A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Heaven (10 page)

The layout was not very confusing. The school is three stories tall—four if you count the slightly below-ground gymnasium. Walking in the front door, you are confronted with two choices: upstairs to the second floor or through a pair of entries to the ground level that overlooks the gym. Through the gym and to the left is the boiler room; to the right are the only working toilets we could use. Each floor above had six classrooms and respective boys’ and girls’ restrooms. On the third floor were the principal’s office and a diminutive auditorium we started referring to as the Theater Room. We found the old kitchen, which had a really loud dumbwaiter and some hastily stored office supplies, but the floor seemed to be falling through in places, so we decided we would not spend a lot of time wandering around in a room where the ground could breach at any moment. As we made our way upward to the various levels, nothing was triggering our inner Venkman—that is, until we got to the boys’ bathroom on the second floor. Everyone who explored that room came away with a sickened vibe we could not put our finger on. It was pretty obvious something bad had gone down in there. I earmarked it for its own recording device and continued the preliminary walkabout.

After we were done we returned to the Safe Room for a quick snack and a chance to go over our initial impressions. Lady was excited, scared, but not uncomfortable. The Boss voiced what we all felt: this was not the site of a murder, but there was something not right, especially in that bathroom, where the ominous feeling had an emotional odor to it. Kennedy was still reserving judgment. Stubs was anxious to set up the equipment. Truck was just taking it all in. I was not sure what to think, but I knew it was time to get cracking. So we finished our snacks and plotted where we would plant our devices. One audio recorder would go in the second-floor bathroom where we all felt sick. One camera would go in the gymnasium, overlooking the entire room. Another camera would go in one of the classrooms that had given Kennedy a hinky feeling. Meanwhile, we would break up into pairs with recorders and cameras and roam, looking to engage whatever we could and try to pick up either EVPs or actual visual instances. We were finally here. The time for talk and speculation was over—it was time to get to work.

Kennedy and I started in the Theater Room, sitting on the stage in a booth I am fairly certain I last saw in an old A&W restaurant miles away. I do not know why it was on the stage or how it got there, but it was comfy and we could face each other. Meanwhile, Lady and The Boss were doing quick sweeps of some of the other rooms on that floor and the one below. Truck and Stubs were down in the boiler room by the gym. The silence was so thick that I started to think I had tinnitus. Other than the near-complete blackout, it was kind of relaxing. It was hot and smelled like a million kindergarteners had left their soiled undies in the ceiling tiles somewhere, but it was not too bad. Trust me—I have been in worse places. I once spent a night in a hotel room in Italy that reeked of dead hookers and strawberries. I could not check out of that place fast enough. The strange thing was that it had great wi-fi.

I was doing some EVP work with Kennedy. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it stands for “Electronic Voice Phenomena.” The human voice only registers at a certain frequency or megahertz. EVPs are supposedly sounds or voices outside those parameters that can be picked up with recorders. Basically, he and I were asking questions and sitting in silence, trying to allow time and space for an answer that we may or may not hear with the naked ear. We had been sitting there for a while, asking random questions and hoping we could illicit a response, when we both heard what was either crying, laughing, or moaning. We looked at each other and listened intently, hoping to discern if it was our compatriots or something we could not explain. We decided it might have been a dog, but we filed it away for further discussion later.

This is how it went for a while: sitting in rooms, asking questions to the night that had very little hope of being answered right away. As we went outside for another round of smokes, we talked about ways to beat the ennui. Stubs thought it would be a good idea to chain Lady up and leave her in the boiler room. He could not understand why she did not share his sentiment. We finally agreed on doing some EVP work in the Theater Room together. We went inside and moved some of the recording equipment around to different rooms, making sure to say that we were doing so aloud so it was documented properly. I went to another classroom to try an experiment: I set up some toy cars in an attempt to possibly broker some movement out of whatever was running around the place. Truck must have had the same idea, because he entered another room and opened one of the file cabinets to see if something would happen to it. Then we set up shop in the Theater Room, sitting in a circle in front of the stage like some bizarre campfire round robin.

You might want to grab your popcorn, because this is where it gets interesting.

It started with The Boss, who, as I said before, has an extra sense for these things, hearing singing. She described a little boy somewhere in the complex singing the “Pledge of Allegiance,” sort of showing off for us like children are prone to do. Every once in a while some of us could pick up on it a bit. The Boss could hear it plain as day, though. Suddenly, she shot up out of her seat and said, “What room is across the hall to the left by the stairs?” It was a classroom Kennedy and I had been inside while we were moving around the other recorders. We all grabbed our flashlights and, like some bizarre wayward football huddle, we moved in that direction.

There had been an encyclopedia sitting on the windowsill in that room when we were there, and the floor was clean. As we entered, the first thing I noticed were torn pages—torn pages—lying on the floor across the room from where that book was still sitting, now open and rent asunder. No windows were open and we were the only people around. Someone had torn pages out of this book and strewn them all over the place. We sat there, listening intently. The Boss was trying to get the little boy’s name. We all held our breath. The lack of sound was suffocating. So you can imagine our reaction when, from somewhere far below us, deep in the school, we heard a crash of metal on metal that was loud enough to make Lady cry out.

Like something out of a scene from the movie Clue, we all shot through the hallways and down the stairs to the room in question. At first we could not figure out what had made that horrendous noise. Then Truck calmly stated, “That file cabinet was open when I went upstairs.” He had opened it as a sort of test before we had corralled ourselves in the Theater Room. We looked: all the drawers were closed. When I yanked on it myself, the damn thing had been slammed shut so hard I had to jerk it to get it open. There was much conjecture and running of scenarios, but we all agreed that even if there had been a window open, the wind could not have shoved that thing back in. The rusty resistance was too strong. Someone had to have pushed it shut . . . hard.

We returned to our circle of trust, discussing everything excitedly. Stubs and I wondered if we were experiencing things now because we were ignoring it—before we were kind of chasing favor and got nothing. Now, though, we were paying more attention to each other, so the activity felt a little like “pay attention to me!” So it made sense to continue that approach: let it come to us and not the other way around. We repositioned the recorders and some of us went outside for a smoke while the others stayed behind to listen and watch. I was enjoying the chill and inhaling the smoke when I could have sworn I saw something in the trees around the corner from where we stood. I did not have time to explore that too much. A light came on in one of the rooms, and we were fairly certain none of our people were in there. Kennedy ran inside to check. The group who had stayed behind was right where we had left them, and a further search of the room in question left us scratching our heads.

As we finished our carcinogens, a car pulled up. It was our friends Biff and Knees (well, of course these are codenames—who would name their child Knees?). I did not want to give them too much info, seeing as I wanted a righteous judgment about the place. So I chose to wait to fill them in on everything until after they had gotten a feel for the surroundings. They were greatly intrigued and very excited—a couple beers imbibed on their part probably did not hurt their states of mind either. But I was not too worried about that.

I guided Biff and Knees through the hallways, showing them the rooms and the layout but not going into detail about anything other than the history. We were down in the lower section by the gymnasium. I was holding one of the double doors open for them to come through so we could descend the stairs down to see the boiler room. I heard something like movement through air, and Knees let out a yell. Biff and I turned to see what the trouble was, and he said, “Something just ran past me and stepped on my foot!” I scanned back down the hallway only to see nothing. Knees shook it off, and we laughed as we went to see the rest of the building. After we finished the brief tour we grabbed some more chairs and went back to find our friends to reassemble our kinetic circle for some chitchat.

Just outside the door to the Theater Room in the hallway I had set up a recorder on a chair. From my vantage point I could see the red light on the device, letting me know it was still on. This turned out to be terribly handy. While we were all sitting around talking about past experiences, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something was constantly blocking that red light. I started tuning everyone out and shifted my focus to the doorway. Sure enough, I saw something peeking around the corner at me several times. Stubs saw it too. It was like a spooky version of Catch Me If You Can. Just as we were all turning our attention to the doorway, we heard something in the room immediately behind us. There was a door that connected the two rooms, and as we stepped into it, I heard laughter in the hallway. Spine-tingling stuff, but I was starting to feel something else. I know I am (supposedly) a big, strong badass man and everything. Even so, I was frustrated; this was getting ridiculous, and not for nothing I wanted to kick that little shit’s ass.

Meanwhile, the temperature in the Theater Room was starting to get schizophrenic. One moment it would be nice and cozy, and seconds later it would be stiflingly uncomfortable. Sweat ran from our faces and then suddenly dried as it cooled. So we walked around some more. I took Biff and Knees to that bathroom where we had all felt physically ill. As we stood in the dark, around a corner by the stalls Biff whispered, “I think I am going to throw up.” I could feel her pain; this was a type of porcelain hell, draped in art deco and painted with some sort of unnatural misery. What the hell could have happened in there? I started looking at how the restroom was designed.

As you walked through the door you could go to the right to one set of stalls and urinals, or you could go to the left with an entirely different set of both. There was one catch: if you went to the left, one of the stalls cut off the rest of the room. But if you went to the right, you could keep going around by the window. I discovered there was a two-person sized nook back in the corner, hidden from view. It suddenly occurred to me that it was the perfect place for an attack. The layout was almost ripe for a sexual assault; no one would see anything from the doorway if they entered. My mind twisted that over and over like an equation. Was that why it was borderline unbearable in that bathroom? If so, who was victim and who was predator? Mind you, I have not one shred of evidence—this is all hypothesis. But I know what I am talking about. I have been on the dangerous end of that type of business. I recognized the feeling in my chest from standing in that room. I knew it all too well. Something very bad had happened in there, and though I was not sure exactly what that thing was, I knew it like I know the sound of rain and the feel of fire.

I took my friends and got out of there. We did some more walking around and some more EVP work, trying to chase down as many actions as we could. But the night was winding down. We decided to do one more round of the place. Everyone else went down to the first floor. The Boss and I stayed upstairs. We were in one of the classrooms talking and trying to coax a little more from our childlike visitor. Suddenly we heard whistling in the hall. We assumed it was the others and continued our conversation. But then we heard the others coming up the stairs—on the other side of the school. When they came to our room, they asked us if we had been whistling. We said we had thought they were the ones doing it. Luckily, there had been a camera set up in the hallway, shooting down to capture any movement. We rewound to the spot. Sure enough, with no one around, an unsettling bit of whistling began to lilt through the air. It made me excited to check what we had gathered that night. It was also the perfect capper for the evening.

It was 2 a.m. Even though we had the building until seven that morning, we were all tired and longing for our beds. So we began packing up and getting our shit ready to take it all home. We crawled into our vehicles for the trip. You can imagine the dichotomy: these adventurous scamps who had been so eager to see what the old madam had to offer, now so obviously exhausted that most of us fell asleep in the car before we got back to the two-lane highway that led the way back to the hearth. Our curiosity sated, we fell in between the sane and slumber, minds racing for the close embrace of sleep while cataloging our various encounters. Nuff said, as Stan Lee put it. Shut the machines down and recharge.

It was a few weeks before I was able to sit down and sift through the hours of footage and audio tracks to see what I could find, helped along with a healthy dose of coffee, smokes, and quiet. There were all the cameras in the halls and the gym, the audio recorders set in the various classrooms and bathrooms, and the handheld recorders we were all carrying around with us. Let me tell you: the only thing more boring than reading and recording your own audio book is sitting, watching, waiting, and listening to hours of content in the hopes of capturing something fantastic. Some shit did not even show up—there were various tracks that failed to record for some reason. Listening back, I could hear voices complaining that the power kept draining in the batteries. So some of the evidence did not get captured. Note to self: next time plug the shit into a wall socket. Of the stuff that was recorded, there are several conversations of past experiences that I will tell you about later on in the book. There are hours of nothing. There are noises from outside and squeaking wood—the floors in the Theater Room were especially peculiar sounding. It gave me the impression of breathing, somewhere between Darth Vader and Bane. So my investigation was moving in fits and starts, from silence to silly quips.