Simpson Library welcomes new ghost among its shelves
3 min read
Some say that the ghost of Bernadette D’Auria still walks around Simpson Library reading books and organizing shelves. | Norah Walsh / The Weekly Ringer
by BERNADETTE D’AURIA
Ghost Writer
Editor’s note: We’ve updated this article’s headline to better reflect the tone of the article and the April Fool’s edition as a whole.
A body was discovered on March 28 in the construction zone in front of Simpson Library. The body has been identified as Bernadette D’Auria, a senior English major enrolled in the five-year education program.
At this time, university officials are not commenting on the discovery of the body. However, D’Auria’s parents put out a statement online.
“She probably tripped and fell into the construction zone,” said D’Auria’s mother. “She recently dropped a blender on her foot and has had some trouble with walking since the incident. It’s really not surprising that this would have happened to her.”
D’Auria’s father shared a similar sentiment.
“Bernadette loved to go to the library, even when she knew she should be at home resting,” he said. “While I will miss her dearly, it is nice to know that she passed on in a place where her ghost can continue reading.”
Prior to her untimely death, D’Auria worked at the Simpson Library in the access services department. For her senior year, she was promoted to stacks student supervisor, leaving her responsible for making sure students shelved the books correctly.
“She was very dedicated to her job,” said junior communication and digital studies major and Business Editor Erin Matuczinski. “We started working at the library together the same year, and I’m pretty sure she only talked about books and what tasks she needed to get done.”
Matuczinski was promoted to the interlibrary loan student assistant position in winter 2021. Her promotion was in part due to her hard work and in part due to her desire to escape D’Auria’s constant ramblings about books. However, she was unable to escape D’Auria’s company completely, as both of them were editors together for The Weekly Ringer.
D’Auria was associate editor for The Weekly Ringer.
“She initially was our online editor in 2020-2021, but to be honest I don’t think any of us knew she existed,” said senior English major and Sports Editor Victoria Percherke. “Gonna miss her though, she sat next to me in the clubhouse this past year.”
“I am constantly kicking myself for not talking to Bernadette sooner,” said junior sociology and communication and digital studies double major Jess Kirby, the editor-in-chief for The Weekly Ringer. “I thought we’d have the rest of our lives to be friends, but I thought wrong. She was the Edward Cullen to my Bella Swan (literally, we did that for Halloween).”
Sophomore philosophy and Spanish double major Norah Walsh, opinion editor of The Weekly Ringer, will also miss D’Auria.
“I think everyone is going to miss Bernadette,” said Walsh. “We have hung out a couple of times and I thought she was really fun to be around, especially when we would share stories about the wild things that are said in our classes. She recently told me about a conversation involving armpits in her fiction writing class and I have been haunted by it ever since.”
D’Auria will be missed by some. Those who want to celebrate her memory can visit the library and pace around the stacks frantically, one of her favorite pastimes. Maybe you’ll even run into her; even though she did not believe in ghosts, some have reported seeing a specter with glasses sitting and re-sorting books in the stacks.
This story is a part of our April Fool’s edition and is intended to be satirical in nature. All information or quotations are made up and not to be taken seriously.
