The Lingering

The Lingering is a meditation on time’s slow unraveling and the silent persistence of memory within architecture. Captured in black and white, the image portrays Halcyon Hall—once the centerpiece of Bennett College—standing in beautiful ruin. Built in 1893 as a luxury hotel and later repurposed as a women’s college, the structure’s layered history is etched into every boarded window and vine-covered wall. Its grand Queen Anne façade, now collapsing under the weight of decades, tells a story of ambition, reinvention, and inevitable decline.

In one high window, a faint, ghost-like figure appears—a spectral presence barely distinguishable from the shadows. Whether real or imagined, she becomes the soul of the image: a stand-in for the students, teachers, and lives once held within these walls. Her presence is not menacing, but melancholic—an echo that refuses to be silenced.

By photographing Halcyon Hall in its current state of decay, I seek to capture not just the physical deterioration, but the emotional residue of a place left behind. The Lingering evokes a question: what remains when the purpose of a place dissolves, when the people leave, but something unnamed still dwells in the air, in the architecture, in the land itself?

This image is an homage to the impermanence of institutions and the endurance of memory, told through shadow, structure, and the quiet figure who never truly left.