Here's another never-told tale from the Dogpatch Vermont ghost story files, which is still not the one I intended for odetteroulette, but that one was tiring me out.  And who wants to read a boring ghost story? 

This one is a little more exciting.   

Extracurricular Activities at Brigham Academy

It was Cabbage Night* afternoon in Bakersfield, Vermont.  We stood looking respectfully at the massive bell in the pigeon palace that was once the pride of the 115-year old Brigham Academy - the central clock tower.  Dave B., a fourth-grade teacher in the elementary school next door, pulled at the side hammer of the bell, but it barely moved, still tightly fastened to the weights and pulleys that ran down a shaft to the basement four long floors below.  “This clock could probably still be running 4000 years from now if someone was taking care of it,” Dave had lamented when we were inspecting the equally massive clockworks in the attic below, where seemingly every graduate of the academy for the last century had penciled their names.  Brigham Academy was closed down by the state in 1988 because of safety concerns, and the clock had been silent since.  Dave tried to swing the large clapper, but it was heavy enough to require several pushes to get it moving.  At last, it struck the side of the bell with enough momentum to result in a huge resonant booming ring out across the schoolyard.

As our eardrums recovered from the vibrations, wild shrieking from the playground below penetrated – many high-pitched cries of alarm, and/or excitement.  “The ghost!  It’s the ghost!  The ghost is up in Brigham Academy!”  It sounded a mixture of consternation and glee.  Alas, eventually they must have heard our unghostly laughter floating down through the belfry louvers, but we livened up their Cabbage Night for a brief moment, anyway.

It’s obvious that Brigham Academy has a reputation in town for being haunted, but the ghost does not ring the bell, which is reassuring given the force required.  Despite the building’s age, the reputation is relatively recent, for while it may have been haunted for most of this century (we don’t know), people didn’t admit it until a few years ago, when a brave and badly shaken custodian dared public ridicule to talk about it.  He wasn’t ridiculed much, though.  Too many others had had bizarre experiences of their own in Brigham Academy, but had held their tongues. 

The Academy was built in 1878 with money willed to the town for educational purposes by the illustrious native son, Peter Bent Brigham, a wealthy Boston businessman (most of the rest of his money went to establishing a hospital for the poor in Boston – now Brigham and Women’s).  It served as a high school until the late 1960s, when it was turned into a middle school.

In 1987, two weeks after school had closed for the summer, custodian Bob D. was starting his major task for the day at 6:30 A.M., ripping up floor tiles in the science room on the second floor, in preparation for new flooring.  The sound of a basket ball being bounced on the gym floor below him interrupted his work.  “Who the hell’s here?” he wondered, as he went down the central staircase to the door at the foot that opened onto the gym balcony.  The building was locked tight until the principal’s arrival at 8 or 9.  Looking across the narrow balcony, he could see all of the gym floor except that part immediately below him on the stairwell wall side.  No one was visible.  A ball, however, was rolling along the floor towards the corner diagonally across from him.  It hit the wall and stopped dead.  “This is strange,” thought Bob, who had expected to see it carom off the wall, as balls usually do.  He took the nearby stairs down to the basement and the empty gym floor.  There was still no sign of an intruder.  

 The gym floor the basketball rolled across

The people (real) stand where Bob did when he saw the ball rolling across the gym floor

Bob crossed the gym to where the ball had come to rest, and bent down to pick it up.  The ball refused to be picked up.  It sat stubbornly, as if glued with some super stickum.  “It felt like part of the floor,” Bob recalled, it was so firmly attached.  Determined to restore some normalcy to this unsettling morning, Bob sat down on the floor in front of the ball, wrapped his arms around it, and pulled until his arm muscles were starting to hurt under the strain.  With a popping noise, the ball suddenly separated from the floor.  At the same time, Bob heard footsteps running up the stairs he had just descended.  He followed, hoping to catch the culprit, still thinking there must be a human explanation behind all of this.  Upstairs, as he entered the large study room/library next to the central stairwell, across the room he could see the door to the principal’s office shutting, but it was already closed enough that he could not see the person behind it. 

"This is really strange,” Bob thought to himself.  Forty-five minutes earlier, he had been in that room emptying the wastebasket, and he had locked the door as he left.  He crossed the room to the door and tried the handle.  It was locked.  By now he was beginning to feel a little more cautious, and he opened the door slowly after he unlocked it.   He peered around the door jamb before going in, but the room was quite empty.  “At that point I proceeded outside and had a pack of cigarettes,” Bob said.  The principal found him there two hours later, sitting on the steps, surrounded by cigarette butts, mulling over his morning.    

The principal, whom we shall call Ed, had no reason to doubt Bob’s story, because he’d had his own run-in with something equally nerve-wracking previously.  Ed had been working in his office next to the library/study hall late one Sunday night during the dead of winter.  A major storm had just gone through, and a thick layer of snow covered the school grounds.  Ed’s office was directly under the big wooden south staircase.  So when he heard footsteps coming down those stairs, as the giant bell in the clock tower was striking ten, the footsteps were particularly distinct and loud, being just on the other side of his sloped ceiling.  Six years later, Ed interrupted his account of this evening to say, “I’m getting chills right now just remembering this.”

To be continued