The Haunted School

Jim Harold's Campfire

This episode of Jim Harold's Campfire features a diverse array of paranormal encounters shared by callers, ranging from auditory hauntings in empty schools and unexplained musical phenomena to intense

Key takeaways

• Laura recounts three distinct auditory hauntings at an Eastern North Carolina pre-K through 12 school, including sounds of running children and a teacher lecturing in an empty hallway before the academic year begins.
• Adam from Cornwall describes using dowsing rods to communicate with a restless vicar named John who left a bruising handprint on his friend's leg and violently spun the rods during questioning.

Main topics

• School hauntings and residual energy
• Dowsing rods and spirit communication

Notable quotes

"I felt like it was maybe, maybe a stone tape."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a multifaceted look into how paranormal experiences man

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) A haunted school. Up next on Jim Harreld's Campfire. Speaker 4 (0:13) Sit back, relax, and warm yourself by Jim Harreld's Campfire. Next up on the campfire is Laura, and I'm going to spill a little bit of beans on myself here, a little bit of the tea. I was sitting on the wrong call for about 10 minutes and Laura was patiently there waiting. And then I realized I was on the wrong call and here she is. So Laura, just a saintly person, saintly person for waiting all that time while Jim got his act together. And Laura, also, thank you for doing God's work. You're a teacher. Thank you. Speaker 7 (0:46) And Speaker 4 (0:46) you've had some strange experiences surrounding all of that. So tell us what happened. Speaker 7 (0:53) Okay. So I'm going to... kind of keep where I teach. I teach at a school in Eastern North Carolina. I'm not going to say the name. Speaker 4 (0:59) Makes sense. Makes sense. Speaker 7 (1:00) And it's a pre-K through 12 school. We have a lot of buildings. And typically, depending on what grade level you teach in is what building you're in. But ever since COVID, I've been in, I teach high school, but I've been in a building that is first through third grade, which is only relevant for the story. And I've had three kind of peculiar experiences. And if I hadn't had all three, I might have been able to brush it off. But I actually just had one in August right before the school year started. The first one happened maybe 2022. I was here on a Saturday doing some work because teachers do that. And I was the only person on campus. And I know I was the only person on campus because when I came in, I had to drive all around the campus to get to my building. Not another car there. I'm in my classroom working and I kept hearing sounds outside the external door so where I could look out to the windows. And there's a sidewalk that leads to a courtyard. Nobody shouldn't have been there. I kept hearing like kids running up and down making sounds. And I heard it a couple of times, ignored it. I heard it a third time and went outside because what I thought was another co-worker from a different building who has children. maybe had showed up and I was going to go see who it was. Open the door. There wasn't anybody there. I was so sure that I had heard the voices that I actually walked all around my building. I went to other buildings and nobody was there. And I thought, well, maybe I was just hearing stuff. And I went back to my room and I heard it again. And it's the distinct footsteps of kids running and like giggling, laughing. And it kind of freaked me out. So I left. Speaker 7 (2:46) And then the other one happened last school year. I was in my room and I have a different schedule than the other classes around me because I'm in an upper school and they're in lower school. And I had my door closed and I was going to make an external phone call using the school's phone. So there wasn't anybody in the room with me. And I went to pick up the phone to dial the number. And you know how like if you're standing there, you can kind of feel like someone's... You can feel a presence, like someone that's in the room with you. Sure. And so I felt like somebody was behind me. So I was getting ready to say something, and I heard a hello. And it was a distinct hello. I had not dialed the phone yet. I hadn't even picked it up. And I turned around to say, oh, wait a second. I'm getting ready to make a call, except there wasn't anybody in the room. And then the third thing, Speaker 4 (3:34) this is the third Speaker 7 (3:37) thing happened. I like to set up for school before the teacher work days actually begin so that I can get focused. I was here. No one else was here. Again, it was a weekday and it was about seven o'clock or so. And I have a door that leads to the outside of the literal outside and another one that leads to an internal hallway. No one was in. I had the door that leads to the internal hallway open. Speaker 7 (4:03) Once again, I'm working quietly. And I heard. the sound of what I thought was somebody coming into the building. And I thought it was, we had a new teacher on the hall and I thought maybe, oh, someone has the same idea as I do. They're coming in to, you know, to set up. And I actually left my desk, went out to go greet the person that I thought was there. And when I walked out into the hallway, I was like, oh, none of the doors are open. But I could hear down the hall, the murmuring of, you know, like the sounds of two people talking, but like you can't make out what they're saying. Speaker 4 (4:35) It Speaker 7 (4:36) sounded like a teacher in her classroom teaching. And I know what that sounds like because I hear it all the time. And I stood there and I listened and I listened. And I started to walk down the direction of where I thought it was when it became clear like there wasn't anybody there. And why would they be teaching? Because school hadn't started yet. And so I walked back to my room, stood in the doorway for a second. And then distinctly heard it like the un, it was recognizable. Somebody was in a room teaching. And then I decided I've watched enough Jim Harreld and I've watched a lot of Appalachian TikTok. And I pretended I hadn't heard anything. And I went back to my desk and was like, I'm not going to acknowledge it. Just keep on teaching. So those were my three things. When I, just really quickly, when I was getting, not permission, but I just wanted to let people know that I was going to do this. And, you know, you always have to preface with, I'm not crazy. I swear I'm not crazy. Speaker 1 (5:35) Right, right. Speaker 7 (5:36) But the person I mentioned to it goes, oh, you too? This was in a different building. They had gone to close up after a basketball game, completely dark in the gymnasium, and heard the sound of a basketball dribbling and the sound of somebody playing basketball. They searched that whole building. It was the same thing as me with the first one. You were so sure of what you heard. Speaker 4 (5:55) Yeah. Speaker 7 (5:56) Undeniable. So the school was built maybe in the 60s. It was on donated farmland. Speaker 7 (6:05) I don't know that it was an interactive. I feel like it was maybe, maybe a stone tape. I don't know. School's had a lot of emotions, like theaters. Speaker 4 (6:11) Yes. Yes. That's exactly. You stole the words right out of my mouth. That's what I was going to say. No, it's exactly what I was going to say, because it might not be like evil or anything like that. You just think about this. You know, being a teacher better than anybody, kids are hyper. And there's a lot of emotion and happiness and angst and, you know, just youthful energy. And you multiply that, you know, over, you said the 60s, 50, 60 years. That's a lot of energy. That's a lot of energy. Speaker 7 (6:46) And this building that I'm in, I think was the first building built. So I don't think it's like I really don't think it's an interactive or an active thing. I just feel like that energy just seeps into the building. And it's here and people have good experiences and bad experiences. And, you know, some of our teachers have taught 30, 40 years before they retire. And that's a lot of time in the classroom. Speaker 4 (7:07) Very cool. Laura, thank you for being a part of the campfire and stay spooky. Speaker 7 (7:13) You stay spooky too. Thank you. Speaker 4 (7:16) Welcome to Jim Harreld's Campfire. Happy Halloween, everybody. I can say it now. It's October. This is our first campfire of this Halloween season. It's October. We can say it without any shame. And I'm so glad to be with you today. And we've got a great show for you. Lots of haunted spooky stories. Oh, it's going to be great. And a couple of things we would ask. If you've got a spooky story, please share it. Go to jimherald.com slash campfire and sign up. And I do have an extra request to those of you who have signed up but haven't been on the show yet. We have about a dozen people who have signed up and have not booked times. So basically the way it works, you fill out the form. And within a very short amount of time, Dara reaches back out with an email. You have to respond to that email and book your time as laid out in that email. But we have people who are booking times and they're not, they're saying, I wanted to share my story, but they're not booking the time. So if you've signed up for a story anytime recently and not followed three, please do because, you know, that. doesn't get on the show if we don't set a time. So please look for an invite from DAR and get your slot set up. We want to get you on the show to share your stories like all our great storytellers today. Another thing you might say, Halloween, boy, I wish the campfire came out two or three times a week. You know, this isn't enough for me once a week. Well, I've got an answer for you. It's called. Spooky Studio Plus. Yes, at jimherald.com slash plus. jimherald.com slash plus. And you get the whole back catalog going back to 2009. You get it all. Thousands and thousands of stories. So sign up today. You get a lot more, but I'm not going to berate it. I'm not going to lay it on too thick. You can see on the slide there all the things you get. If you go to jimherald.com slash plus, you'll see all the things that you can get. But I know you're a Campfire fan. So I'm guessing the main thing is that big Campfire archive going back to 2009. So you can have a different episode every day, a couple of episodes every day. In fact, you could have, I don't know, you could fill the whole day basically. 24 hours of campfire until Halloween. You could probably do that. What would that be? On average, 24, because the early episodes weren't 90 minutes. I bet you could do that. I bet you could almost have 24 hours of campfire going all the way from now through Halloween if you're a Plus Club member. So, yeah, get with it. jimherald.com slash plus. Plus, it supports our work and allows us to do what we do. jimherald.com slash plus. And now let's get to some great spooky stories. Speaker 4 (10:09) As I always say, I love to hear from our friends over in the UK, our friends over in England and so forth. And Adam is there and he's been a friend for a long time. He's been listening since 2012 and we appreciate it very much. And he has a tale of a paranormal investigation and the aftermath. And he's going to tell us all about it. Adam, thank you for joining us. Always a thrill to talk to somebody from England. Tell us what happened. Speaker 2 (10:36) Well, thank you for having me, Jim. So probably best to start with a bit of background. So sort of 2010, 2011, I got really into those ghost hunting shows and things like Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures. In the UK, we have something called Most Haunted. And so I was into them in a really big way. So I fancied trying it out and doing it myself. Ended up joining up with an amateur group of paranormal investigators. and it was about six months we did five or six investigations and i'll be honest jim not a lot um didn't get anything throughout all of those um and i kind of i sort of counted him because it was um it just got it was boring again a lot of investigations that didn't fake anything it was just a lot of nothing um so we sort of parted ways with that group um and also i i they sort of a little less serious than me. I don't think maybe you have to go a bit too seriously, but I tried to debug everything. But that's going to be quite important later in the story. Meanwhile, about a similar time, I've got a friend who started picking up dowsing rods. And she started practicing them and she claimed that she was very good with them. So as soon as I got wind of this, we're in the back end of 2011 at this point. Speaker 2 (12:02) I thought, I'm going to debunk this. I'm just going to sort of not call her out, but just wanting to sort of take a scientific approach. And I did everything I could think of to debunk her skill, her claims. Everything from like picking objects in the room, thinking of like asking questions only I knew the answer to, even having different people going into a completely different room with myself included, with like rolling a dice and getting her to pick out. the number. Now, you would expect something like this, even when taking out the fact of her being able to read people, the results would be quite low. But we were talking an 80-90 % success rate. It was spooky how accurate, how good she was with catalysis. I genuinely believe, Jim, the real deal, she's actually very skillful with them, like genuinely. Speaker 2 (12:53) So those are probably the two bits of important background information. But to the same friend who did the Dowsing was, she moved into an old chapel. So we live in Cornwall. It's a small village and it's sort of like an old chapel. Not crazy old by UK standards, but I suppose in America you would call it a historical building. probably looking 18, sort of mid-1800s, as to how this building is. But it had been converted into flats, or I suppose apartments, sort of two up and two down. And the key point is, in her sort of apartment, her bedroom's up in one of the corners, and it led through to the attic of the chapel. So... The Speaker 2 (13:50) She started getting some quite low-level sort of, that's what I'm looking for, phenomena. She had quite low-level phenomena to begin with. Things like knocking, the odd breath here and there. Things that she could kind of ignore and hope it went away. But in particular, there was this one door which led to a narrow corridor which went up into the attic. It was big enough she could use it as a walk-in wardrobe, which she did. But this door would open and close very often by itself. And again, it's an old building. It's quite, you'd expect it to be quite drafty as you sort of try talking up to that to ignore it and hope it went away. And this continued on for a few months until it got dangerous. So she actually woke up with a handprint on her leg and it was a bruise. What was really odd about this handprint was the palm was really small. And we're talking like a small child for the actual palm print itself. And the fingers were really long and spindly. My hands aren't small, but the fingers were longer than mine by a good measure. Wow. So it was very clearly a handprint. The four fingers, thumb, and the palm, which is really odd proportions. But this was the point where she couldn't ignore it anymore because it was getting dangerous and basically just really trying to get her attention, I think. So, of course, me being the ghost hunter friend and sort of maybe probably the most knowledgeable about the subject out of the people she knew, she approached me and I said, look, let's investigate it. Maybe we can get some answers. No, just see what's what. I still fancied myself a ghost hunter at the time. I think I'd get a bit older and a bit wiser now and maybe wouldn't have been quite so gung-ho. But, yeah, let's investigate it. So we got to, again, this would have been early 2012 by the time we actually got around to arranging to go over. And it was myself, my friend, my girlfriend at the time. We sort of decided we were going to go the whole hog. We went to this wicked place, got spirit candles, a Ouija board, did EVPs, tried doing, like taking photographs, everything that I knew and everything I could think of. And as usual for me, a lot of nothing. Didn't get a thing on any of those. But the whole investigation, the whole, the active phase of the investigation, we didn't get. anything. What we did get was some really strong responses on the dowsing rods because we decided we would try and make contact with the dowsing rods when the Ouija board was a bust and the really strong responses. So my initial thought was maybe it was a child trying to get attention because the chapel was attached to an old schoolhouse built at the same time, built as a single complex. So I thought maybe, you know, That was my initial thought. But through a series of questionings, we've discovered it wasn't a child. It was a grown man. And we initially asked, were you a priest here? Got quite a stern no to that one. And they were like, hold on a minute. It's going to be, obviously, it's in England. It's going to be Protestant, not Catholic. Were you a vicar? got a strong yes. So we narrowed it down to a vicar whose name was John, but we didn't manage to narrow it down further than that. Maybe it was from lack of asking the right questions. But then we got to why was he still here and not passed over? Because a man of God, you thought he'd be looking forward to embracing the afterlife. So we asked, are you here because you're missing someone? No. Are you here because you did... you could have did something wrong. And this is where we got the first real evidence of it being paranormal was the dowsing rods that had been sort of leaning left for yes, right for no. And this one, they just spun as if somebody in a tantrum flung them. Now, in order to get that vine of a spin on dowsing rods, you've got to either flick your hands or give it a proper twist. But my friend was just holding it loosely in the hands and they just spun on their own, Jim. So that was the first time we sort of got a hint of his, maybe sort of his disposition, his temperament. So I said, right, okay, why are you, are you, why are you sort of, Speaker 2 (18:41) what happened to my friend? Is it because you're angry with her? No. Did she do something wrong? No. Are you attracted to her? Another big spin. So what we could gather is he had some sort of attraction to my friend. I didn't want to dig into the nature of it. Whatever it was, he was drawn to my friend and was basically trying to get her attention. Speaker 2 (19:08) So then after that, no matter what we asked, it was just spin after spin. We weren't getting anything else. I think he was fed up at that point. But so we put the dowsing rods away. My friend was quite spooked and asked if we could basically stop the investigation there, which we did. Speaker 2 (19:29) However, one thing I wanted to do, I was quite insistent on, was when we went to sleep, I wanted to leave out various objects. So we left out a couple of trigger objects. One was a crucifix, a Bible. I said, do a chalk line around it so we'd know if it'd moved. And because a lot of the activity seemed to be coming down through, from the attic into the room. And one thing about that door to the attic I should have mentioned earlier was, It was actually a very windy and stormy night when we were doing the investigation and that door did not move an inch. If there was going to be a draft, if it was going to be blowing because of the wind, it would have been banging all of that night. But there wasn't a draft through it, Jim. That door was not moving because of the wind. So we laid out, so I put out talcum powder, like baby powder, all over the floor, right from the door to the far end of the room. And this was a big room. So with this talcum powder, with that down, you couldn't get to the door without stepping on the powder. You couldn't get to the far wall without stepping on the powder, or at the very least, take a running job off the bed and clattering into the wall. So I went to bed, woke up in the morning, nothing. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Nothing in the powder, nothing on the trigger objects. And then sort of left. Speaker 2 (20:55) So I woke up a few times a night, did a bit of an EVP by myself, and again, got nothing on those. So we decided we were going to call it a day. Went down to the sitting area. We were there for maybe half an hour. And it was me, my friend, and my girlfriend at the time. We were all in the room. And then we thought, right, we should probably start packing away. By this point, it's about 11 o'clock in the morning. Not the time you'd expect to be the spookiest. But I hear... no more than 30 seconds after she's got up from the room. Adam? Yeah? Come here. So I go up and she's like, do you see what I'm looking at? And I see on the floor in the talcum powder by the door, there is four finger marks. What looks to be like four drag marks through the talcum powder. Somebody's sort of taken the hand and dragged it through there. But Jim, here's the thing. She wasn't looking at the floor. She was looking at a guitar on a bench across the far side of the room. Now, like I said, in order to get to this bench, we would have to cross the talcum powder or take a running leap and risk breaking your neck. And on the guitar, there were a matching set of four scratch marks scratched down the body of the guitar. And you can see the talc there as well. It's like somebody had taken the fingers. dragged it through the powder and scratched down the body of this acoustic guitar. Now we