I had always heard that the classroom down the hall was haunted, but I never believed it until that night. The night that my middle school changed for my friends and I. It was a hot, June night at the end of my seventh-grade year, and my school was hosting an all-night, lock-in. It started with Mrs. Lock, an angry-looking and soft-spoken teacher reading us a long list of rules for a game of indoor manhunt. Mr. Steven, our gym coach, then divided us into two large teams and flipped a coin to decide who hid first. Clink. Clink. Clink. The coin bounced across the floor then my team erupted into cheers. Heads. We hide first.
Mr. Steven blew his whistle and the game began. My team rushed into the dark empty hallway of the school and looked for spots to hide. I ran with my best friends, Tyler and Kayla, towards the back of the building. “Let’s go into the bathroom!” Kayla whispered.
“No, that’s obvious,” Tyler replied, and we continued down the hall.
After five minutes, there was a second whistle and a loud eruption of yells from the gym. We needed a place to hide. I looked around as footsteps poured into the hallway. “In here!” I said, running toward an old door.
I pushed open the door, and it creaked. I pushed my hesitant friends inside and shut the door. It closed with a loud latching sound that I am sure echoed through the hall. The only light in the room was from the red, cobweb-covered exit sign that hung above the door. We bumped into everything, as we tried to hide. Things slid in all directions, but we made it to the back of the room where a rolled-up rug was laying. Just beyond the rug was the teacher’s desk that we crouched down behind. The desk looked like it hadn’t been used in years. It was covered in orange rust spots, a thick layer of dust, and dead bugs. “Don’t they clean in here?” Kayla asked, after sneezing because of the dust. “Shh” I said, trying to listen for footsteps.
After a few minutes of silence, our eyes adjusted, so we could see the dirty, dust-covered collection of broken chairs, desks, and unread books filling the room around us. The silence pressed in on us, and we listened hard for any noise. Suddenly, a heavy book slid off the shelf across the room from us and fell onto the floor with a loud thud. We all screamed and jumped back into the wall behind us. We stared at the book and tried to come up with logical explanations for what just happened, but we couldn’t. Little did we know, this was the first of several experiences we would have to explain from our time in the graveyard classroom.