School Spirit: Ghosts of the Halls and the Chalkboards...

N. Reiter

8 May 2007

BACKGROUND:

In early April of this year, I received a phone call from old friends Lisa Swickard and Trish Valentine. Lisa and Trish have contributed in the past to the Avalon Foundation efforts – they coordinated the investigation Lori Schillig and I performed a few years ago in the old cold case of little Leon Mackling, the young boy from northwest Ohio who vanished under strange circumstances in the early 1960s.

The news this time was of a different sort. Two doors down from Lisa and Trish in their hometown of Melmore, Ohio sat the proud old town elementary school. However, as part of a sometimes overly zealous state program, the grand old brick building was slated to be torn down and bulldozed soon... perhaps within a week or two. Lisa and Trish wanted to have me over to take a ghost seeking perusal through the old place before it also became a ghost, as the building apparently had long been home to rumors of haunting spirits and ghostly activity. The ladies had been given keys to the building by the school board.

I accepted their invitation. It had been a while since I had poked my nose around a good haunted locale, not since before my cancer surgery in November of 06. I was certainly feeling up for it. Thus on Sunday the 22 of April, I packed up my gear and headed down to Melmore, a quiet little village about ten miles south of Tiffin, Ohio.

The stories of ghosts in the school appear to date back to at least the 1970s, and as so often is the case, stories turn into local lore and legend, which in turns creates a well defined and agreed upon scenario for the haunt. In the case of Melmore Elementary, two ghosts were claimed to walk the old halls. One was said to be the shade of a young girl carrying a blanket and teddy bear, the other was said to be the ghost of a former principal of the school from the 1960s and 70s – "Pappy" Collins - known for being a severe and curmudgeonly fellow. The little girl ghost appears to predate the spectral appearances of principal Pappy, and some stories tie her to a claimed nearby drowning accident involving a young girl sometime in the early 1900s.

Melmore Elementary itself had seen and shepherded a number of generations of the town youth through its noble red brick halls. The original school building had been erected in 1906, with the larger vaguely art deco styled addition and gymnasium being added in 1935. In such buildings where a full century of human energy and stories filter through, year after year, decade after decade, how can tales to cause shivers be avoided?

Most accounts of the two ghosts had involved visual glimpses of both figures by staff and students, and mysterious sounds or voices heard by faculty and janitorial staff at night. Recently, shortly before Lisa and Trish contacted me, one of the local contractors working on window and furniture removal caught a glimpse of a young girl on a stairway that vanished promptly. This same contractor also was terrified one evening when he heard a man’s voice yelling or bellowing in anger, from an empty room, with nobody else said to be on the grounds.

My Visit:

I arrived under sunny clear blue skies at about 15:00 on the 22nd of April. Lisa and Trish greeted me, and we wandered toward the old school building. Despite the fact it was a Sunday, several contractors were pulling outside window tin, and occasional local folks were arriving to take bricks that had come out with the large window frames. It was certainly not a vacant building or grounds, which we all agreed would probably not be overly conducive to careful investigation under ideal conditions. But one does what one can, and so we proceeded to wander floor by floor through the school.

In all, we made three forays through the entire building. The first round, moving from the first floor to the second, and then down to the two isolated basement areas was primarily for random photos and dowsing. The second tour included use of the Hall Effect magnetometer and tape recorder. Following the second tour, we wandered back to Lisa and Trish’s house for a session of porch sitting and tale spinning. Some neighbors drifted by, and hearing of our doings, wanted to go look at the inside of the school as well. Thus we returned and made one last round through most of the school.

Following many goodbyes, I departed Melmore by about 18:30.

Events and Locations of Interest:

As we went from old classroom to classroom, I snapped off random photos and opened myself up intuitively to any subtle nuances in atmosphere. Several locations were found where dowsing rods acted up. One of these also held a strong "stifling" and uncomfortably negative feeling, this being the small classroom formerly used for Special Education on the ground floor. This particular room had been at one time part of the boys' locker room, but had been isolated with a wall and converted into a special use classroom.

On the second floor, the old science room seemed to have an undefined charge and dowsing reaction in the NE corner. At least two of the rooms on the second floor had an interesting property of producing a dowsing rod reaction at their doorways.

In the old portion of the school, in the middle of what would have been the cafeteria floor, a dowsing reaction was observed, over a small area where it appeared as though the floorboards had been replaced for some reason. In the basement immediately below this point, we also observed a dowsing reaction above the floor. No immediate explanation seems to be forthcoming.

In a small room in the old basement, Lisa felt a strong and uncomfortable presence as well as a dowsing reaction with her own rods. Though not as uncomfortable a feeling as the small special ed classroom, I concurred with her.

A rather curious event happened between our first and second building rounds. Lisa, Trish, and I were all three in the old gymnasium, which I had designated as something of a "base camp". I was busy sticking my head into a small room off the side of the gym floor, apparently an equipment storage or prop storage spot. Lisa and Trish were behind me perhaps twenty feet away, talking with each other. Suddenly, I heard a soft "thump" on the floor, and Trish exclaiming, "What’s that!"

I turned around to see what had attracted their attention. There, on the old wooden floor, an odd arrangement of wire, ribbon, and dried vine or plant root lay. Whatever "it" was, it had dropped onto the floor from somewhere whilst none of us three were watching. The softness of the thump suggested to both Trish and I that the mass had not fallen from a very high point, certainly not from high ceiling height. Lisa immediately ducked outside to see if any of the workmen had thrown it through the now-vacant window space. Nobody was about, and when she did find one a few minutes later, the fellow indicated none of their crew had been on that side of the building! The tangled up mass is shown here. (click pic to enlarge)

As may be seen, it consisted of about 4 feet of an antique style silverized cloth ribbon – reminiscent of Christmas ribbon. Wrapped together with it was about 2 to 3 feet of old style insulated bell wire or phone wire, and then some length of dried thin vine. In cases where synchronistic apports or pseudo-apports occur in hauntings, there is usually a prominent symbology or archetypal element involved. If there was some "message" or metaphor in the ribbon-wire-vine, it remains inscrutable.

Physical Anomalies:

In at least two of the old classrooms, we observed slight (~10%) geomagnetic distortions corresponding to dowsing reaction spots, at door thresholds. These did not appear to be immediately related to steel in the door frames.

No other magnetic distortion anomalies were found that appeared to be significant.

Audio Anomalies:

Using a small cassette recorder, we recorded three segments (about 5 minutes each) on low noise tape in areas that were of intuitive interest; the special ed room, one of the old section basement rooms, and the second floor science room. After listening to these segments later in a noise free room, with headphones, I was unable to pick out any bona fide EVP vocals or anomalous noises.

Photographic Anomalies:

Photographs were taken with a Kodak EasyShare Z740 digital camera and an Olympus SuperZoom 760 point and shoot 35mm camera loaded with Kodak 400 speed color film. Over 80 random photos were taken with digital format, and about 20 were taken with film. In a large number of the digital photos taken indoors, we find typical faint to moderate "orb" images, generally a hallmark of entrained dust in the air. Considering that demolition of the old building had begun, we would not be surprised. Occasionally, strikingly bright orb images or orbs that appear to be significant for location or some visual attribute will merit our attention and further analysis. However, none found in photos from the school building appeared to be of compelling visual drama. A typical digital shot taken in the old gymnasium is shown thus:

A rather striking photo image, however, may be seen in a picture taken with the digital camera, in the old boiler room under the gymnasium stage. With no electricity in the building, and no windows, the boiler room and attached cellar were pitch black when I wandered down into the depths. Not having a flashlight with me, I was forced to use the green LED rangefinder on the Sony digital camera as a weak light to allow me to navigate around the old boiler. Thus, when random photos were taken, I had no visual reference for my surroundings... I merely pointed the camera this way and that, and took photos. The picture in question shows a small alcove off of the main boiler room. In the lower right corner of the small cement walled enclosure, there is an eerie image that bears a resemblance to a bald man’s head rising up from the rubbish covered floor! Of course, I had to consider the likelihood that this was a "simulacrum" – a chance arrangement of objects and lighting that takes on a peculiar and ghostly appearance for most viewers. (click pics to enlarge)

After examining this photo, which was nicknamed "Uncle Fester", I got back in touch with Lisa and Trish, and requested that before the old building be torn down completely, could they make one more visit to the boiler room, this time with a flashlight, and see if any material rubble or wall stains existed in the corner of the alcove, which could have given rise to the Uncle Fester head simulacrum. Over the weekend of 5 May, Lisa reported back to me that she and Trish had taken some test photos at the same location, and they were awaiting developing on those prints. Lisa also stated that in the corner where the Fester Head image appears, there were a couple of light colored bricks on the floor, but due to the fuzziness of the original photo (due in turn to the close quarters influencing the auto-focus on my camera) it was hard for her and Trish to say whether or not the Fester Head was indeed some light colored bricks or whether the image was imposed over the bricks on the floor. The matter was sealed, though, about two weeks later, when a ghost hunting acquaintance of Trish’s, Brent McMonigal, came forward with a photo he had taken in nearly the identical spot in the boiler room I had been standing. Brent’s photo, which was much clearer than mine, shows easily a set of light colored bricks and a whitish stained patch on the cement wall. Uncle Fester had dissolved into lighting and circumstance.

As the reader will notice, there was an additional feature of the McMonigal photo that bears mentioning. At about shoulder height on the rear wall of the boiler room nook, a single pair of handprints can be seen. Brent indicated that whatever these prints were made from, they were not visible to the naked eye, but only the flash of the camera.

So it sometimes goes, with the best of ghosts... but that’s the way of truth as well. Special thanks are due to Brent, Trish, and Lisa for their photos and follow-up. (click pic to enlarge)

Post-Visit Anecdotes:

Lisa and Trish made several more walkthroughs of the school, before the bulldozers arrived by the 4th of May. Lisa ran an audio tape recording and believes a female child’s laugh can be heard at one point. Several other visitors to the old boiler room felt an uncomfortable presence, and one photo (not seen by me) was claimed to show an image of a male profile or torso superimposed against one of the walls there.

Word spread rapidly through the small town, and it seemed in the week after my visit that nearly the entire populace temporarily took up the role of "ghost hunter" and paid visits to the old school. From a scientist’s perspective, this is an irrelevant matter. But for one with a taste for history, community, and folklore, it was a good sort of thing to see happen. An edifice and bastion of education such as Melmore Elementary deserved a farewell visit and send off from the grown children who once blessed the halls and rooms there. It was good for the entire town to go back to school one last time.

Summary and Discussion:

Because so little time was available to me to dig into the stories and circumstances of Melmore Elementary School before the building was torn down, I can say far less about this case than most others in Avalon's archives. Subjectively, I can say that several locations in the structure gave me an uncomfortable impression. The matter of the falling ribbon tangle is curious, and not with an immediate decent explanation. The boiler room photo featuring the image of the bald Uncle Fester head will no doubt go into my "favorites" archive, even if it now must reside their as an example of "Explainable" images of a creepy nature! It would be my conclusion that Melmore Elementary may have been the home for at least a modest level of paranormal activity, but how much of this was due to pre-existing conditions (namely ghosts of one type or another) and how much of it may have been manifested folklore and projection from the community collective unconscious will not be resolved.

All of this more or less leaves the anecdotes and tales of the old school to stand alone by themselves, for all time to come. The building is now gone. Lisa Swickard has indicated that a new community hall or fire station will likely be built on top of the site. Perhaps the shades of "Pappy" Collins and a nameless young girl-child from another era will find a new home, and become resident fire station ghosts. Many of the bricks from the old building were taken home by locals to build patios, fireplaces, mantles, barbecue pits, or even whole home additions. Who can say whether or not Pappy chose to ride along on a brick to a new "school" somewhere! If he did, hopefully he will not make it a favorite punishment for misbehaving youngsters to go a-popping his balding head up out of a floor at night...

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