“Someday I’ll write a book about all this.”

A look at Sigrid Stevenson’s diary shows she had already written it.

Words by Andrew Erkkila

Illustration of Sigrid Stevenson / Credit: Sergiy Maidukov

Night falls, and in the blowing dark, students jog briskly past Kendall Hall, listening for the eerie nocturne played by Sigrid Stevenson’s ghost. The story of Sigrid has persisted as campus legend for the nearly half a century since her death. Allegedly haunting Kendall, her piano-playing specter is no different from any ghost story — a sensationalized placeholder for the unexplained. In Sigrid’s tragic case, it’s a deeper metaphor for a young girl’s restless spirit, a traveler not yet ready to leave.

Blue-eyed with a bright smile, 25-year-old Sigrid had short, reddish-brown hair and an eclectic wardrobe, and she often shunned eye contact. Her personality had many sides: a loner, quirky, incredibly smart and talented, a classical music buff, a Kerouac admirer, and an avid hitchhiker. According to a childhood friend from California, Sigrid was never boring. A piano prodigy at age 8, she played Beethoven after a single sight-reading. After graduating, she hoped to become a music teacher.

She never did. On the night of September 4, 1977, three days before classes started, Sigrid was murdered in Kendall Hall. Her sheet music was found placed at the piano, set to be played.

In a 2024 episode of Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries, we meet the Sigrid obsessed sleuths who have examined every detail in her murder. Among them is Scott Napolitano ’06, who has tirelessly pored over the facts. What began as his undergraduate film project has become a decades-long search for the truth.

“Once I learned her name and what happened to her,” Napolitano said, “I couldn’t stop. It was like cleaning off a dirty window — every news article, every interview, every new fact made it easier to see the view of the other side. And the more I saw, the more my heart ached for her.”

With renewed interest and attention to the case, investigators hope the show will generate new leads that will bring Sigrid her long-deserved justice. Even so, the tabloid nature of Sigrid’s murder still eclipses her life. Sigrid was a person. A Trenton State College student, with dreams, fears, and ambitions. Among her possessions, investigators found her diary. In it, her story survives.

According to her diary, Sigrid’s days were busy. A full courseload. Multiple jobs, music lessons, gym, choir practice (twice weekly), volunteering — all without owning a car. She biked and rode the bus but mostly thumbed rides. She’d spent the previous summer on a solo trip, adventuring across Nova Scotia. When criticized for recklessness and chided about the risk of catching rides from strangers, she’d abruptly end the conversation. “I wasn’t brought up to ask for things,” she wrote at one point in her diary.

Sigrid felt most alive at the piano bench. As she played, color faded from the walls. She played compulsively, late nights, even if it meant finagling her way into locked music buildings. She was notorious with campus security and maintenance. “Rules such as ‘You can’t stay here after five’ mean nothing to me. The time to leave is when practicing is done and I’ve done what I want with the piece,” she wrote.

No one might guess that Sigrid, a self-proclaimed “feisty, female countertenor, who admittedly didn’t wear a brassiere,” suffered violent mood-swings, often losing her temper, publicly weeping. “Why is everyone trying to push me around?” she asked, a year before her tragedy.

If half of literature is about finding home, the other half is about escaping. Sigrid had a loving family. To Siggy, it was sometimes an aggravating love.

“You don’t know how to set your own pace,” her father often said. “Slow down.”

In Sigrid’s diary, she confessed that she felt tugged in two directions. One was toward financial security and parental expectations. The other direction? The life she really wanted. The road less traveled. The unknown.

Sigrid moved 3,000 miles from California. She rejected her parents’ plane tickets, preferring cross-country bus rides instead.

She stood at a crossroads. If she didn’t break free and become her own person, she feared that one day she’d wake up in her mother’s body, living a life that wasn’t hers.

She was too young to know one day it gets better.

“Try laughing at it, Siggy,” her landlady advised.

“That’s not how I operate,” she said.

At choir rehearsals, Reverend Aldridge took her aside for singing too loud.

“All he wanted was to help me figure out why I seem to want to outdo the others all the time … I see him every Monday at 3 now; he thought it was funny that I would refer to it as ‘free head-shrinking.’ And I told him a number of things: how much easier it is to get along with older people; how I prefer older men to ones my age or younger; all the mother trouble in the family; and how the victim always seems to be a girl.”

It was July 1977. She was eager to hit the road. Thumbing through New England, she crossed into Canada, wearing her “big-eye little-girl smile for security guards, professors, and every patrolman.” She made great time, obsessively recording road hours between destinations in her diary. She wrote urgently, as though she was running late.

Her travels were upbeat, though on the road she worried more often about finding a place to sleep. In those vagabond days, she slept in vestibules, went days without showers, but seemed happy.

In restaurants, she’d drink three water refills before glancing at a menu. Thirsty days on the highway, she slipped wild berries under her tongue, feet aching as the wind whistled past her thumb. She didn’t mind walking, so long as it was sunny. She sketched the countryside, gifting her sketches to strangers who helped her along the way.

In her diary, she seemed overjoyed, in motion, purposeful.

A thick-accented trucker told her, “You got more nerve than Dick Tracy,” buying her Cokes and sandwiches as she recited her adventures. She offered him a sketch, but he declined. His wife got jealous easily.

She crossed back into Maine, fished for lobster, camped on a beach, and wrote in her diary.

“Time doesn’t mean much up here, but means plenty in the place I’m going to in a few days,” she wrote with a borrowed pencil, fretting over the impatient pencil-lender waiting nearby.

“Someday I’ll write a book about all this,” she wrote.

Forty-seven years later, thanks to Scott Napolitano and the college administration, Sigrid’s memory will live on in a designated practice room in the Music Building on campus. Music was Sigrid’s sanctuary. Nothing else compared. “As long as the music stays, I can face anything,” she told herself.

“So here I am,” she stated in one of her final entries, as she hid in a church choir room in New York City, waiting for someone downstairs to leave so she could play.