The Haunting of Brockesville High School

“WHY are you here? … What do you want from us? … Where are you from? … Are you of human origin? … In God’s name, I demand that you identify yourself and your nature! …”

But Cindy had already sensed what was creating the havoc at Brockesville High School, and her strong-willed personality compelled her to make an attempt at extracting from the entity its true diabolical nature and specific intent there.

“Maybe you should leave it be, Dee, or maybe try that less abrasive EVP thing,” advised her mother, standing in the doorway to her room. “Maybe you’ll just manage to piss it off, honey.”

Cindy preferred her mom’s shortened version of her name—Dee—because it omitted the ‘sin’ in ‘Cin-dy’; therefore it enabled her to ignore to a greater extent the many mean-spirited schoolmates who profanely verbalized their fear of her unorthodox insight into the unseen realm.

Not interested in artificial contact by means of ‘electronic voice phenomena’ nor intimidated by malicious spirits, Cindy maintained her consciousness simultaneously in both the physical world and that of the extra-dimensional.

“By the power of almighty God, you must reveal your identity and what you want with the people at Brockesville High!”

There was only silence in the room for the following few moments before she, still sitting cross-legged, looked up into her mother’s worried eyes and explained, “It hesitated for a while, but it finally told me what it is and its name. Also, it revealed what it plans for the school.”

“It’s nice that you’re happy with your spiritual accomplishments, Dee, but you really need to think more about your health, to fully consider your heart’s condition.”

Cindy, however, considered the condition of her heart to be well enough. Besides, she sensed that the spirit wouldn’t cause her serious harm. Plus, over time she’d found that she was not prone to any form of possession, be it a spirit of human or diabolical nature. Perhaps out of naiveté, she felt a sense of invulnerability.

The diabolical spirit or “diabolic” (Cindy’s reference) called itself Elevant and claimed to be the sole demon connected to the school. It also revealed that it occasionally followed Cindy home then invaded her dreams. In some nightmares, such as the one she endured the night prior, it vividly visualized for her all of the untimely and violent death that occurred at the school because of its insidious influence over decades.

“It really considers all of that enormous suffering it caused as just an average day’s work,” Cindy vented in frustration.

She shortly later accessed both the local library and high school archives in search of little known, if at all, Brockesville High history, specific information and events that her own psychic sensitivities failed to expose.

Taking only twenty minutes of archival perusal, she quickly learned that during the late 1940s and early 1950s a vicious outbreak of influenza within the Brockesville area filled the local hospital dangerously over capacity mostly with gravely ill teenagers. Therefore, the high school, which was closed to prevent greater transmittance of infection, was utilized as space to sanitarily house and care for the surplus number of seriously sick. The final death toll from the outbreak included seven of the flu-stricken teens who’d perished at the school’s makeshift hospital. It wasn’t until two years later that the long-since-disinfected school hastily reopened to house many of the town’s rapidly growing high-school-aged demographic.

But it would be five decades after its reopening that the truly horrific story commenced at Brockesville High.

Loner student pair Tim Williams and Allan McCallester, both seventeen and weary of the relentless bullying served them by three peers in particular—Patrick Grevenson, Joel Steiner and Daryl Reese.

Openly and persistently, the two misfits were taunted, being openly called “losers,” “fairies” and, especially intimidating to the pair, “dead men” almost every time the bullies would physically as well as psychologically bump into them while walking the school’s hallways.

So, with the final straws having broken their backs, Tim and Allan thoroughly expressed their burdensome frustration one foggy Fall morning via AK-47 assault rifles. They fully opened up on their entire classroom of thirty-one students, including their three aforementioned school-punk peers.

“You pricks are about to go to Hell. Say hello to Hitler for me!” crowed one of the two gunners, Grevenson told police investigators in the hospital eight days after his awakening from a coma. He nervously noted how the two wore gratified grins as they fired over a hundred rounds of armour-piercing bullets. Ironically, though, the two gunners failed to kill off Grevenson, coincidentally the worst of their high-school tormentors, who was the sole survivor of the massacre (albeit having been hit twice in the torso). The pair feeling satisfied that they’d sufficiently expressed their unforgettable displeasure with the school, each put a fatal bullet through his own heart with the same .45-caliber handgun.

But Cindy felt assured that the pair would imminently in death accomplish in entirety what they’d failed to do during their last moments of life—‘finish off’ Patrick, the last of the lot who’d barely escaped his comeuppance.

While accompanied by another schoolmate late one afternoon, he was completing an assignment in the very same classroom in which the mass shooting had taken place, Patrick was said to have frantically shrieked out something about seeing the apparitions of all the bloodied, bullet-ridden students who’d been massacred.

Horrified, he desperately yet futilely tried to evade the frightening specters by way of the classroom door.

“I saw him barely able to pull the door open six inches but then being hindered by something that seemed to force the door back closed,” said the lone-witness schoolmate that same day to police with a bewildered expression.

“Although … I can’t explain it, but I could swear there was nothing on the other side of the door, at least nothing visible through the door window.”

Finally unable to further tolerate the ghastly vision, Patrick, by then completely out of mind, leapt right through a classroom windowpane, four floors up. He was killed almost immediately upon impact, his body covered in cuts and shards of broken glass.

Cindy told her mother the following day of having on two occasions witnessed Patrick’s translucent spirit accompanied by those of his two bully buddies.

“They’re still sticking together, like peas in a pod, as they—completely unseen, of course—bump shoulders with living students they deem deserving of their harassment. You know, Mom, I can sense from them that they’re actually completely oblivious to their non-corporeal existence.”

As for the massacre, when flowers were left in memoriam by the sealed door of the classroom shooting site, their pedals totally withered within seconds to witnesses’ sickened astonishment. Then, immediately following the shocking sight came an inexplicable intolerable putrid odor.

Cindy knew that it was the deed of the demon, Elevant.

Shamefully, many students who were averagely bullied would pass their troubles onto the most helplessly bullied amongst the entire student body. Meanwhile Elevant, although having fully enjoyed the plentiful suffering caused by such collective pass-it-along abuse, felt only contempt for all bullies as well as their prey.

The bullies also induced against themselves the most contempt from the other human spirits.

“They are the real cowards—‘they’ being those who pass down their turmoil onto the weakest students. We should show them what’s real high school misery!” Cindy told her mother that she sensed from Elevant and the human souls.

She also knew that it furthermore had been maliciously manipulating the typically malleable minds of the bodily students that were being weakened by the bullies’ abuse; thus she counselled the weakened ones to completely shun the way of the gun or any form of violence—to not choose the brutally lost way of Tim and Allan.

Upon arriving at the school the same morning as she had learned so much about Elevant, Cindy was told by her schoolmate and sole friend, Justine, all about some fascinating paranormal events that had occurred in the gymnasium.

She informed Cindy that two fellow students had reportedly heard what sounded like dozens of simultaneous “whispers” emanating from the large storage space for sports equipment beneath the stage, there.

What made it all exceptionally creepy was that the ghostly event had occurred precisely where the young influenza victims’ portable bunk beds were stored immediately upon being thoroughly disinfected five decades prior. They included many beds that had been used by sick teens who had succumbed to their unrelenting illness. Before being eventually forgotten, it was initially thought during the early 1950s that the beds might also be of future use, with due note that nothing was to be wasted during the Korean War.

Also noteworthy was that in November of 2005, about a year before those disembodied whispers were encountered, the school’s janitor was in the process of attempting to remove the decrepit beds for disposal when “I was stunned dumbfounded by a large lot of murmuring, all at the same time. Then it all got louder and louder and louder! That’s when I’d had enough and left.”

Regardless, when told by the school’s principal, who wasn’t without empathy towards the janitor’s understandable anxiety, that the bunk beds still required disposal, the janitor quite reluctantly went back at it. He later reported for the written record that, “At first they simply would not budge; but when I finally managed to yank two of the beds out a foot or so they were instantly forced back in with a strong jerk—and twice as hard, at that!”

When some fellow school staff tried to give him a much-needed hand at pulling out the beds from the storage space once and for all, again they were forcefully yanked back in by the same unseen forces that finally loudly squeaked out a collective “No! They all stay here!

It wasn’t even a week later that a student working alone in the school’s machine shop was stunned so incapacitated by a horrific distorted apparition that he inadvertently cut off his thumb with an electronic saw.

Meanwhile, desks in many classrooms aggressively moved about, by all accounts, on their own accord. In a classroom attended by only two girls, one was pinned by her shoulders against the chalkboard by an unseen force; and when she screamed out in terror it let out an equally loud shriek.

Then there was the paranormal lunchroom food-fight: One boy almost lost an eye to a flying eating utensil, one of very many, all apparently propelled by themselves. Resultantly a female student then ran screaming to the girls’ washroom where she had later reported to some teachers that multiple ghostly hands molested her until she finally bolted out of the washroom, screaming even louder: “It was like something straight out of one of those cliché Hollywood B-movies, you know, with the lame meaningless shower scene and all,” she’d told other students soon afterwards while trembling uncontrollably.

Cindy sensed that the very aggressive paranormal activity originated from a trio of “especially corrupted human entities definitely attracted to the energy aftershock from the very difficult deaths during the school’s intensely unpleasant history,” she stated confidently. “But they’re exceptionally attracted to the extremely embittered, angry energy lingering there since the Tim and Allan atrocity.”

On some occasions the raucous like that of a multitude of musical instruments could be heard playing in the totally unattended music classrooms. It would almost always repeatedly play to the tune of the once-popular Tequila, for hours on end, and wouldn’t cease that day until some students or staff dared to enter the classroom and demand (on unsurprisingly shaky terms) for it all to immediately stop.

Perhaps most notable was the borderline-nervous-breakdown gym teacher who’d resigned his post after thirty-three years at Brockesville High because of the weekly occurrence (every Wednesday) of multiple phantom basketball slaps against the gymnasium floor. They always disturbingly sounded at the same 8 – 9 a.m. hour, which was in fact the precise class timeslot during which six members of the school basketball team were murdered by the maddened duo Tim and Allan.

Soon enough, the school was pasted with its own gossip-prone label, as that of “the Brockesville High haunting.” And, of course, the further the news would have to travel, all the less serious it would be taken. Cindy herself noted with some frustration how, unfortunately, this haunting like most wouldn’t be acknowledged for they consisted of seemingly typical spectral appearances and non-severe attacks, plus only relatively small numbers of witnesses had come forward officially with their harrowing experiences.

Cindy also knew that there was considerable non-sentient residual haunts at the school, mostly as a result of the large quantity of extremely negative emotions remaining ingrained in the physical environment following the horrific mass shooting.

And while Elevant misleadingly paraded itself as a human entity, Cindy alone could distinguish between it and the truly human spirits, with most of the latter existing in “a state of unawareness.”

Even with all of the Earthly and other-worldly suffering that took place 24/7 and the accompanying unclean spirits, Cindy maintained her belief in a good Creator who “cares very much about Creation.” While always acknowledging how typically predictable her spiritual convictions sounded she’d then emphasize her belief that the souls destined for the white-lighted tunnel would go there immediately upon their bodily death. The souls that didn’t cross over right away were destined to remain within an extra-dimensional form of the Earthly plane, though usually in some manner connected to the location of their death, “until they’re ready for the other side”. The remainder, Cindy also believed, go the way of the Godless realm “and likely learn upon arriving there that it is indeed where they truly belong.”

It would soon enough happen, however, that Cindy personally experienced the other side upon her untimely death due to a congenitally malformed aortic valve, a condition much exacerbated by the additional stress of dealing with extremely active paranormal activity.

But on the positive side of matters there the terribly tragic, traumatic Tim and Allan massacre directly expeditiously brought about into being school-based programs on a national scale to dramatically reduce or preferably outright eliminate schoolyard bullying and similar domino-effect destructive behaviour.

To the present day, Cindy’s ghost is said by some to be occasionally observed on the high school’s grounds. According to her mother, “I believe that Dee is more than welcome to enter Paradise, when she desires and decides to go; but apparently she feels like staying another while, for whatever reason.”

The Haunting of Brockesville High School