The Gym Is Haunted

I attended first grade in what had originally been built as a high school back in my grandfather's time. So the place was pretty ancient to a six-year-old -- and the most ancient and forbidding part of it was the old ramshackle gymnasium.

The gym probably dated back only to my mother's time, but that was ancient enough. It was a huge white building with a concrete porch area and massive columns. We weren't allowed to go into it, it was so dilapidated. But we could peek through the old doors and see inside: a big silent room, dusty gym floor, and rows of empty bleachers. One time -- one single, memorable time -- the teachers took us in there to play. On the back wall was a faded painting of the high school mascot, a short little man with a white mustache, big white hat, and a gun: the Rebels. Welcome to the South, y'all.

What was most interesting about the gym, however, were the rumors. By the second week of school, everybody knew that The Gym Was Haunted.

Some of the other kids seemed to know all about it. The gym was closed because, a long time ago, a girl had drowned in the swimming pool. What swimming pool? It was under the gym -- see, if you looked underneath it, in the crawl spaces, you could see where the dirt was piled up. That was the swimming pool, all filled in, with the girl's body still in it probably. Also those other smaller mounds were graves, didn't you know that?

One girl said that when her mother was young, she and some friends sneaked into the gym at night. They saw the mascot on the back wall COME TO LIFE and get down off the wall! I think his eyes glowed green, too.

If I were at all skeptical (and I don't remember that I was), I and a classmate confirmed all these suspicions by scientific experimentation. He got a stick and beat it against the gym wall. We clearly heard someone pounding back! It was all true!

There was nothing else to be done but for me to write it out as a news story. I have a distinct memory of looking down at my paper with my penciled handwriting. (Come to think of it, the paper is white notebook paper; so I might actually have written the article in second or third grade.) I reported that The Gym Is Haunted, and provided all my supporting evidence. I even interviewed the classmate who had banged on the wall. I gave him just one quote, but that wasn't bad for a two-paragraph article.

When I was in fourth grade, the unthinkable happened: the school renovated the gym. Absolutely oblivious to the spiritual danger, workers ripped off the front porch, replaced the old wooden bleachers, shored up the foundation, and painted over the undead mascot on the back wall. They covered the peeling white boards with gray vinyl siding. If they discovered the old swimming pool and the bodies underneath the gym, nobody was saying anything.

By my last year in elementary school, the gym was new, improved, and apparently exorcised. Even at eleven years old, I felt a little loss every time we marched single-file onto the bright polished floor. I knew by now that there were no ghosts, no graves, no glowing eyes.

Even if I pounded the wall, all I'd hear back were echoes.

-- SJ