Gather ’round the campfire once more, as your favorite teachers share six more scary stories that’ll give you goosebumps!
When I was little, there was a road named Grinch road. It was a neighborhood, and a neighborhood, and a neighborhood, then there was the road. If you kept going down the road, it was no longer cement. It went to mud or dirt, like a dirt road. Rumor had it that if you continued down Grinch Road, at the end of the road, there were devil worshippers that would use humans as sacrifices. It was always a scare to see who would go the farthest down Grinch Road. It was an urban legend, and we talked about it every weekend. Nobody ever saw the devil worshippers, but we all thought they lived down that road. —Mrs. Israel, MS Science TeacherThe urban legend that I grew up with was a pretty popular one in the Southwest on the border of Mexico. It was called “La Llorona.” When you hear certain wailings or screams, or maybe echos at night, they are the shrieks of a mother who is searching for her children. This really scared me as a kid because I was hearing this when I was out camping in the woods many miles from my house in this middle-of-nowhere remote area. The reason why she’s searching for her kids is that she had killed her kids by drowning them. There are different stories as to why she killed her kids, some being that they were either really sick, or they weren’t really hers, or the fact that they were dead when she found them. Afterward, she drowned herself. So, she’s now out wandering, looking for kids to drown if they’re near a body of water. No one really knows why she’s out there, though. —Mr. Simbaña, MS English teacher
In Thailand, I had some friends who went to a private school in a wealthy area. Around the school was an enormous mansion that belonged to wealthy people living in the neighborhood. There were rumors that if people walked around this mansion at night, they’d suddenly become cold and get goosebumps. Around this house, there were white threads. In Thai, we call these white threads sai sin. Sai sin are threads that monks pray over, kind of like saying an incantation. They can be used to make the livings’ lives better or to contain bad spirits from the dead. My friend wanted to know what was going on inside of that mansion, so they went to find out from older kids (seniors) who explored the house. The seniors said there used to be a couple who were about to get married. They were children of rich, rich people, and had a lot of money. The couple promised each other they were going to be together forever. On their engagement day, they drove a car somewhere together, and they had an accident that killed both of them. After their death, their parents agreed to preserve their bodies, and place them in large glass coffins, side by side inside of the mansion. The bride was wearing her wedding gown, and the groom was wearing his suit. The parents paid for people to take care of the bodies––doctors to come change medications, people to clean them . . . basically to keep them preserved. The seniors also told my friend that one night, they decided to look inside of the house to see the couple in the glass coffins. The people who saw inside the house always had life problems afterward. —Mrs. McGhee, Jasmine McGhee’s MomThis story actually has to do with how I came to Westminster. I went here [Westminster] as a kid, and then when I graduated I went to UVA, and when I came back, I worked for three years at Harrison High School. When I worked at Harrison, I loved it so much, but I had a really long commute. I would drive 30-45 minutes on I-75 to get to the school. One morning, I was running super late, so I was going above the speed limit. It was raining like cats and dogs, and I was driving up I-75. There was so much water on the road that my car suddenly started to hydroplane, and I lost control. I was in the far left lane because I was out of control. My car spun completely 360º around, and then another 180º, and I ended up facing the wrong direction of where I was going on I-75. I was head-to-head with a tractor-trailer, just coming full barrel towards me in the rain. From then, I literally don’t know what happened. I don’t know how I didn’t drive, I had zero control over anything. I just remember squeezing my eyes shut, and I was like, “oh my goodness.” When I opened my eyes, my car was on the side of the road, perfectly pulled over. The tractor-trailer was 50 yards in front of me. Not one car got into an accident, nobody got hurt, and the only thing that happened to me was a dent in the left rear bumper. This makes absolutely no sense. After that, I was like, “I don’t know what just happened, but I know I need not work so far away, at Harrison High School!” Then, I applied to Westminster. -Mrs. Williams, MS English TeacherThis happened to me many, many years ago, when I was a senior or junior in high school. One day, I returned home, and there was nobody at home. My parents had gone out, they were working and everything. I can remember the house being eerily quiet. I remember just taking the time to make myself a snack and unwind from a day of being at school. I then left the kitchen area to go put my stuff up and do all of that. I left the kitchen lights off because it was still very bright outside. I came back to the kitchen, and I found the lights on and a chair pushed out of its original position. I thought to myself, did I move them? Did I not move them? Then, I just dismiss the situation. I heard a noise coming from the back bedroom where my sisters stayed. Still, no one’s home, but I wonder if one of my sisters came home. I went to my sister’s room, and I didn’t see anybody. I straightened everything and put everything back up. A couple of minutes later, I heard a noise coming from a closet upstairs. In my head, I was debating whether or not to open the closet door. In the end, I decided not to open it and walked away because I wasn’t going to tempt anything. It subsided after that. —Mr. Malloy, MS Boys CounselorIn Kentucky, there’s this former insane asylum or tuberculosis clinic. It’s a huge old building, and you can go visit it now, and it’s one of the most haunted locations in the entire country. My wife is from Kentucky, and she took me there around Halloween time several years ago. It was one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been in. I didn’t actually see any ghosts, but you just had the feeling that there were other beings or entities around you when you were there. I’ll never forget that experience. The hair stood up on my arms, and I got chills and goosebumps when I was walking around the whole place. — Mr. Fry, MS Drama Teacher
