find out about something a few weeks after you are there. You spend a few weeks or months in total oblivion of something that happened and then, BANG, the starting pistol is fired and a catalogue of stories come flying out of the woodwork.
It happens a lot in American horror
movies. They seem to portray Americans
as people who are willing to buy a house without ever having seen it, and who
know nothing about it.
Then you, as the new owner are told
by someone something they thought you knew, but you didn’t and then it’s too
late. Like a realtor not telling you
that someone had their throat cut in the kitchen by a burglar of the house you
are thinking of buying and you move in, happy and blindly oblivious to the
carnage and you have a welcome party or house warming party with your new
neighbours only for a few of them to ask you, “What happened here doesn’t bother
you then?” or “Have you seen the headless woman on the landing?”
After choking on your beer you
shout. “WHAT?” and they say, “Oh sorry I thought you knew’ with some inane
smile on their face.
There
had been rumours that the place was haunted because many years earlier one of
the pupils and a boiler engineer had been killed in a fire in the old school.
No
one told me that. They didn’t mention
THAT! I overheard that when at the council picking up my wages, which we did
every Friday morning in those days. A
little brown envelope with a payslip and cash in it. I had heard a few of the assistant caretakers
say they were asked to cover an absence at the school in the past but had
decided to take time off through ill health.
I suppose it wouldn’t be good for morale if the story was widely known and
in the few weeks I had been there I had heard of no issues until that morning.. It’s not something they would put on the job
description, I suppose. I could have
been a sceptic, and it wouldn’t have bothered me. I was, and am, an inquisitive person and I am
open to anything. I prefer fact to
supposition but I trust my own judgement. Even though I never believe anything
like this unless I experience it myself, I knew that I was sitting with someone
who was absolutely terrified, and he really believed.
The Lady who ran the Library in
the school knew the history of the school and told me a few months later that the
fire had broken out in the Boiler Room at the foot of one of the two staircases
in the old school. The staircases had acted like a chimney and very quickly the
fire had reached the top floor. It then started to burn through into
the Hall on the top floor. For some reason a few of the children had
hidden from the fire on the landing of the top floor but they had become cut
off from any hope of escape.
All in all, two people had been
killed in the boiler room and three on the top floor before the fire had been
brought under control.
It was a very sad day in the
school’s history and it was quite a few months before the school opened again
and it resulted in the new school building being added to the old Victorian one
about 30 years ago. This had enabled the school to take more pupils.
I didn’t believe the stories of
seeing a girl or other girls all in burnt clothing that obviously dated from
the Victorian era, yet, here I was sitting talking to someone who really
believed he had seen this girl.
“What do you mean you have ‘seen
her before’?” I asked.
Andy continued to stare into his
mug of tea. He looked up at me and appeared to be trying to decide
if I was going to laugh, or worse, make fun of him.
“Come on, you may as well tell me
everything. You said ‘It was her’ and
that you had ‘seen her before’.
Andy leant back in his chair and
stared at the ceiling, exhaling a loud sigh .
He leant forward again
“A few months ago I saw her in
the window of the ground floor hall when I was looking out of the window
upstairs above here. You know the corridor that faces the old school
upstairs near the computer rooms?”
“What time was this?”
“During the summer holidays we
were cleaning this side of the school and I was having a
cigarette. I went to the window and looked out at Stratford and the
buses going past. I opened the window to flick the ash out and I saw
her.”
I stared at him. He
really believed it, I could tell.
“She was looking at me and not
looking at me, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded in agreement, not having
a clue what he meant.
“She was looking through me, like
she was looking at something behind me. I
could hear Jim downstairs from me; he was banging and crashing around. One
minute she was there, I looked away when I heard a loud bang downstairs and
when I looked back…she was gone.”
“Did you see her disappear?” I
asked, trying to make it sound like an everyday, run of the mill, question.
“No, she just wasn’t there
anymore. I just couldn’t see her anymore.”
He said it in such a matter of
fact way that it kind of made sense to me.
We both sat there drinking tea
for a minute, in
silence. The rain was still hammering down but I
decided that I had to leave.
I had agreed to drop into the
school at 9:45 that evening as I was passing through as the new night cleaners
were starting and I was going to show them where everything was and ensure that
they had everything they needed. Another little job that Jim had
delegated through ill health and, thanks to my conversation, it didn’t seem
like a good idea to me now.
I felt a little disturbed by what I had heard. Not so much the content, but the fact that he appeared to believe it with every fibre of his being.
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