It was around 2:00AM by the time we finished with the last EVP sessions. George wanted everyone to split up for one more round; Kim and I found ourselves back with Jimmy Wenger. I don’t know why, call it a cop-out, but I was adamant on making the gym our last destination. It was the only room where I didn’t feel scared and after our adventures with George, I was kind of looking to end the night on a note that didn’t include phantom faces leering through windows, mischievous laughter and inexplicable piano plunking.

But as we all crowded outside the door of Base, gathering our bearings and adjusting our headlamps, Kim suggested we ride the coattails of Christine and Tiny, who were about to ascend the staircase to the second floor classrooms. Her reasoning was that they had been having shit happen to them all night, so maybe we would reap the rewards of being in their presence. This was exactly why I didn’t want to go with them! Which is pointless, considering I was there that night to have an experience. My inner chicken-shit was not on board with this at all, but Jimmy agreed to join them so there I was, being dragged along like I was on my way to get a root canal.

“Get fucked,” I whispered to the Shadowman Room and his equally-eerie neighbor across the hall. I was relieved when Christine and Tiny kept walking to the other end of the hall. We would be starting out in the Little Girl’s room again.

The vibe was immediately different, being with these two. They both made themselves comfortable, each choosing a desk to sit in while getting acclimated with their surroundings, while I continued on with my now-signature EVP stance –  up against a wall with a rigid spine, nervously suckling a strand of hair.

Right away, Christine asked us to kill our headlamps, preferring to work in a pitch black environment. It was so dark that I could no longer even make out the nebulous mist of my breath. Almost immediately, my ears began to pick up the slack for the paycheck my eyes no longer had to earn, and my head was beginning to fill with ringing and static noise.

The EVP session started; Christine and Tiny had a more relaxed, conversational way of communicating with the dead. Their questions piggy-backed each other and didn’t come off sounding disjointed like when I chimed in. They had environmentally-centric queries, such as, “Were you a student here? Who was your favorite teacher? Were you a teacher? Can you write your name on the board for us?” They weren’t  shy about asking the spirits to do things for us, such as completing the series of knocks that Tiny made on the desk in which he sat.

Nothing happened.

He rapped his knuckles on the desk a second time, and both he and Christine asked, “Did you hear that?” Jimmy, Kim and I did not. But those two evidently heard  answering knocks coming from the coat rack behind me. I took several giant steps into the center of the room.

“Thank you,” Tiny called out to whomever (whatever) had supposedly completed his parlor trick.

“I didn’t hear anything, did you?” Kim whispered to me. She sounded annoyed, and I didn’t blame her. Not being able to pick up on everything was frustrating.

“We’re going to the next room now,” Christine called out, and at first I thought she was talking to the rest of us and was immediately irritated by her patronizing tone. “You can follow us if you want, we’d like to talk to you some more,” she added, and I realized she was still talking to some dead person. The thought of some evil school kid drifting around the school with us made me  feel weary and about 10 degrees colder.

The room across the hall was the computer room. “This is where I heard the piano!” I excitedly reminded Christine and Tiny, neither of whom responded. Being the jejune newbie was really hindering my credibility.

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the empty floor, Christine once again asked for all lights to be turned off.  Jimmy would light up the room with an occasional camera flash, and Kim was talking in loud whispers; Christine’s bristling irritation was nearly palpable. No one had ever set any ground rules but it was clear that Christine had her own firmly planted preferences and Kim wasn’t having it.

“I’m going to the gym,” Kim said, standing in front of me. “Do you want to come?”

I did. But at the same time, I kind of wanted to see what was going to happen with Christine’s game of Duck Duck Goose. So I stayed. Jimmy tried to get Kim to stay too, by reminding her that we weren’t supposed to go off on our own, but she said, “I’m not scared!” and pretty soon she was far enough down the hall that I could no longer hear the swishing of her snow pants.

I peed in my pants a little on her behalf.

Meanwhile, Christine was still trying to lure a ghost into playing Duck Duck Goose with her. I was standing there, knees knocking together, listening to her do that while Tiny tried to tempt a ghost to have its picture taken, and my mind was ready to explode.

I was standing in the dark.

With perfect strangers.

In a haunted school that felt like a freezer.

My nose was so cold, a stream of snot could have been bubbling out of it and I wouldn’t have known.

My fear of the dark had taken on tangible fists and was pummeling away at my psyche.

It only got worse a few minutes later when we heard Kim and her snow pants sloshing back down the hall, and Jimmy poked his head out of the door to talk to her. They exchanged muffled words and the next thing I knew, Jimmy had joined her, closing the door behind him, shutting me in a room with my crippling paranoia and two people who were oblivious to my presence.

“Is everyone gone now?” I heard Christine ask Tiny.

“No,” I stammered. “I’m still here. Me, Erin.” I wondered if they were disappointed that they were still going to have to drag around my dead weight.

Tiny heard something from the back of the room, a voice? I don’t know, no one ever really told me. So what did Christine do? SHE FUCKING SCOOTED CLOSER TO THE BACK OF THE ROOM. I’m standing there, ripping my nails nearly all the way off their beds, hand reaching for the doorknob, ready to bolt, and this broad is moving closer to the source of the noise.

“Come on, come play with me!” she kept taunting in a sing-song voice. Are you fucking kidding me? I tried to imagine being a ghost and watching this play out. I imagine it would be hard not to say, “Yeah, I’ll play with you. Duck, duck, duck, duck GOOSE, bitch!” as I slam her on the head with a sledgehammer. But that’s just me. I have a feeling I might make an angry ghost.

You might be shocked to find out, but no one took her up on her Duck Duck Goose offer. Maybe because that game is fucking lame? Just a thought.

During the EVP prepping back at Base, George told us to make sure we verbalize for the tape recorder if we accidentally make a noise, such as coughing, bumping something, stepping on something. Even if our stomachs growled, we were told to state for the recording that it was indeed our stomach growling.

I had to do this at least 12 times. It was a little embarrassing.

“That was just my stomach again. Sorry guys,” I said sheepishly for the eight time, prompting Christine to assure me that she used to have that same problem but had since learned to fill up before embarking on a ghost hunt. I ate a sandwich before I left home, and it was pretty amazing that I was even able to get that down my gullet, what with the waves of emotion my nerves had crashing against my stomach lining. Jimmy Wenger’s glazed donut and a few handful of barbeque chips were the only vegetarian options down in Base, and I had ravished some of those in the beginning of the night, but as the groups got smaller and the rooms grew blacker, food was pretty much the last thing on my mind.

Apparently my stomach thought otherwise.

“OK, we’re going to be leaving this room now. Do you want to come with us? Show us around some more?” she suggested.

(Oh god, please don’t.)

With my arms wrapping myself into a big, walking hug, I followed them reluctantly to a classroom in the middle of the hall.

The door wouldn’t open.

“It feels like it’s being pulled back from the inside,” Christine said to Tiny, who took the knob and tried for himself.

“It’s not catching on anything,” he pointed out, and meanwhile, I’m inching back. I don’t know about you guys, but that seemed like a pretty good GET THE FUCK OUT warning to me.

The door was eventually wrenched open and the two ghost soldiers marched right over the threshold while I opted for a more timid, dainty tiptoe.

There was a toy truck on the floor; small and wooden. Christine sat down in front of it and launched her pleas for play while Tiny chose to squeeze his decidedly non-tiny body behind a desk.

Me? Oh I just stood near the door as usual.

I was colder than ever in this room. Maybe because it was nearly 3AM by now? Maybe that room had some broken windows? Maybe my own cowardice was causing my blood to coalesce into icicles? I really didn’t want to consider that it was because I had spirits swirling around my torso, blowing on my hair, looking for an opening to enter me and fuck my world up.

And the next thing I know, I’m hearing Christine say, “Erin has a kid. I bet she would like to play with this truck with you.”

There was an awkward silence, which I chose to fill with the even more awkward addition of, “Yeah, I have a four-year-old. We play trucks all the time.” (THIS IS A LIE. We do not play trucks. We do, however, play Zombies out in the front yard, but hello, I’m not suggesting THAT game to a fucking ghost kid.)

I stood there, squinting through the darkness at this stupid toy truck which just sat there, immobile. An overwhelming sense of pity (for myself) washed over me. I wanted very badly to open that door and leave. I was cold, the coldest I had been all night, and it was painfully uncomfortable. My toes burned in those goddamned uninsulated galoshes, my lower back ached from standing erect with trepidation for the last five hours. I couldn’t stop thinking about the comfort and safety of my home, my home that had heat and electricity and (hopefully) no spirits waiting inside cubbies to jack my world up. I don’t know if it was exhaustion, my sense of sight being stolen from me, or if there was honestly something inhuman in that room, but I felt awful. Just completely horrible, uncomfortable, completely oppressed, like the atmosphere of this particular room was heavy enough to crush my chest. I sensed things all around me; whether there was really something haunting that classroom or not, I’m not the one to verify that. I was honestly seeing shit though–wispy shadows? I’m not sure what it was. It could have been my eyes struggling to adjust to their new unlit surroundings, maybe overcompensating by creating images that weren’t really there? I don’t know, but I was fucking frightened. I felt unsafe and I wished Henry was there with me, so you know something inside my brain was awry.

You know in The Blair Witch Project, they start out all happy-go-lucky? Full of jokes and excitement? And then as their time in the woods lengthens, and shit starts happening, they sort of just break? Get all whimpery and paranoid? Oh, could I relate. Turning off the lights and hearing these phantom noises had me on the Autobahn to a psychological snap. My eyes started to well and I panicked because I didn’t want my tears to cause my contacts to freeze. I already couldn’t see!

But I stayed in that room. Mostly because I didn’t want these hardcore ghost chasers to think I was some spineless weakling (even though that’s exactly what I am).

Tiny launched into his knocking experiment again, and this time I fucking heard it. The answering knocks, more like taps, came directly from my left, where a metal cabinet sat in the corner.

“Thank you,” Tiny called out. I was glad that he brought his manners to the ghost conference.

“Is there something you want out of that cabinet?” Christine probed. “Do you want Erin to open it for you?”

DO NOT BRING ERIN INTO THIS. I backed away with such zest that I nearly lost my balance.

Meanwhile, Tiny had picked up some sort of scent, so Christine and I joined him in the middle of the room.

They both decided it smelled like burning wood, but all I could glean from the air was the stench of industrial cleansers.

It seemed like hours had passed since Jimmy and Kim had left, hours since we all left Base in one group. I wasn’t sure how much I could handle. Actually, I was sure, and it was this: not even one more second in another darkened room. So as we left the room, shutting the door behind us, I cleared my throat and asked, “Is it OK if I go back down to Base?” Once they made sure I knew how to get back (it literally involved walking down one flight of steps; even someone as directionally incompetent as myself would have a hard time getting lost), I left them behind as I did a ridiculous shuffle-run down the hall, past the Shadowman Room (I refused to look at the door), down the short flight of steps and then ripped open the door to Base.

Brittany and Lynnette, who had opted to stay back for that round, looked up in alarm.

“I COULDN’T DO IT ANYMORE I WAS TOO SCARED OMG AREN’T YOU GUYS SCARED?” I squealed, planting myself in a chair under the kerosene lamp. They didn’t seem very scared, and said that they hadn’t seen anything on the monitor either.

I wasn’t back for more than a few minutes before the other groups returned. Christine and Tiny were the last to come back, staying upstairs for a good fifteen minutes longer.

Lynnette and Brittany mentioned to the group that they would be leaving soon. I looked at my phone and saw that it was nearly 3AM. I grabbed onto their coattails and said that I would be bowing out as well. George said all that was left was a walk around the premises and the playground, and one last free-for-all around the inside of the school. I already made it way longer than Henry’s guesstimation and if we’re being honest, I wasn’t sure that on a purely emotional level, I could handle much more.

So I was firm in my decision to leave.

But first, I was entertained by Chris and Kim bickering over who is the biggest skeptic (they are constantly making me laugh!) and then, at George’s insistence, we all posed for a group photo.

l. to r.: Joel, Nick, Lynette, Tiny, Chris, Christine, me, Brittany, Jimmy, George

Kim is worse than me when it comes to pictures (and unrightfully so!) and purposely used Christine’s head to shield her face. I still don’t know who was giving me bunny ears–Kim or Jimmy. Jerks, both of them!

It was a good group of people and I was happy to meet them all. I hope that they didn’t think I was an idiot or too wussy to be a part of their group, though. I did take it seriously, even if it might have been difficult to see that through my veil of fear.

By 3AM, I was on my way home with the heat blasting, after having Kim and Chris walk me up the snowy lane to my car. (I half-expected it to not be there.) I called Henry and woke him up, making him talk to me while I drove the mostly desolate streets, too afraid to be alone in the car.  He didn’t seem very interested in any of my experiences, only that I had left his flashlight at the site.

“Don’t worry!” I begged. “Kim and Chris are still there! They’ll get it for you!”

Then he laid in bed and smirked while I spastically told him more of the night’s details. He of course had an explanation for everything.

***

The next afternoon, we were on our way to the roller rink and I had to endure Henry’s endless castigation on the subject of Flashlight.

“That goddamn flashlight could be in the same place for YEARS, and the moment the lights go out, it’s gone,” he fumed. “Everything was fine until my kids and YOU entered the picture,” he added, casting an accusatory glance upon my soul.

It’s just a flashlight.

“And of course you’d leave it there!” he continued, flashlight maniac that he is. “I never should have expected anything else from you!”

But Kim and Chris met us at the rink, and Henry was reunited with his precious fucking flashlight. Never mind the fact that his girlfriend had spent the entire night risking her life inside of a HAUNTED SCHOOL.  Let’s ignore that and have a fucking Welcome Home party for a goddamn battery-operated torch.

***

After rehashing the events over and over again since that  night, I believe that I was offered enough proof at Broughton Elementary to believe that there is definitely some shit out there. Just writing these recaps, in an empty house in broad daylight, has been enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and fill me with that dreaded sensation of being watched. I’ve screamed outright on several occasions while lost in typing-mode, always because of something stupid – a beeping car, my phone ringing, one of the cats slowly pushing open the basement door. I’m worried of the impact this might have on my cemetery walks, if I’ll be too sufficiently freaked out to go there on my own now. I hope not.

Would I do it again? I think I would. Only, with my own flashlight.

Three years ago, I was on my way home from Cincinnati for the last time, when this song came on in my car. It was on a mix CD I had made months earlier, but never listened to until then. I just remember having my breath ripped right out from me, and replaying the song immediately after it ended, then scouring the CD for more Dance Gavin Dance tracks. I bought both of their albums post haste and it became pretty much all I listened to for months; their lyrics inspired paintings and stories and certain songs on repeat coaxed me down from the ledges upon which life and broken hearts had precariously placed me. Their music simultaneously made me want to love and rage while throwing my body up against walls.

If you’ve received a mix CD from me anytime since 2008, chances are there is at least one Dance Gavin Dance track on there.

Unfortunately, my discovery happened right after the band kicked out their singer, Jonny Craig, so while I’ve gotten to see them twice over the years with Jonny’s replacement, I never really got to have the DGD experience I craved.

I was in the car last August when Alternative Press sent out a tweet announcing that Jonny Craig was going to reprise his role in Dance Gavin Dance. Even though I don’t harbor the best opinions of Jonny, with whom I’ve had a couple unsavory encounters at his other band Emarosa’s shows, my love for his work with Dance Gavin Dance is great enough for me to snuff out the flame of hate that burns for him in my stomach’s pit and just appreciate the music as the entree instead of a side dish to Jonny’s steaming bowl of douche-peppered arrogance.

So as the news sunk in, I cried. Legitimate tears of OMG Fangirl Hysteria streaked my face as I realized I might have the chance to see one  of my favorite  bands with their original lineup, and for this thirty-one-year-old scene girl, that’s better than a trip to the beach. Better than winning a new car. Better than having whatever asshole you’re rooting for become the next American Idol.

Better than anything most women my age should be getting all worked up about. And I am grateful for that.

I bought tickets for their Pittsburgh show in March and have been so happy about it all weekend. Henry can’t wait.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Video] [Part 3] [Video]

Kim and I wound up with George for the second round of EVPs.

“Great, this is like being with the boss,” Kim complained in my ear, trouble-maker that she is.  I was nervous because I could only imagine how potentially intense it would be, standing next to an expert like George while he conducted his EVP session. I had an image of him standing in the middle of the room with his arms spread open like Jesus Christ, summoning the spirits out from the floor boards, naturally ending with one of them using his insides like a Holiday Inn and spitting their disembodied voice out through his mouth.

I really hoped that wasn’t going to happen.

Chris, who was still reeling from being rejected for Jimmy Wenger, purposely ditched us in favor of Christine and Joel. When I found out they were going to the boiler room, I was suddenly pretty happy to be going to the second floor classrooms with George. Tiny and Jimmy stayed back in Base for this round. I believe Nick, Brittany and Lynnette went to the gym.

We started out at the far end of the hall, in a classroom to the left of the staircase leading to the gym. This was the room everyone in the know kept calling the Little Girl’s Room, but I was too scared to ask why.

“Do you smell that?” George asked when we crossed the threshold. I smelled nothing more than the musty scent of a rotting school and a bouquet of my own fear and anxiety. But Kim said she smelled something, like lavender or lilac, and George seemed pleased with her answer. Apparently, he and Tiny had been detecting wafts of old perfume in one spot of that room all day.

I pulled in a deep drag of stale air through my nose and wasn’t rewarded with anything other than the need to sneeze.

In that room, I saw the name of one of Blake’s friends written on the chalkboard, verifying that the Blake-centric graffiti I had seen earlier  definitely belonged to Henry’s son. I momentarily felt a little relieved at the notion of Blake being there and making it out of the school alive. Maybe I would, too.

We lined up in front of the row of windows, which now seems like a dumb idea—I could have been grabbed and pulled through!—and began recording our session. My brief sense of relief dissipated.

Spewing out questions to a roomful of nothing is about as awkward and idiotic as it sounds. I realize this. But every time George would open up the floor to me, my pulse would quicken and I would get a terrible sensation of stage fright. I didn’t want any spirit motherfuckers making fun of me, you know? But my questions were so lame. “Hi, how are you?” [Dead.] “What’s your name?” [Your mother.] “Friend me on Facebook?” [Decline.] Presumably speaking with the dead in an abandoned school at 1:00 in the morning is pretty terrifying.

The whole point of recording EVPs is not that we expect to hear a spirit answer us right then and there, but hopefully something will be able to be detected on the recording later. I hoped that whomever I was communicating with didn’t turn out to be some asshole.

Suddenly, something echoed down the hall.

George and Kim thought it sounded like a cough. I was certain it was a laugh. No one else was assigned the upstairs classrooms with us, but George made a note to ask the others later if any of them had coughed. (Or laughed, goddammit! It was fucking laughter!) We heard it a second time before crossing the hallway to the computer room to fire off another round of questions.

“Does anyone hear that?” George asked. I was already standing stalk-still, which had become my signature ghost-hunting stance, but George asking that made me clench and tense up even more, all of my muscles ensconced in imaginary braces.

Kim and I shook our heads. All I heard was my heavy breathing and the rustling of fabric as I shoved my hands deeper inside the pockets of Henry’s Faygo jacket, searching for warmth.

“Here,” George said, removing his headphones. “Put these on.” They were attached to some sort of parabolic amplifier, which George held in his hand.

Headphones clamped against my frozen ears, I strained to hear something, anything, but all I could pick out was the sound of dirt and broken glass crunching under my feet as I shifted my weight to curb the pee sensations that this creepy moment was stirring up inside me.

I frowned, was shaking my head and lifting my hand to remove the headphones, when I heard it.

“Wait,” I whispered, pressing the headphones harder against my ears. It was coming from the right side, it seemed. A high-pitched, but extremely faint sound, like a child singing a word, a falsetto “ahhhh.” I heard it two more times before removing the headset and passing it over to Kim.

“You heard it too?” George whispered excitedly. “The piano?”

“I thought it was a voice,” I started, explaining to him what it sounded like to me. But then I considered this piano theory, and realized that it could have definitely been the sound of a lone key plunking in very slow, random succession. The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a piano. I remembered what had happened to George’s girlfriend, when she had heard the piano playing so loud in her head that she had to leave the school.

“There’s no piano in this building,” George pointed out, and I was really ready to leave that room.

Kim didn’t hear it and was pretty pissed about that, but I reminded her that she smelled the perfume and I didn’t. My hearing is way more sensitive than my sense of smell. I’m usually the last one to notice if someone in the room farted. But my hearing is so tweaked that it drives Henry nuts. I can detect the most faintest of bass lines coming from my neighbor’s side of the house and I will go on a rampage because other people’s bass goes right through me. Hate it! Can’t stand it! Love it at a concert, though. And in songs, I will pick out the most random sounds that most people might not even notice, and force Henry to listen over and over to my “favorite” part. Half the time, he has no idea what he’s listening for in the split-second sample I’ve given him. Then there are times when we’re on the couch watching TV, and I’ll point to the ceiling and say, “Ooh, my jam’s on!” and Henry’s like, “How the fuck can you hear the bedroom radio?”

Even so, it took me needing headphones and a parabolic amplifier to hear that piano note.

I remembered this one afternoon last year when I was over Alisha’s with our friend Evonne, attempting to use the Psychic Circle (similar to the Ouija board, but used for good, positive spiritual contact). Alisha and Evonne had many experiences with the Psychic Circle, but with me there that day, nothing was happening. “Are you nervous, Erin?” Evonne asked. I showed her that my hand was shaking a little bit, and she said that it was possible my anxiety was affecting the Circle, and that we would have to try it another time.

I wondered if my fear and nervousness was closing me off to bigger experiences in the school. I tried to calm down, which was futile. You try getting your knees to stop knocking when you’re standing in a dark classroom, trying to get a ghost to tell you their favorite color.

There were several classrooms on the second room that George pointedly skipped. He seemed to know which ones held hot spots and didn’t waste any time on the rest. “This is the Shadowman Room,” George said, leading us into the classroom at the far end of the hall, above Base. This was the part of the hall where we heard the laughter. (Not coughing!)

I asked why it was called the Shadowman Room, and immediately regretted not waiting until later, when we weren’t standing in the middle of it.

“Because we keep seeing a large shadow drifting in and out of this room,” George answered nonchalantly, like it was no big thing. (My fucking phone just rang and I had a full-body convulsion; now my cat Don is laughing at me.)

“I feel like it’s way colder in this room. I’m the coldest I’ve been all night,” I shared with George and Kim. The ghosts born from my breath made up for the ghosts that weren’t showing up in my photos.

We heard something in this room. All of us heard it, a sound like movement from the back corner. I took two giant steps to my right, positioning myself for a quick escape. Then, a sound like rustling came from the front of the room, by the door. George’s camera had inexplicably died while we were up there, so he asked me to snap a picture in that general area. I did, but along with all the other photos I took that night, nothing spectacular showed up on it. Just some trash bags and “BLAKE.” And part of George’s parabolic amplifier. (I just like typing that as much as possible because it makes me feel like I’m smart.)

I couldn’t wait to peace out of this room. Standing in there made me feel awful, real uneasy and tense, like anticipating your drunk dad to come home raging from the bar.

The last room we covered with George was the classroom directly across the hall. I wasn’t too happy about this, because where did the Shadowman go when he left his room? PROBABLY STRAIGHT TO THIS ROOM.

“My friend Erin is here with me, and she is really wanting to experience something. Can you show yourself to her?” George called out to the empty room as I sucked in my breath. Don’t go bringing me into this, buddy.

We heard that noise again, the one I swear was mischievous laughter but George and Kim insist was coughing? That noise. Only this time, Kim thought it sounded like a growl. Fucking outstanding!

George asked me if I wanted to say anything. After Kim basically insinuated that the Hounds of Hell had joined us? No, not really.

“I’m afraid of making them mad,” I admitted, biting a hole through my lip.

Hesitating a little, George said, “You won’t make them mad.” OH OK BUT I’VE SEEN AMITYVILLE HORROR! Besides, I’m not so naive that I believe all ghosts are floating around, turning somersaults in the air and falling in love with Christina Ricci.

So I flat out asked, “Are you angry that we’re here?” and was immediately grateful when the windows didn’t blow out and the floor didn’t rumble.

However, it was a little disconcerting when George spoke into the recorder, “Check the tape for face looking in the door at [insert time].”

“You…you saw a face looking in the door?” I asked. Kim didn’t seem fazed by this, but by then, I was standing in half Eagle pose, trying to plug the impending pee that wanted to trickle down my legs.

“Yeah, right through that window,” George answered matter-of-factly, pointing at the door to the classroom.

FUCKING AWESOME.

Satisfied with the session, George deemed it was time to head back to Base. I couldn’t run down those steps fast enough. Those last two rooms left my nerves sizzling and hissing like live wires.

Warming up under the kerosene lamp after Round Two.

Back in Base, Chris, Christine and Joel told us of their activity-laden time in the boiler room. Chris felt something tug at his jacket; Christine felt something press up against her back, as though she were leaning against a wall; and all three of them saw something float past them and drift off up the steps. It was at that point I decided I had developed a life-threatening allergy to the boiler room and ain’t no way, no how, anyone was going to drag my ass down there.

“I heard the piano!” I offered excitedly, but no one really seemed all that impressed.

George walked over and stuck his camera in my face. “Look,” he said, pointing to the symbol on the screen depicting a fully-charged battery. “I knew that battery was fresh, but it just completely died up there in that room.”

Warmth of the kerosene lamp be damned, I felt a chill percolate all the way down to my toes.

[Ed.Note: I honestly cried at one point while writing this. I need to stop doing this when I’m home alone!]

I’m sure I’m going to regret posting this because I sound so fucking sniveling and lame in it, but here is a short video I captured using my camera in the teachers’ lounge.  There is no supernatural activity that I can detect, but there is Jimmy Wenger attempting to order a pizza, Kim trying to decipher and analyze poorly-spelled messages on a chalkboard, and me practically whimpering in the background, trying not to crap my pants even though absolutely fuck-all happened in that room. I didn’t even get any of the actual EVP session on this. I think Kim was recording that part. (I hope so, anyway! God, I’m not very good at this at all.)

It took me over a week just to work up the nerve to watch this and the other two videos, because I was so scared. I woke Henry up the other night and forced him to watch this with me.

Afterward, he sneered, “This is what you were afraid to watch? It was like the Three Stooges Look For a Ghost.” Then, with that signature facial hand-drag of his, he mumbled, “I can’t believe I got out of bed for this.”

HPIM0254, originally uploaded by appledale.

It was Christmas 2007 and Henry, as usual, had presented me with a big box of gift-giving FAIL. All I wanted that year was a Chiodos hoodie which was apparently way too hard for Henry to procure.

So I snagged one of his lame Everfresh Juice work hoodies and made my own fucking Chiodos hoodie. You can tell I was really pleased with it, too.

Oh memories.

The roller rink we’ve been going to every Sunday isn’t really the greatest. It’s small, kind of out of the way, severely lacking in hot pants and has a cramped snack room with unfriendly attendants (according to Henry, anyway).

But it does have Roller DJ. And he is pretty fucking awesome. I’m not sure why I feel this way, and I know Henry has no idea why I feel this way. (“You’re so weird,” he mumbles, every time I walk away in a giggle fit from a Roller DJ run-in.) Last week, we were still sitting in the car when I saw him rolling his rotund self out of the driver side of some down-trodden green Blazer-type vehicle. His hair looked like the follicular version of a mushroom cloud and his lower half was stepped into baggy, worn flannel pj bottoms.

“Wow,” Henry and I murmured in tandem. Except mine had an “I love that guy” tacked on to the end.

The back of his dusty car boasts a magnetic advertisement for some herbal miracle weight loss drink. Nothing like a good, hearty swig of irony. Kim told me that he gave her a bottle of it last week, but after Googling it, she’s too scared to try it. I suggested she just give it to me. I’m not scared of ingesting illegal and harmful potions in the name of weight loss. If not for Henry, I’d have about 12 tapeworms in me right now.

This past Sunday, Roller DJ’s hair was noticeably less swollen. Kim immediately accused him of being the victim of a hair cut, which made him defensive.

He insisted, “I did not! It’s just wet.” And to me, he said, “Touch my hair.”

And I did. Having too much pity on my fingertips to force them all the way to Roller DJ’s scalp, I stopped halfway, quickly rubbing  between the pads of my thumb and pointer  a curl-i-que slick and moist with what I hoped was water and not natural scalp juices and molten filth.

“Yeah,” I said around a gulp. “It’s wet.”

As soon as he walked away, I said in a hysteric voice to no one and everyone at once, “I can’t believe I just did that!”

Henry and Kim looked horror-stricken, and expressed in unison that they too could not believe I touched his hair. I mean, it’s not the velvety locks of Justin Bieber, for shit-packing Christ’s sake. It’s goddamn Roller DJ. Who knows what he rubs in those black pube-like tufts.

When I was telling my co-workers about it yesterday (yes, it was that big of a deal to me), Barb asked, “And if he asked you to touch his penis, would you have touched that too?”

I can’t answer that without knowing more of the situation.

***

Elsewhere at the rink, Henry’s mom and sister Kelly joined us. Kelly brought her youngest, Zac, and her second-oldest daughter, Ashley. Like Chooch, Zac is not yet able to skate on his own, so Ashley chaperoned him as he edged along the wall.

Meanwhile, my lazy/spoiled son was being  pulled around the rink in a leisurely manner by his new professional handler, Chris.

The scene would have been much  more complete had Chris been holding a parasol above Chooch’s head. I caught Chooch laughing and pointing as he rolled past Zac, who was lying on the floor in a small heap, post-wipeout.

“At least he’s TRYING!” I shouted to Chooch. Jesus Christ, that kid.

It’s surpising he didn’t stretch out on a lawnchair first, daiquiri in hand, and have Chris roll him under.

Last week, I skated into some man, stopping only after I splayed my hands against his Steelers-jersied chest. He was there again this week, in the same Mendenhall shirt (hate that I know who that is) and I immediately taunted Henry with little songs about how my boyfriend was back. During Backward Skate, which Kim made me stay on the rink for but I ducked off after two revolutions when she wasn’t looking, my boyfriend looked over his shoulder just in time to avoid crashing into me.

“I’m not very good at this!” I laughed.

“Either am I!” he shouted over whatever Longest Song in the History of Music that was playing over this week’s Backward Skate. (I should start jotting these down.) “Just sort of let yourself cruise!”

I laughed, even though it wasn’t funny at all, and couldn’t wait to rub it in Henry’s face. Apparently, it worked, because that combined with the fact that I absentmindedly missed Ladies’ Choice had him feeling really neglected. He told me later that night that he was sitting on the bench with his mom and sister, waiting for me to come and claim him, but I just kept skating past without looking at him. Which is confusing considering last week I had to knock people out of my way to chase him around the rink and claim him.

I do sort of have a crush on Rollerskating Henry.

Don’t tell anyone.

By the time we left, Roller DJ’s hair was the slightest bit poufier. Oh my god, why did I touch his hair?

“That wasn’t so bad,” I thought, giving myself a psychic pat on the back, after we all returned to Base from the walk-through. A little creepy in the boiler room when Chris heard that erotic sigh in his ear, but overall, nothing I couldn’t handle. This ghost-hunting thing ain’t shit, and I flexed my muscles a little.

While we all stood around, warming up under the kerosene lamp, fidgeting with our cameras and parching palates on plates of steaming sauerkraut, the last two members of the night’s expedition arrived: Joel and his wife Chris, who always goes by Chris and always went by Chris as a child until some kid moved next door to her in grade school and had the nerve to be named Christopher, at which point the nickname ‘Chris’ shifted from her to him and she has clearly been harboring a metric ton of bitterness and resentment ever since and at the risk of her finding this blog and snarling at the sight of all the “Christine”s, I am going to hereby be referring to her solely as just that to differentiate between her and the male Chris.

Around this time, George had to make a run to a nearby gas station to get more gasoline for the generator. I took that opportunity to poke around outside the school with Nick and Tiny, later joined by Joel, who found deer tracks that stopped at a drain in the ground. We all stared down at the drain, wondering what happened to the deer, as there were no retreating tracks. It was like the deer just vanished. Later, Chris joined us and was quick to point out that they were rabbit tracks, and that the rabbit probably did quite literally fall down the hole. No one really said anything after that, but I think that silence was really the rest of us NON-SKEPTICS making a secret pact to always believe in vanishing deer.

I caught Tiny shining some sort of laser pointer up at the windows and after assuming my role as Hyper-Inquisitive Newbie, he explained that it was giving him a read of the surface temperature, and that sometimes there would be an inexplicable drop which could mean there was a paranormal presence of some sort skulking around.

“Like this window, here,” Tiny illustrated, marking a second-floor classroom window with a bright infrared blemish. “In one spot, it’s in the 30s, but when I move it down here slightly—” He dragged the dot a few centimeters down. “–it drops to 16.”

I involuntarily shivered. It was a cold January night and I was standing up to my galoshed shins in snow, but this shiver was not born from any natural elements.

***

Twenty minutes later, George had fed the generator and we were all gathered back in Base. I was nervously shoving barbeque chips in my mouth by the handful, unable to eat the meat-laden hot foods set out on the table. Several times I considered lifting the lid on the crock pot and letting the steam bite through the icicles my fingers had become. Everyone was socializing, warming up, checking pictures on the view finders of their cameras when suddenly, all the lights went out.

I froze, feeling a rising scream strangulating up through my voice box.

The lights came back.

“Sorry guys!” George called from the hallway. “That was my fault!”

Everyone laughed. I did too, but it was robotic and the corners of my mouth stayed in a neutral line. In the notepad draped from my neck, I scrawled: “9:ish, generator turned off (George’s fault) but I thought it was ghosts & went numb.”

I ate one of Jimmy Wenger’s donuts after that. I rarely eat donuts, that’s how you know I was stressed.

***

George wrangled everyone’s attention from their personal conversations so that we could finally get the EVP sessions started. I only knew a little about EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) so I was glad when George (and Chris, who jumped in to give the group a little more structure and leadership) took a few minutes to go over the procedure, and were given examples of what to ask the spirits during the EVP recordings.

“Remember, ghosts are people, too,” Chris joked. I went to laugh, but my teeth were chattering too hard.

George wanted us in groups of three. I wondered if anyone heard me gulp. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t considered we wouldn’t be all together as a team for the whole night.

Jimmy quickly claimed me and Kim, after I made the adamant statement declaring that I wasn’t going anywhere without her, and it was determined we would be focusing our EVP experiment in the Special Education annex. Christine, Joel and Tiny took the gym; Nick, Brittany and Lynette chose the upstairs classrooms; while Chris and George stayed back to monitor the DVRs.

“I came here with two pretty girls and end up sitting in Base Camp with George,” Chris whined, and while I couldn’t see his face at that moment, I was sure Jimmy Wenger was gloating. He’s very girl crazy! But I felt infinitely safe and assured that he was in our group. Not much seemed to faze him and I hoped that somewhere under his coat was safely tucked a Proton Pack. I had Henry’s flashlight in my hand, but then I thought better of it, desiring to free up some hand-space in case I needed to push over a book shelf onto the Devil. So I set Henry’s beloved flashlight on the desk by the door, opting to rely on my headlamp and the light Jimmy and Kim were bringing with them.

George handed me a camcorder, but as soon as I got out in the hallway, the battery died. I went back inside to alert him of this small snafu; he  snapped a newly charged battery onto it, saying, “You should be good now, this has a full-charge.”  But as soon as we descended the steps to the first floor, the battery life drained and the camcorder promptly shut off.

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GHOSTS, I heard my quaking voice of reason yell at myself. I knew that other people were experiencing spontaneously draining batteries during the course of the night, but that was not something I wanted to entertain right then, as we walked up the small flight of steps to our designated spot in the school. It’s pretty amazing how much safer one feels in a group of nine as opposed to a group of three. I kept trying to stay sandwiched in between Kim and Jimmy, but they were bravely swinging open doors and exploring through the darkness, like it was nothing more than an estate sale.

On the chalkboard behind Jimmy, it says “Leave the kids ALONE!” I like to believe that some teenager hoodlum (i.e. one of Blake’s friends) wrote that to be a dick. And you know, not whoever is haunting the school.

Fucking creepy tea party in the teachers’ lounge.

No matter what camera I used, my pictures just weren’t focusing. (True Story: as I just typed that, a truck went by my house and blew its air horn, causing me to scream GHOST! and splash myself with scalding coffee. I’m a little jumpy. And home alone.) I kept telling myself that it was because it was so cold. Maybe the lenses were rebelling against the temperatures. Henry accused me of having the camera on manual focus, but I can promise you I’m not that dumb, and I even checked to make sure it didn’t get bumped from automatic focus. I eventually just gave up taking pictures, figuring there would be enough from everyone else.

With George’s recorder activated, we began our first EVP session in the lounge, asking standard first date questions, like “Why are you here? Who are you? What happened to you?” It was kind of awkward, speaking these questions into what one could only assume was empty air. It was this moment of dire seriousness for me, and suddenly Jimmy Wenger was on his cell phone, attempting to place an order with someone from the Pizza Company, after getting the number from a magnet he found slapped to the chalkboard.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have an address to supply, so no pizza for us. I didn’t even know I wanted pizza until that happened, and then it was all I could think of, a momentary distraction from the complete and utter unease I felt in that room. The whole EVP thing has me torn. There’s that large part of me that has always wanted some sort of contact with the other side. But then there’s the other part of me that remembers movies like The Gate and what a tremendous suckfest it would be to open the door to your soul to some motherfucker who wants to take up residence inside your carapace, fucking you gratuitously from the inside.

I was sort of in a hurry to get out of the Special Ed area.

While Jimmy roamed around the hallway, conducting his own EVPs,  Kim and I entered Room 112. The first thing we noticed was a copy of a story three girls had written about Snow White, casually strewn across one of the desks. Kim immediately flipped back the cover page and began skimming it.

That’s when I had my first experience that night.

It came from my left, back where a row of recessed closets lined the wall, fluorescent stickers stuck above each individual coat hook, each bearing the name of a student.

Muffled laughter. High-pitched, definitely a giggle from a child. I forced my ear drums to play it back on a loop. I was certain it’s what I thought it was.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered to Kim.

“No, what?” she answered at a regular volume.

“I swear I heard something from back there. Like a whispered laugh.”

We went back there to check it out, like we’d see the laughter in some tangible Ectoplasm’d form, chilling out next to a coat rack. What actually happened was that Kim marched back there with self-assured purpose and bravery, while I shuffled stupidly and meekly behind her.

Not finding any substantial evidence back there (but again, not really knowing what I was looking for), Kim and I went back to the desk to further examine the Snow White story. It was almost starting to edge out Kim’s obsession with asbestos. (Seriously, she didn’t give a shit about the fact that we were poking our noses around a supposedly haunted school; her main issue was asbestos, inhaling asbestos, falling into a churning vat of asbestos, accidentally clumping asbestos on her hot dog instead of sauerkraut, dying of asbestos. No matter how many times Chris told her that even if there was any asbestos in that school, we weren’t going to be there long enough to have anything happen to us. Even still, the theme of the night was Asbestos, which is a really fun word to say quickly, many times in a row.)

Photo courtesy of Jimmy Wenger.

I pretended to really give a shit about the story. I even said things like, “I really give a shit about this story.” But inside my head, all I could do was freak out about that goddamn laughter. Now, it wasn’t menacing, it wasn’t even mocking. It was just…it was quiet laughter from a kid. I tried to pretend I was in a park, the zoo, a city landfill–anywhere it would be natural to hear the laughter of a child. Not an abandoned school at 11:59PM on a Saturday night.

Finally able to extract Kim from Room 112 and the Snow White story it held, we noticed a door that we missed during the walk-through. On the other side of it was a small space located underneath the steps leading from the second floor to the gym. Kim walked in with authority but then quickly asked Jimmy if he thought there might be asbestos in there. With trepidation, I followed Kim inside, but kept thinking of The People Under the Stairs and also the “little girl” at the top of the steps that George had us say hello to during the walk through. Jimmy attempted to enter the small space after me, but I shouted “No!” And have no one guarding the other side of the door? Not going to happen on this girl’s watch. That’s all I needed, was to have the “little girl” wait for us to all step inside that fucking cob-webbed space only to slam the door and lock it.

So I squeezed past Jimmy and resumed my stance in the hallway, while he went inside to have a look around. I was standing at the base of a short flight of steps which led up the landing at the bottom of the steps from the second floor. At the top of the landing was the gym door, which had two mysterious lights shining through the glass at me. Just I was beginning to panic, the doors opened and Tiny and Joel walked out, laughing and with headlamps blazing.

“God, you guys scared me!” I hissed. Kim, Jimmy and myself walked up the steps and joined them in the gym, where Christine was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at a tennis ball dangling from a string at the edge of a long table.

“Trying to see if they’ll play with me,” she said with a shrug. “We got it moving a little bit awhile ago.”

I took a nervous perch on the edge of the stage. This was something I hadn’t considered we’d be doing that night – actively seeking to interact with the spirits.

“Come on, I know you wanna play duck duck goose with me,” Christine called out, in a playfully taunting tone. I wondered if she was talking to Joel, if this was some sort of childish foreplay they like to indulge in from time to time. Then I realized she was speaking to the ghosts and I felt even more uncomfortable.

“Would it be bad to take something we found in another room?” Kim asked Christine. “I mean, as long as we put it back later.”

I knew where this was going.

“What do you mean?” Christine asked. “What do you want to take?”

“We found a story on one of the desks.”

“Oh! And you want to read it to the spirits? Yeah, that would be fine. Just remember to put it back.”

I knew the only person Kim was going to be reading that story to was herself, but I  went back with her to grab it anyway. I didn’t feel too sure about it, though.

***

Back in Base, I told Tiny I had heard laughter in one of the rooms.

He didn’t even flinch, nor did he seem very impressed.

“Yeah, you’ll hear things! You’ll definitely hear things. I been here since 3:00 this afternoon and been hearing things all day,” he told me, like it was no big deal at all.

Meanwhile, as Kim read her story, Lynnette had pulled up the school’s address so Jimmy Wenger could finally order his pizza, but The Pizza Company was already closed.

This footage wasn’t from the night I was there, but my people saw (a) door(s) opening as well, while watching the monitor from the safe room. I didn’t see it myself that night, but just the idea that someone there with me saw it was enough to sufficiently creep me the fuck out.

The doors there were pretty solid and none of them seemed loose on their hinges.

We’re meeting up next Saturday to go over the evidence culled from the investigation. One of the girls commented on the Meetup site and said that she and her friend picked up some EVPs from one of the recordings they had in a classroom that night. I’m probably going to pee my pants.

I still have so much to tell you guys about that night! Finally went through my unfocused, blurry photos.

Didn’t really see anything but I also have absolutely no idea what I’m looking for. My new ghost hunting friend Jimmy Wenger said I can share some of his photos on here, though.

I’m way more into this than I thought I would be! I know I have been causing Henry’s eyes to roll a lot this past week like dice in an alley, because it’s all I’ve been able to talk about. I think mostly it just feels nice to be a part of something.

(Here is where the studio audience would all coo a canned “Awwww” in tandem.)

And now I’m going roller skating. I’m having my birthday party there this summer. Ya’ll better be there.

I had a dream the other night that Henry had a tattoo on his right hand.

Outside of my slumber, I can’t seem to remember the details of the ink, but I know it started at his wrist and spilled out onto the top of his hand, a quilt of images with the focal point being a Lugosi-esque Dracula. Suddenly, Henry seemed very hot in my subconscious.

Then I woke up as reality coated my memory like slow-pouring honey from a bear-shaped bottle and remembered that I was dating the same old lame bastard with boring SERVICE tattoos on his biceps. (He is quick to point out that only one is from when he was in the SERVICE; the other two are still lame, though. Mostly because neither are the letters E R I N.)

So I’ve been hounding him about it ever since. I feel that since he wouldn’t concede to the Great Labret-Piercing Demands of 2002, he could at the very least slap his hand under the needle for me.

“It would make you seem so much more hard core!

” I reasoned. Then I realized that would imply he is already hard core, so I quickly said it again, erasing the “much more.”

I also pointed out, “And you would look less dad-like at Warped Tour.”

He just laughs, the kind without mirth.

“You could at the very least get my initial on your RING FINGER,” I suggested, not very sweetly. (We’re in the throes of a new campaign around these parts of My House, Pioneer Avenue;  it’s called Project Propose or Peace Out 2011. Step One was posting his cell phone number on Facebook and having people text him. You can imagine how effective that was.)

“I’ll think about it,” he mumbled. That means YES!

***

Today, we were in the car when a biker growled by on a motorcycle.

Henry, feeling emasculated in his Ford Focus, sneered, “Who rides a motorcycle when it’s like, one degree outside?”

I considered this for half a second before answering with complete certainty, “Someone with a hand tattoo.”

He didn’t laugh. Not even the kind devoid of mirth.

I sent this Sea Monkey video to Barb yesterday at work after she was pouting over not being able to see the newly-birthed sea babes on my desk, and she apparently was so taken by the music that she was watching it again today and showing it to other people.

My favorite is that third three-eyed bastard who comes poking in halfway though the video.

I just love him.

I never thought these things would be such a hit around here, but curiosities have definitely been piqued and several people have been chiming it with name ideas.

One of the processors admitted that he never knew they were real things, but thought they were mythological dragons.

Which makes me wish they actually were mythological dragons. Except less mythological, more logical.

After Kim made sure she had on an appropriate amount of pink clothing, we left her place in separate cars; I wanted to make sure I wasn’t depending on anyone but myself for a way home in case something horrible enough happened to make me run out of the school with a shock of white hair and yellow demon eyes.  It was 7pm when we crept up to the snow-packed road snaking down to the school. I had a rare moment of common sense and decided to park at the top, in front of someone’s house, because I was pretty sure our puny Ford Focus wouldn’t make it back up that road. And I certainly didn’t want to have to spend any more time than necessary on school property.

I trudged down the school road alone, lugging a purse weighed down with two cameras, lenses and four flashlights. I found Kim sitting in the parked car in front of a locked door, which I’d later learn was the location of the stabbing. Had I known that then, I wouldn’t have been pissing around out there so long, planted in the snow and talking to Kim while waiting for Chris to return. (I don’t know where Chris went, but if that had been me and Henry, I can’t say for certain that you’d find him anywhere on the premises of that school without me pasted on his back like static cling. Kim is far braver than I.)

Chris reappeared to collect us, and I was a little surprised that I wasn’t squeezing out pee drops as I followed him up the steps to the main door, which had been unlocked for the night by the owner of the abandoned school. (Everything was done legally–no breaking and entering, release forms were signed, it was legit. And maybe that’s why I wasn’t quite as freaked out as I imagined I would be, walking up those steps and through that door, into a run-down brick abyss where dead Susie Swanson could be waiting in the girls’ room to fist my soul like a rotted apple.

The co-founder of the group, George, had brought a generator with him, so the makeshift command center (I just kept calling it Base, like we were playing tag, a very scary round of tag with spirits) which was located right across the main entrance, was well lit with a giant kerosene heater as its focal point. There was a computer monitor set up, displaying a quadrant of night-visioned  images from around the school. A surplus of yellow flashlights stood at attention next to that.

As I put down my purse and took a nervous gulp of my contraband Riunite, I saw that Chris was eating some sort of Hostess delicacy, and I too wanted a Hostess delicacy, but every time I went to ask him where they were, I got sidetracked. (Are TastyCakes the ones with the white Charlie Brown zig-zag decorating the top? If so, that’s what Chris had that I coveted.) There was so much to take in: George running around in a last-minute effort to get everything in order; foods inappropriate for a vegetarian cooking in crock pots on a table along the far wall; the static-y blips and squeals of the Steelers game being broadcast from a small radio on a windowsill (which, in spite of my all-consuming Steelers-hate, was actually doing a large part to numb my nerves).

Being the newbie, I generally tend to fade myself into the background. But I felt that, in this case, it might be a good idea to introduce myself, stick myself in the thick of things, so that perhaps someone might notice later on if I went suddenly absent. And that’s when I introduced myself to Nick; Tiny (and you are already wagering that he’s not Tiny); and Brittany and Lynnette, two young girls from Somerset.

George passed out small notebooks, with a long loop of blue yarn attached to the spirals for us to wear around our necks.

“And everyone please take a pencil,” he added, motioning to a package of plastic Bic mechanicals. “If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that pencils always work.” I quickly swiped a purple one (probably too zealously), which I ironically had a hard time getting to work at first.

We stood around in Base for awhile, chatting and waiting for some more people to arrive. Jimmy Wenger, whom I had heard about from Kim and Chris and was excited to meet, arrived and immediately snapped eighteen photos of me, doing nothing more exciting than shivering and clutching my phone, mid-tweet. I mean, obviously I’m a ghost-hunting pinup model, but that was still a little excessive, I thought. Jimmy brought into the room with him a warming presence, like a big figurative bear hug, and I at once felt a little safer with him there.

Tiny and Chris, moments before the walk-thru.

Chris fitted me with some dorky head-lamp equipment and we all left the room together as a group, ascending the staircase to the second floor. George did some talking about the school while we were left to explore the classrooms at our leisure. Broughton Elementary isn’t very large; there were only around eight classrooms on the second floor (I probably should have counted; a real ghost-hunting journalist would have). The first room we explored–which I would later learn George and Tiny were calling the Shadowman Room, due to the fact they saw a large SHADOW dart out of it while they were observing the monitor in Base–had the name Blake grafitti’d large and in red on the wall. For a second, I considered the possibility that it was Henry’s son.

George pointed out that when he arrived earlier in the day, the minute hand was exactly on the 3. It had since slipped down a little. I tried to shake off the chill that was using my spine as monkey bars.

“Just please, after you leave a room, close the door behind you,” George said. I thought maybe he was trying to be courteous to the owner of the school. Then he added, “We’ve been noticing open doors on camera that we were sure we shut, so I want to make sure they’re all shut right now so we can be positive about it.”

STFU! Oh my god, I was so scared.

I was really upset that “Pauls” didn’t have an apostrophe, and started to not feel so sorry for this school that had perished,  but then I realized that must have been the point of the lesson. Good thing, because I would have fixated on it all night and probably would have returned with a Sharpie.

I kept looking up to find that I was the straggler of the group, which would set me off into a sort of Wile E. Coyote running-in-place maneuver before taking off to wedge myself back in the middle. I was not about to get taken.

George led us through another set of doors at the end of the hallway and, before descending the stairs, he said, “Everyone say hello to the little girl,” and in unison, everyone did. Everyone but me, whose voice box had become tragically impaired from the fist of FEAR choking it.  I hissed in Kim’s ear, “WHAT little girl?” and was suddenly very aware of my surroundings as I did a frantic little jig down the steps and into the gym.

The gym wasn’t too bad. It was a big space, clothed with litter in some places, metallic marijuana leaves painted over the school’s insignia on one wall, big windows near the ceiling. It just looked like a gym, nothing else, nothing creepy or haunted.  For the first time, my skin wasn’t blistered with goose bumps.

Saw this on a shelf in a small room attached to the locker room, and wondered if it ever played a Lolliwinks record.

Coming back up from the locker room, we had to pass through the gym again to get to the stairs that would take us to the 1st floor classrooms. I caught Tiny shining his flashlight up at one of the windows and I asked him what was going on.”Just saw something,” he mused, nonchalantly. I didn’t like how lethal the tree branches looked on the other side, back-dropped by a horrid salmon-hued winter sky. I didn’t stick around to see if I saw what he saw.

The bottom level of the school had some more classrooms and a long hall which sat a lone, sad wooden child-sized chair next to a water fountain. That was an image that I had a hard time shaking. I was telling either Tiny or Nick about it later, when we were poking around outside, and they agreed that there is something inherently creepy about casually-strewn childrens objects in abandoned places. I was careful about not moving anything for fear of pissing off the ghost of a particularly persnickety red-head kid of the REDRUM-persuasion. (I really think red-headed spirits would be the meanest.)

I found that my iPhone was helping me take better photos than my camera, which I could barely get to focus. The lens kept fogging and I’m sure it was because it was just so cold in there BUT IS THAT REALLY WHY? I had my crappy red point-and-shoot as backup and that one got me some marginally decent pictures as far as I could tell at a glance. I haven’t had a chance (nor the balls) to really sit down and look through them yet. Maybe Henry will sit with me. I mean, not that I need him to hold my hand or anything. Seriously, you guys!

Abacus in the janitor’s room, located in the special education annex

The one thing I thought was odd and noticed on the top floor was that there were certain rooms that were almost good as new. The tile on the floor was intact and clean. None of the paint in there clung to the walls in brittle curly-q’s. Some of the bathrooms were cleaner than my own, while the others were nasty, broken, caked with filth and age.

Kim asked George about this and he told us it’s one of those inexplicable things that even Don, the school’s owner, can’t explain. “Don doesn’t have anyone coming here to clean,” George told us. Yet, some of those rooms looked like they were still holding daily classes while the rest were riddled with vandalism and the tolls of neglect. The school has only been closed for eleven years, but I guess I just expected that decay and decomposition was more of an equal opportunity process.

What’s a walk-through without a tour of the boiler room, which I am here to tell you is just as terrifying as you might imagine, if say you are right now imagining tons of large, rusted furnaces and valves on which to accidentally slip and concuss yourself  before landing on a sheath of broken glass and ice and having a cavalry of demon-shadows swarm your lifeless body, while the more sadistic of the floating dead enter your every orifice and ghost-fuck you from the inside.

Yes, the boiler room was very scary.

Chris broke away from the pack and entered the small coal-chute room alone. “I heard a heavy sigh as soon as I walked in there,” he reported back. Now, Chris was probably the biggest skeptic there so I latched on to this immediately and, hoping to finally have my own experience, walked into the tiny nook of a room with Kim.

And proceeded to hear nothing.

“I didn’t hear it!” I whined later to Chris. What a fucking one-trick pony. (The sigher, not Chris.)

With the walk-through complete, we retreated to Base to wait for the last two people who had yet to arrive, and to discuss what parts we wanted to focus on for the EVP-segment of the night.

Tiny noting the time of an opening door, no biggie.

I almost kind of wished the Steeler game was still on, broadcasting a noisy little piece of the outside world into our cold, tense Base Camp.

[Sorry I’m splitting this up into sections! The amount of stuff I want to write about is overwhelming and staggering. I’m hoping to squeeze the rest into one last part, but that’s the stuff that’s the most troubling for me to put into words.]

I bought a Sea Monkeys in the City kit at Toys R Us on Sunday. I already have a furiously-fornicating farm of them on my fireplace mantle at home, and they bring me great joy (when I remember they’re there).

So when I saw this cute little neon cityscape, I immediately pictured it on my desk at work and couldn’t resist. I figured a jar of disgusting floaters would be a nice place to rest my spreadsheet-wary eyes. Today when I got to work, I poured in the eggs and everyone around me kept asking, “DID THEY HATCH YET DID THEY HATCH YET?” and I was like, “God, take your Sea Monkey-novice selves to Google and learn yourself about the birth process.

”  

(No, they have not hatched yet.)  

Just a few minutes ago, one of the surlier analysts expressed excitement and delight over the prospect of having sea monkeys in the office. I’ve never seen her happy about anything before!

To quote her: “Oh, this exciting! I can’t wait!” (And I didn’t denote a hint of sarcasm.)  

These sea monkeys aren’t even done hatching and already they’re so loved. It’s beautiful.  

I’ve never seen a ghost before. Never experienced any inexplicable phenomena showing up in the background of my pictures. Nothing I could ever see with my eyes. But there were times when I was a teenager walking in the woods behind my house, in broad daylight on humid summer afternoons, where a skin-prickling chilliness and uneasy being-watched sensation would creep over me and stop me in my tracks. I was always so certain that those woods were haunted. I would never go in those woods alone, without my German Shepherd Rama at the very least. My mom and aunt Sharon are always talking about ghostly shit happening at my grandma’s house, which is also flanked by the same woods on one side, but you all know those two are fucking lunatics so I try not to believe a word they tell me.

And my cemeteries. The ones I spend so much time in, alone? There have been occasions where I’ve stepped out of my car only to stand stock-still, senses heightened, hairs erect like midget wangs on my arms. It could be the most blistering of August afternoons and I will give into one violent shiver before swinging back into my car, post haste, burning asphalt on the way out. Because something just didn’t feel right. Something felt off. The atmosphere felt too heavy, too quiet, too absolutely motherfucking creepy.

But I’ve never actually had a real experience with the other side. And I do believe there is an other side. I also believe a lot of that shit is a hoax, a lot of those mediums are fucking crooks, and orbs in photographs are mostly unfocused dust particles. I believe I have a better chance of being eviscerated by America’s next sexy serial killer before ever running into the spirit of some winsome girl in your grandfather’s attic.

My last game night turned into an after hour’s ghost story-telling session and I found myself covered in goose-flesh. When Kim and Chris told me that night that they had joined a local ghost hunting group, I was intrigued, curiosity slightly piqued. And then when they talked about the upcoming ghost hunt that was scheduled for last Saturday, I decided it was time to be a big girl and do this thing.

The day before the hunt, some of my co-workers bequeathed to me mini flashlights, just in case Henry decided to be stingy with his own lighted lover. But by Saturday afternoon, I think Henry was finally beginning to believe that I was actually going to do this (I made sure I told a bunch of people that I was doing it, insurance that I wouldn’t back out), even though I was a bundle of nerves all day, driving him nuts with my sporadic outbursts of OMG I’M SO SCARED! and WHAT IF I DIE TONIGHT?! So he let me take his flashlight. It was kind of a big moment in our relationship.

“See ya at 11,” Henry laughed as I walked out the door that night, insinuating that I would never make it to 5am.

I arrived at Kim and Chris’s place, swaddled in a thermal shirt, my sacred Versus the Mirror hoodie (Kara, this hoodie is like my lucky blanket), Henry’s lame ass Faygo (100 Years!) coat, knee high socks, regular socks, legwarmers, pink skull and crossbones galoshes (couldn’t find real boots since I waited until THAT DAY to go looking), gloves, a knit hat and ear muffs. I looked like an obtuse, mismatched Sumo wrestler dressed for a snowball fight. Chris filled up two travel cups from a giant jug of Riunite, which Kim and I immediately began chugging to quell our nerves (mine at least; I’m pretty sure Kim wasn’t scared at all). We weren’t supposed to have alcohol at the site, but Chris kept the jug tucked away in his car in case our bravery depended on refills.

Broughton Elementary School is located in South Park and was only about five minute drive from Chris and Kim’s place. I knew it was abandoned, but had no idea it was supposed to be haunted. I grew up in a house a few streets above it, and should have actually gone there along with my childhood best friend Christy, but my mom lied about our address in order for me to start elementary school in the town we were building a house. I don’t remember Christy ever saying anything about books flying off shelves or Bloody Mary appearing in the lavatory mirror. According to George, the Meetup group’s co-founder, “this location has a history of death dating back to the Miners strike in the 1930s and in the Whiskey Rebellion in the 17 and 1800s.” There was supposedly a shooting there, in which several teachers and the principal were slain, and someone was stabbed in the parking lot.

Prior to the actual hunt, several of the experienced members did a trial-run of the school. George’s girlfriend Kim, the ‘K’ of G&K Paranormal Investigation, heard a piano playing. The sound eventually crescendoed to a point where she had to cover her ears. It only got worse when she was in the parking lot and began to feel a lifelike shanking all over her body, and then felt as though her body was aflame as she RELIVED the murder that had taken place there so many years ago. Kim and Chris told me this a week ago over dinner, and I just sat there with saucered eyes, unable to even comprehend ever being taken over by the supernatural in such a horrific way.

This lady, Kim? She has been on over a hundred ghost hunting expeditions, experienced passels of paranormal activity. But she refused to go back to Broughton Elementary School after that. And true to her word, she was not there when we arrived last Saturday night at 7pm.

I don’t know why Henry lets me do the things I do to him, but I do know that the fact that he does keeps me interested in him. Maybe he’s smarter than we think! He makes all my other boyfriends look like complete duds.

(I mean PAST! PAST boyfriends!)

I think the only thing I’ve commanded him to do that he flat out hasn’t is write a guest post. Clearly I haven’t hounded him enough. Maybe I can get him to write about how worried he was for me when I was stumbling blindly around a haunted school Saturday night.

Worried about his FLASHLIGHT, anyway.

This weekend, I’m going to see if he’ll let me castrate him.

And maybe I’ll get him something nice for Valentine’s Day. Like a day off.

The DJ at the RollerDrome is in love with Kim and sort of reminds me of Christina. It’s exciting to me that you can see my quotation mark tattoos in the reflection.

By the time my second straight rollerskating trip rolled around, I had shimmied out of my idyllic sense of humanity like sodden post-rape panties and resumed hating every wheeled dildo that dared skate in my path. It was crowded this past Sunday with Steelers-jersied douchebags and birthday partying prepubescents, most of whom had their feet stuffed in clunky rollerblades, which are super easy to trip over on the rink. I hate that rollerblades are permitted there. QUADS 4 LYFE.

Kim and Chris thankfully made it home safe and sound from the ghost hunt as well, so they met us at the rink. There are two reasons Chris comes skating: to play videogames with Chooch and to help Kim and I lace our skates. (He calls himself KH now – Kim’s Henry. It’s a pretty accurate nickname.)

Once they arrived, I tried not to talk too much about the prior night’s ghostly events in Henry’s presence, lest he feel all left out and do that thing where he shoves his hands in his pockets and slumps his shoulders. He could have joined us at the haunted school if he wasn’t so scared.

The music selection was a little better this week. What the rink lacked in Lady Gaga, they made up for in Ke$ha (look I spelled it right this time!) and Trey Songz. Still too much Katy Perry. At least three tracks! I once knew this obnoxious girl* who would always end tweets with “boo hiss” when she was displeased with something and I thought that was so lame, but really – BOO HISS, FOR REAL. (* And no, I’m actually not referring to myself.)

However, I was very happy with the song selection for the first Couple Skate of the afternoon and thought to myself with a smile, “I’m so glad I survived ghost hunting last night so that I could skate to Air Supply today.” Air Supply, bitches! Huge fan of soft rock.

There were a lot of children there who had no right being on that rink, and because of them, I spent more time slaloming around the wooden floor and less time practicing the roller-dance I’m choreographing in lieu of walking down the aisle. (You know, if Henry ever proposes before arthritis and osteoporosis sets in.) There was one point where Henry and I were skating together sort of near each other (to Justin Bieber no less; I let loose an ironic shriek in perfect tandem with all the young girls and Henry was not pleased) and I delved into a (loud and meant-to-be-heard) rant about how bad I hate children and how they should all stay the fuck home playing their fucking Wii and sexting their classmates and leave the rollerskating intricacies to the well-trained adults. Henry made some off-hand remark about our son being there too, but he’s cool by association, I argued. Besides, he spent most of the afternoon sidelined on the bench with Chris, playing games on my phone. I’m so disappointed that my spawn wasn’t graced with the same roller-master gene as I.

“You weren’t always good at skating,” Henry argued. “I’m sure it took you awhile to learn, too.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I cried. “There was no learning for me. I put the skates on and just skated. It was inherent, Henry.”

Just then, some douchebag in a flannel CHANGED DIRECTION in the middle of the song and came barreling toward me. He and I both yelled out in terror at the same time, narrowly missing each other, which made Henry do this husky laugh inspired by schadenfreude. I hate that fucking laugh. It’s usually reserved for when I get busted for writing about someone on my blog. (He thinks I’m going to get recognized someday while out and about in Pittsburgh, which will probably lead up to me catching a blow with my jaw. But then I remind him that there are only 10 people who read this thing.)

The DJ announced it was time for Limbo, causing Kim and me to collectively protest. Limbo is a fucking waste of time to the die-hards who want to SKATE, MOTHERFUCKER. And of course, since there were so many kids there, that fucking line snaked back to eternity.

Getting in line for Limbo. Never mind that Chooch can’t skate!

“How is Chooch going to manage to get under the bar?” Kim asked. “Do you think Henry will take him all the way?”

“No,” I said, barely thinking about it. “Henry will probably just push him through.”

I was right. Henry gave Chooch a hearty shove, resulting in Chooch falling and basically crawling his way under the bar.

“I used to be so good at that,” Henry murmured to himself, lamenting the fact that it’s been thirty years since his Limbo heyday. I’m going to have to ask his mom if she has any photos of a bell bottomed Henry, in a provocative half-split Limbo action-shot.

I sort of had a crush on Henry that afternoon. Skating makes him seem less old, I guess. He tried dodging me when it was Ladies’ Choice, but I’m way too fast; I caught up to him and clamped his hand inside my own, silently signifying to all of the rink that we are definitely A Couple.

My crush dissolved as soon as Henry took off his skates.

I nearly wiped out way more times this week than last, all because of waist-high nuisances. Kim even used one as a hurdle at one point. I’m pretty sure that people should be licensed before being allowed on a rink. Amateurs really fuck with my flow, you know? Specifically that asshole in the flannel. His near-collisions with me were beginning to become such a regular occurrence that I was sure he was doing it on purpose. I kept skating over to Henry and screaming about it.

“He’s gunning for me! That fucking prick is doing this on purpose! He won’t be happy until I break one of my delicate bones!” But then I started thinking about how I always wanted to break my nose, because I hate it so bad, and I wondered if I could somehow arrange for that to happen by the flannel motherfucker’s hand, so that people would feel sorry for me and I could get a new nose, which would hopefully change my whole face just like it did for Jennifer Grey and then no one would recognize me and I could start over from scratch! No more running from the Feds!

Look, you flanneled motherfucker: Try skating in the right direction! I don’t care if you’re six. You are a motherfucker.

When I finally pointed him out, Henry was surprised. “I thought he was going to be at least a teenager, the way you were talking about him!”

Why? Because I used names that most respectable adults reserve for other adults? I don’t care if he was two-years-old and in a wheelchair. He would still be a motherfucker. Evil little dickhead.

The other person I hated was this old fuck who thought he was Flashdance on skates. Oh my Lord, he disgusted me. While everyone not participating in Limbo was told to stay off the rink, he planted himself in a corner and did these fruity fucking pirouettes with his arms bowed gracefully above his head.

“What a dumb motherfucker,” I yelled to Henry. “Stay home and do that stupid shit on your driveway, am I right?” I looked at Henry for his adamant agreement, but instead he gave me a thoughtful stare which means he’s trying to figure out why I’m so hateful. Maybe it’s because of you, Henry!

(l-r) Fruity Ballerina, Rink Ref, Someone in a black shirt associated with those two so clearly he must be an asshole, as well.

Next to Fruity Ballerina is the rink ref (Henry said he’s actually called a skate guard and I was like, “OK, but there’s no alliteration in that…?”) who chastised Henry thrice (little Conan shout-out) last week for wearing a beanie on the rink. I was prepared to shoot him scowls and stinkeye but then I saw Henry sidle up next to him on the rink and lean in real close to his ear. Whatever Henry said made the rink ref laugh, and then Henry laughed too, and I felt so confused. I thought we were supposed to be hating this dick, not sharing secrets with him on the rink?

When Henry skated back to me, I demanded to know what he said to him, and I swore Henry said something about asking him to go thrifting, which makes sense because that’s always what I pictured Henry doing on a same-sex date, but later, when we weren’t shouting over top of Ludacris, he said he merely alerted the rink ref that someone had spilled something on the floor by the refreshment room and people were streaking it around with their skates.

Oh. That’s pretty boring.

Kim’s Sunday Boyfriend (i.e. The DJ) told her that his friends have bought the rink. The current owners are going to finish out the season, but once the new owners take over, it’s going to be better with more Adult Only skates and hopefully a new DJ (sorry, dude). I will be highly anticipating that. I might even have my birthday party there. One of them, anyway. (I have a few years’ worth to make up for.)