This article is dedicated to the people who aren’t able to celebrate Halloween. Gather ’round the campfire for 6 scary stories that’ll chill you to the bone, told by your favorite teachers!
When I lived in Thailand, I worked as a secretary, and my friend was a receptionist. Our companies worked for 24 hours, so there was a day shift and a night shift. One day, my friend had to take the night shift. Part of my friend’s job as a receptionist was to pick up the phone. Around midnight, she expected little to no phone calls because no one really calls around midnight. That night, it was only her and her employee. Her employee went to take a break and she sat by herself at the counter. When the phone rang, she picked it up, and it was one of her friends, named Derek. I’ve never personally met him, but she knew him because she worked there before me. My friend asked him how he was, and he told her that he was fine. Derek told her that he was calling because he wanted to let her know that he wasn’t coming to work, and it was nice knowing her. He also said, “If my fiance calls, please tell her that I miss her and love her.” That’s it. She was like, what the-?” She hung up and didn’t think about it. The next day, my friend took the day shift. She had heard that Derek had passed away around 6 p.m., which was before he called her. My friend broke down crying and didn’t want to believe it. Later, Derek’s fiance called my friend and told her that her boyfriend called her last night to tell her to call us (our company), and someone would give her a message from him. – Mrs. McGhee, Jasmine McGhee’s MomWhen I was growing up, my Mom and Dad were very religious people (Christians). It was the late 80s, and the ouija board was all the rage. It was sold at toy stores everywhere, and we were like “We want a ouija board!” but my Mom was like, “Oh, no. You are not bringing any of that nonsense into my house.” My sister and I shared a room, and my friend had an ouija board, and she let me borrow it. I snuck it home, without my Mom and my Dad seeing it, and hid it in the closet so that my sister and I could play later. We go to sleep that night, and I’m dead to the world––completely knocked out. My sister tells me my Mom came into the bedroom at 3 in the morning, and shouts, “Who’s playing in the closet, girls? Who’s in the closet!” My sister wakes up and she’s like, “What are you talking about, Mom? We’re sleeping!” My Mom says, “Somebody’s in that closet, shaking it around at 3 in the morning. Get back to bed!” Nobody was in the closet. We wake up the next day, and my sister says, “Get that thing out of the house, right this second!” I did, and we never played with it. To this day, we don’t know what was in the closet, but something was shaking it around. -Mrs. Hemken, MS English TeacherAn urban legend that always scared me was about a woman who was riding in a car. She leaves the grocery store and packs up her groceries in her trunk, and she gets in the front seat. As she leaves the grocery store parking lot, another car comes out behind her. This car seems to follow her for a while . . . Then, this car starts flashing its lights at her. If she makes a right-hand turn, the car turns right. If she makes a left-hand turn, the car turns left. The car just keeps flashing its lights on. No matter where she goes, the car continues to follow her. Eventually, the car speeds up and pulls up beside her. It starts trying to push her off of the side of the road. The woman is freaking out, she’s fighting back, she doesn’t know what to do. After some time, the car manages to push her off the side of the road, and pin her, where she can’t go anywhere. Suddenly, a big muscular guy jumps out of the truck, goes past her front door to the back door. He opens it and pulls out someone who was riding, hidden, in the back seat with a knife in his hand. He was going to ride in the back seat of the car, to her house, and kill her. The muscular guy saw him but didn’t know how to tell her without trying to flash the lights and do what he did. Ever since I heard that story, I remember when I first started driving, at night, I was always paranoid. I was always looking for someone in the backseat of my car. If I heard a sound, I would keep looking back, checking. I think about this story to this day. This urban legend has been one that has always stuck with me, always has me nervous. It always has me on guard. – Mr. Jessup, Sixth Grade Boys ChairYears ago, I was working at a school in New York City, and we would go to Plymouth every year to tour it and learn about its history. We always stayed at a hotel (John Carver Inn) that was known to be haunted. On my third year of this trip, I’m no longer frightened by the ghost stories. I’m in my room at night––the chaperones all got their own rooms. Other schools were also on this trip, and they also had kids. I was in bed, reading, and I hear kids running around upstairs, and the physical sounds of running around and hearing some giggling. I’m thinking to myself, some chaperone isn’t doing a very good job with their students. I don’t think twice about it, and I go to bed. Then, I wake up the next morning, and everyone’s out in the hallway with their bags, and I see the chaperone who had stayed next door to me. She also had been on this trip multiple times, so we were not into the whole ghost aspect of it anymore. We were in the hallway, and we were taking. One of us was like, did you hear those kids running around last night, and it was confirmed by the other chaperone as well. I said yes, and that it was really annoying. We go to the elevator, we’re about to leave, kids had already walked down the stairs. We look at the elevator buttons and realize that there’s no floor above us. We were on the top floor. The only kids we might’ve heard wouldn’t be alive anymore. We were completely freaked out at that point. -Mrs. Hogan, WMS History Teacher
My family is from small-town southside Virginia. My Mom actually grew up in a house that used to be a tobacco farm. It’s a beautiful house, and they’ve renovated it, and it’s beautiful. There was a long gravel road from the main road. I can remember, where I slept, there was a big street light on the gravel road coming down from the main road. It was bright from the window. It was bright in my bedroom. It looked out onto the tobacco field. When it was windy, the leaves would sway, and it was super creepy. When I was younger, I was really spooked when I was in that room. I have a memory of waking up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom. There was only one bathroom in the house, at the time, so you had to go down the stairs to the bathroom and come back upstairs. I can remember I looked out on the tobacco field, and the leaves were still, except for some breeze. You can see when someone is out in the field because the leaves part. I remember that when I looked down, my heart skipped a beat. I could see that there was something walking through the field. The next day, I asked my uncle and my granddad the next day if there was anybody out in the field in the middle of the night. They said no, that they didn’t go out there. It could’ve been a deer. To this day, I’ve been thinking that the mood of it, the breeze, the scene––something was out there in that field. It wasn’t anybody I was related to or anybody that lived in that house. I’ve always sort of believed that it was something . . . The way it was moving through the leaves . . . I’ve always believed to myself that it was something otherworldly, not human. – Mr. DuPriest, MS Dean of Students
Years ago, my grandparents lived on a farm in Tekamah, Nebraska. It was the middle of nowhere, with corn and soybean all around. In the wintertime, it gets really, really cold. We’re talking feet of snow, always freezing, for weeks on end. So, as grandparents, they would venture down South to Texas to escape the snow. One year, as they prepared their house––they made sure the heat was set at a cool 58 degrees, not too hot so that it wouldn’t be running the whole time. It wasn’t too cold because they didn’t want their pipes freezing. They made sure that all the lights were turned off, the TV was turned off, the radio was turned off. They just made sure the house was ready to be left alone for a few weeks when they went to Texas. Off they went to Texas. In the meantime, in Nebraska, it was so cold that it snowed at least every week. There wasn’t a single day where the snow melted enough to see the ground. Upon their return to the farmhouse, when they opened the door, every single candle in that house was melted. Not a single wick had been burned. They were new candles that just melted against the walls and their little plates. They had just melted where they sat. To this day, they could never figure out what had happened that made all that wax melt in the house. -Mrs. Mares, MS Spanish Teacher
