

Yeah, humans just aren’t powerful enough to do that, no matter what TV and Meg Cabot says.

And since lately my blog has had a distinct lack of my personal crazy, I shall recount the tale of my run-in with some ghosts over spring break, which I spent in my beloved New York.

I had missed New York. A lot. And due to some issues with mold and allergies, Mu ended up tagging along with me, which made for a more interesting experience, as she has never been to New York before so’s I got to show her around.

On the day in question, we were wandering around Greenwich Village aimlessly, as I don’t do too well with street names instead of numbers in Manhattan, and if you’re gonna wander aimlessly in New York, you might as well do it in the Village.

But then, as we rounded a corner, I saw a building that made (yes, this is a cliche but a true one) my heart seize up and my body shiver with cold. It was red brick, maybe ten or eleven stories tall. A very old, beautiful building that I had never walked past before, never seen before, but I instantly recognized.

“The Triangle,” I whispered, and as much as I joke about Mu being deaf, she heard me.

“What?”

I pointed to the building. “In March, 1911, this was a shirtwaist factory.”

“A what?”

“Haven’t you ever seen the Gibson Girl? Shirtwaist. You know, those frilly Victorian blouses.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“But there was—”

“A fire,” Mu interrupts me, which is rare as she is not the interrupting sort.

Dread settled in my stomach. “Yeah,” I echoed. “But the foremen locked the girls, the workers, in, like they did everyday. So some of the girls had to jump to escape the flames. From the eighth, nineth, tenth floors.”

I looked up at the building, which in the bright afternoon, seemed to have more shadows. And that’s when I began to see something that twisted my heart, and I clapped one hand over my mouth.

“What is it?” Mu asked.

I pointed to the top of the building. “Don’t you see?”

And she did. Those poor girls, so long dead, couldn’t move on for whatever reason. So, everyday for over 100 years, they jumped to their deaths over and over again—some with their hair or skirts on fire, and crumpled onto the sidewalk in a terrible heap.

I was so deeply disturbed my instinct was to run, get out of there. So I did, but I wasn’t alone. Someone was following me, and tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around I saw it was one of them, a girl of about seventeen, with dark hair piled up on top of her head, and horrific burns over her right eye and cheek. She attempted to be speaking to me, but I couldn’t understand what was being said. But I knew I couldn’t just walk away.

So, I went to the east side of the building, with Mu—the place where most of the girls jumped. And pulling one of my mockingjay pins off my dress (I have a whole bunch of them, as my dad did work with Lionsgate on the marketing of THG) and let it drop down a grate to the basement of the building. I said the Kaddish for the Jewish girls, and I cried, leaving the rest up to those who deal with the dead moving on.

What disturbed me the most, besides those young immigrant girls reliving their horrible deaths, was that there were still businesses in that old Triangle Shirtwaist building, like nothing had happened. And people just walked on by, unable to hear the pleas of the few ghosts who were mobile.

I hope wherever they are now, they can move on.