Ghoul School

Informant: Male/20/Mixed ancestry

Location: Hilo High School, Big Island

Every school has its collection of ghost stories. Hilo High School is no different. Every fall, seniors are trying their best to scare the freshmen with tales about suicides in the bathrooms, nightmarcher trails that lead through the gym, and moving desks in the classrooms.

When I was a freshman, I dismissed many of the stories the upperclassmen told me as, "lame attempts to humiliate harmless 14 year olds." Many of the stories seemed cliche or just too ridiculous to be true.

Then one night, a group of friends and myself decided to go and knock on the door of the chorus building for a good laugh.

We all were in band and we had just finished playing a concert in the auditorium. There wasn't school the next day, so we had decided that we'd all hang around and explore the school. We all heard the ghost stories, so we thought it would be funny to go and see if any of them were true. The first thing we decided was to knock on the door of the chorus building.

The chorus building is a small one room building behind of the gym. At that time, our English teacher had told us stories about how sometimes late at night she'd be grading our assignments and the chairs would be thrown across the room or she would hear knocking in one of the closets. She also told us about how she found a giant wooden cross under the building a couple of years before that year.

So we marched up to the chorus building and gathered at the base of the stairs. We were all laughing and having a good time up until that point. Then we decided that one of us should knock on the door. After a series of jun ken po (rock, paper, scissors) it was decided that I would be the one to knock on the door.

I went up to the door and quickly knocked on it and then quickly ran back down the stairs. We all laughed at how we were scaring ourselves.

And then the door violently knocked back. It was as if something had thrown a door at the desk. We could hear things crashing inside of the classroom. It was if someone had unleashed a raging bull into that building.

All of us were terrified. We ran to our cars and just drove off, with no plan other than just getting as far away from the chorus building as possible.

We all met up later that night after everybody had calmed down. We all came to the agreement that nobody could have been in that classroom. All of the lights inside of the classroom had been off and showed no sign of anybody being there prior to when I knocked on the door. That Monday, we asked our English teacher if she had been there that night grading papers. She laughed at us and told us that she was never on the school on Friday nights. We asked her if her classroom had been a mess when she came in that morning. She looked at us suspiciously, but told us that her classroom was the way she left it before on Friday afternoon.

So what had made all those noises and banging?