The Haunted Desk

Informant: Female/62/Portuguese ancestry 

Location: Lihue, Kauai 

A colleague of mine at the school I taught at was having some problems in her classroom. Not student problems, but mysterious problems. The lights would go on and off on their own, her TV would turn on and off on its own, things like that. She knew that I was Catholic, so she asked me if I could come and bless her classroom. 

She didn’t always have these problems. They all started when she got a new teacher’s desk (a hand-me-down) for her classroom. The flickering lights and TV she could handle, but when it started to follow her home, that’s when she got scared. 

She picked her kids up after school one day, and noticed that her infant stared at the ceiling of the car laughing the whole ride home, as if being entertained by something. When she got home, stranger things happened. There was a wind chime by the door that rang every time someone came near the door. She heard it ring and asked her older child to check who was there. Nobody was there. It rang again, they checked again, and still nobody was there. 

So finally I was asked to bless the classroom. When I walked into the room, it felt very cold and ominous. Just a strange feeling. I said a few prayers, sprinkled some holy water, and that was that. When I told this story to my daughter, she asked me if anything was in the desk. My colleague said when she had gotten it, the only thing in it was an old bible in one of the drawers which she threw away. My daughter was sure that the bible was left there to keep the spirits contained.