Tag Archives: school

The House on the Bus Route

Nationality: American
Age: 28
Occupation: Engineer
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4.10.2014
Primary Language: English

Item:

Me: “Did you ever go to the house in person?”

Informant: “It was on the bus route which was somewhat long, so it wouldn’t have made sense to. But I don’t think anyone would have wanted to anyway…”

A house on the informant’s elementary school bus route in southwest Ohio had a very eerie exterior. The owner had built extra things on to it — weird overhands, banisters, small porches — which led to a unique structure. All the additions were poorly put together, so as a whole, it looked like a bit of a wreck. Kids would always look at it as they passed. Over time things were added to it or changed, but they never saw the owner or someone working on the house. It never looked like anyone was home. The story behind the house among the children was that a drug dealer lived there. If someone stepped on to the lawn, he would shoot them for trespassing.

 

Context:

The informant assumed that there wasn’t a reason behind the story of the man who was there. He had heard it from fellow classmates, who heard it from siblings, but as far as he knew there was not a specific reason that led to that explanation. He still remembered how weird the house looked and that the structure alone was cause for curiosity and a little uneasiness. In us talking about it, he posited that if anything, the arbitrary construction was sort of unnerving as to the mental stability of the owner. I asked if he stopped by the house on foot at any point, but because it was just one location along a bus route, there wasn’t an opportunity to. Nor would he have, he said, since there was just a general fear of it among the kids.

 

Analysis:

Around the age of 12 when the informant had this experience, kids are starting to get exposed to anti-drug education from schools and parents. There wasn’t any basis for the “drug dealer” bit, but perhaps it was created to associate a fear of the unknown with the growing awareness of a negative thing like drugs. It seems most school stories like this have no clear generation or grade where they started, but are simply an evolution that caters to the active issue around that age range. In this case, drug awareness is connected to a mysterious but haunting looking house.

Math Classroom Ghost

Nationality: American
Age: 50s
Occupation: High school teacher
Performance Date: April 9th, 2014
Primary Language: English

Information about the Informant

My informant is an English teacher at a high school in Southern California, and has been teaching for over twenty-five years. She has been featured as an Influential Teacher of the Month within the last five years, and has received great reviews and praise from her former students as a teacher who cares about and motivates her students to succeed. I met her next to Tommy Trojan when she brought her class to USC campus on a college visit and she gave me this school ghost story in the short time before she had to collect her class.

Transcript

“I teach at the oldest high school in [school name and location removed]. And there is a common story that, um, circulates. And that is that one of the math classes is haunted. And so everyone goes in, I–usually on a Thursday morning, and you can note the differences in air temperature. Um, on a Thursday morning, you can, at any other time, on any other day. So, we really believe that something is going on in that school, or in that room, or something occurred there that–and that is an ongoing reminder to us that something negative occurred in there, because it’s always cold.”

Collector: “Is there any, like, theory as to what it might be?”

“From my kids? No, we’ve no theory. We have no idea because we cannot, um, there’s no accounting of anything had ever happened in there. So it could be that prior to the building being built, that some violent occurrence was there. Maybe, you know, some, uh, early settlers or maybe some of the indigenous people, or something like that that was in–that was, gave that piece of land or that little area kind of a negative quality.”

Analysis

When asked how this possibly haunted classroom affected people at the school, whether staff members or students, my informant told me that all it seemed to do was reaffirm the beliefs that the students or staff members already had. For those students (and possibly members of the staff) who already believed in an afterlife that included ghosts or some sort of spiritual remnant left in the world after death, the story “gives credence” to that belief. But for those who did not believe in ghosts, they simply believed the unnatural cold was due to “wind pattern or something.”

This is an interesting example as it’s an instance of a ghost story where there is no actual ghost, but merely an unnatural phenomenon that could easily be attributed to a natural cause. It’s interesting to observe because, rather than attribute the cold to a problem with the cooling system or weather patterns, it seems like people at the school are more than willing to try to find a “supernatural” explanation for the cold, even undertaking, it sounds like, research into the history of the school to find out if anything violent had ever occurred on the school’s property. It’s an interesting example because it provides a look at how an experience may turn into a memorate, the process by which an experience can become a memorate, where the experience is something strange but explainable and those involved instead search for a way to incorporate it into the genre of ghost stories, using the tropes about ghost stories that they already know (e.g. that if there is a ghost, there must have been some violent incident in the past; that settlers or indigenous people may have cursed the ground long ago).

Playground Lingo

Nationality: American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/12/14
Primary Language: English

Context: The informant is a 23-year-old white female from Florida who grew up with her parents and two older siblings. When the informant was in grade school, a common accusation between kids swinging on adjacent swings, when someone got too close to them, was, “You’re in my shower!”

Analysis: The informant says she remembers the phrase because “I thought it was a weird thing to say, i was like, okay, whatever you say…” This indicates that it was not a widespread saying but perhaps unique to a small area of schools or perhaps even just the one school that the informant attended.

It can be assumed that when someone had possession of a swing, they would be unwilling to give it up or to experience interference from other swingers. The connotation of a shower being a very individual, private space, therefore, transferred onto the swinger’s small area of free movement and they would understandably be indignant of someone invading their “private,” designated area.

Punahou Grey Lady Sightings

Nationality: Self-identified as multiracial/multicultural Hawaiian
Age: 60
Occupation: K-12 Science teacher, working on special science projects
Residence: Honolulu, Hawaii
Performance Date: April 2nd, 2013
Primary Language: English

He (my colleague) was… walking home one day, from his office down in Bishop Hall… when he noticed this lady coming down the chapel steps. And… he goes in front of her and he can see that she has no face. It’s just… black (encircles face with hands), all black inside this cowl. And at that point he realizes that she’s not walking… she’s floating a few inches off the ground, and her left shoulder was up a little higher and she was just floating, floating until she floated right through that grating at Bishop.

***

I used to teach high school… and one of the kids in my AP (homeroom), he worked running the lights in Dillingham auditorium. And he’s looking over at the right side and he sees a shadow, but then he’s looking around for… well you know, he works with lights, so he knows where all the sources of light would be; how could a shadow be over there on that wall, when there’s no light source? And then he takes his light, and with his hands steers it over to shine it on the shadow, because it should just disappear, but what the shadow does, it kind of turns, like it’s facing him, stands up, and then walks down into a crack…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “This is a story that was told to me by a friend, another Punahou faculty member, and another story of a similar interaction from a former student that told me what happened to him.”

Punahou is a very old school, with some buildings well over a century old… and lots of eerie things are known to happen from time to time. In other more detailed versions of the story, the Grey Lady is supposed to be a spirit of a former Punahou faculty member who inhabits the school chapel and reveals herself to people on campus, usually at night and when they are alone. She usually just scares people, and doesn’t cause harm. One of the purposes of this legend is to make the Punahou community more exclusive–it’s a campus wide legend, she stays on campus, and typically is only seen by students, faculty, or staff of the school.

 

Silly Pens

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 11, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Interview Extract:

Informant: “One little thing that me and my friends used to do, like before every exam—and in China, every class stayed with the same students, so we all had the same tests at the same time—and what we would do was buy these ridiculous, feathery pens that were really brightly colored and had these puffy, feathery tops and ribbons, and we used them on our tests for good luck.

Our teacher would obviously look at us like we were weird, ‘cause our whole class had the crazy pens, but they made us feel like safe, and they were a good luck charm.”

Me: “How long did you do this for?”

Informant: “Um, in middle school we did it, so for like three years there, and then we stopped our first year of high school ‘cause then we outgrew them, I guess.”

Me: “Do you still wish you did it?”

Informant: “Um, I don’t know. It was our kind of rebellion I suppose, because we had to use blue or black ink on our tests, so we wrote in blue or black ink with feathers the most obnoxious pens ever. In China, like there were a lot of thrift stores that sold them, so we’d go there before every class to get them.”

Me: “Did you get a new one for every test?”

Informant: “Yes. They didn’t last very long, but they were cheap so it was like, whatever.”

Analysis:

It is clear why this silly pen tradition was important to my informant. They provided solidarity, a quiet way to rebel against school and authorities, an opportunity to keep secrets from adults, and perhaps most importantly, a way to simply have a laugh on an otherwise stressful occasion. While the students may have honestly believed that the fluffy, feathery pens bought them good luck on their exams, I think they continued this tradition for three or so years mainly because it did bring them together as a class. In my personal experience of test-taking, there is always a sense of jovial camaraderie within the class if everyone is doubting themselves or if everyone is worried over a particular question. This isn’t exactly a positive thing, and yet there is comfort in knowing that everyone else is in the same situation. The pens would serve as a physical reminder to the students that they are joined together against the institution, especially as they go on outings to buy the pens with their own money and then use them ostentatiously in class. There is even the added glee that the students were committing an act that wasn’t entirely within the school rules. They were following directions, but bending them slightly, and in such a manner that they couldn’t actually get in trouble.

It would be doubtful that anyone would abstain from using the silly pens, even if it was ridiculous or uncomfortable to write with them, simply because no young student would want to be left out. After all, I’d imagine they would provide an abundance of fond memories and laughter.