The Goode School, and the town of Marchburg, are complete figments of my imagination, an amalgamation of several private colleges and high schools in central Virginia.
That said... I have always wanted to write a boarding school mystery, and I come to the story honestly. I had the great privilege of attending Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia (class of ’91), and I have woven pieces of the school’s legends and tragedies into this story, all put through my own creative lens. Alumni will easily recognize Main Hall, the Skeller (I still dream of those tuna melts), Odds and Evens, Chilhowies, the trolleys, the sewing circle, and other unique-to-Macon details like Goode’s version of the Honor Code. The rest are fabricated for this story.
A few ghost stories have also been molded to fit this particular tale, the red staircase chief among them. The Commons is named after a real attic room in Main Hall, colloquially called the Bean Bag Room, one that I lived below the spring semester of my sophomore year. Many a night, my roommate and I were kept awake by footsteps, furniture dragging, and other unexplainable sounds overhead. The problem was, after several of these events, we would creep up the stairs to see who was there—and find the room empty. It did have a stunning view of the Blue Ridge Mountains during the daytime, though.
The haunted arboretum path is based in part on a real and terrible event, the on-campus murder of coed Cynthia Louise Hellman in 1973. The subsequent ghost story of the girl in purple clogs made it very hard for me to walk behind Martin Hall during my tenure.
Allegedly, the Underground Railroad did move through Lynchburg. Non-allegedly, there are tunnels under the campus, though they are not as accessible as they are at Goode.
Secret societies flourished during my tenure; I had the great honor to be tapped for more than one. Stomps, in particular, were great fun. That is where the similarities end, though. Yes, there was hazing, but Ivy Bound takes it to the extreme.
Goode’s provenance as an all-girls high school begins one hundred years prior to R-MWC, which was started by William Waugh-Smith, one of the great champions of female education in his day. I daresay he and Sister Julianne would be fast friends.
I was quite dismayed to see R-MWC’s board vote to go coed in 2006, against the wishes of most of its alumni. No knock on the subsequently named Randolph College, but I still believe that single-sex education has innumerable advantages, especially for women.
And all hail Virginia Woolf. I studied her great essay A Room of One’s Own at length at R-MWC, and I took it to heart as I moved into the world.
One last personal note. If you are feeling sad, depressed, or suicidal, please reach out. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available twenty-four-seven at 1-800-273-8255. You are not alone.