The Woman in the Rotunda

Night security guard James McAllister knows the Capitol after hours; the echoing halls, the polished marble, the silence heavy with history. He believes the building is empty once the doors are locked. He is wrong. When James encounters the ghost of a woman who should not exist, he uncovers a hidden ledger buried deep within the Capitol's foundations; a record of lives quietly erased to preserve power, order, and the illusion of permanence. The more he learns, the clearer the truth becomes: the Capitol is not merely haunted. It is sustained. As James digs deeper, the building begins to resist. Corridors shift. Rooms appear where none should be. The pressure of the place grows calculated and intimate, bending space, memory, and identity itself. The Capitol does not want the past exposed; it wants silence restored. With the help of a restless spirit who has waited decades to be remembered, James must decide how much truth a system built on forgetting can endure before it turns its full weight against him. The Woman in the Rotunda is a chilling literary ghost story about power that never rests, institutions that feed on quiet compliance, and the terrifying cost of making history speak when it would rather stay buried.