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B
y the time Mom and I decided to take a break and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer about mid-afternoon, we knew that Shady Run had been built in 1923, that it had operated until 1954, and that it had closed for no reason that we could find.
Other Rosenwald schools were open until the late 1950s and early '60s, when integration became required, but Shady Run closed in 1954—that’s what the UVA site said—but it didn’t give a reason.
As Buffy slaughtered vampires with her wooden sticks and cheerleading round-offs, I thought about Henrietta and the other kids there. I couldn’t quite figure out how that many ghosts get trapped in one space. Ghost theory—believe me, I’d read most of it in the past few months—held that ghosts stayed if they had unfinished business, which was true in my experi
