The Iceman is our campus ghost. Yes, I know how dumb that sounds. He was also a real-life St Mary’s legend. Ichabod Williams was the star player on the 1912 St Mary’s ice hockey team. A week before the big national championship game, he stayed out late and missed curfew. In those days, if you missed curfew, the priests locked you out. So Ichabod was forced to sleep on the steps of his dorm – McLaughlin Hall – on an icy February night and he caught pneumonia. On his deathbed, he gathered his hockey team-mates around him and gave them this big emotional speech about how he would always be with them and they needed to win that championship. ‘Win it for me,’ he croaked meaningfully. ‘Win it for the Iceman.’

They won the championship, and the Iceman died. Now he haunts this hall. Supposedly.

‘That whole story is complete bullshit,’ I told Mary Kate.

‘No, it isn’t! It’s true! My guide told me when I took the campus tour here!’

‘The school perpetuates the myth on purpose. They want to scare you so you don’t miss curfew. Like, Oooh, get home on time or you’ll die of pneumonia! Don’t stay out late or the Iceman will get you!’

Mary Kate shook her head stubbornly. ‘He’s real! So many people have seen him! Clare Crowley had to stop practicing Irish dance in the basement because the Iceman was always banging around down there!’

‘Mary Kate, you’re taking five advanced classes,’ I reminded her. ‘You’re way too smart to believe in a ghost! You need to stop buying into all this St Mary’s bullshit. The lake walks and the purity rings and the paranormal activity. You’re better than that.’

‘I don’t know.’ She looked up at McLaughlin Hall anxiously. ‘I started reading English Gothic novels at a very impressionable age. I think I have Brontëan Stockholm syndrome.’

‘You’re seriously refusing to go in that building with me? What happened to your Proximity Theory? Go everywhere? See and be seen? What if your future boyfriend is waiting inside?’

‘I don’t want a ghost boyfriend!’ she told me, in a duh tone of voice, like I was the ridiculous one. ‘Although –’ she looked back at the bronze plaque – ‘the Iceman was actually pretty cute.’

Nope. Too much. I was not going to stand here arguing with a girl wearing multiple rosaries about the sex appeal of her ghost boyfriend.

‘Okay, that’s it. See you later, Mary Kate,’ I said, and climbed the steps.

The inside of McLaughlin Hall was beautiful, too. It had been converted from a dorm to a theater in the 1920s, right in that amazing art deco, Great Gatsby, more-is-more time period I love. A big gold chandelier, plush green velvet seats, elaborate curlicues on the balcony overhead – when I first walked in, all I could do was look around in awe.