by Corey Taylor
So I made plans to make some myths. But in order to pull off the great escape, I knew I could not go alone. I was going to need a team . . . or at least a bunch of friends willing to sit in near dark all night without complaining much. I needed a crack squad of miscreants steady of hand or paw, equipped with nerves of steel and night-vision cameras. I needed allies and night owls with tons of patience but a penchant for the verbose. In other words, I needed a bunch of people with the night off and no plans for Crisco Twister. So I went about the business of assembling my misfit band of Avengers Lite . . . and assemble they did.
My wife: code-name “The Boss.” Her superpower is a near Hulk-like strength and an uncanny sixth, seventh, and eighth sense for sniffing out bullshit like a fart in a cockpit. My wife was going to be the anchor of the team, the feather in the flaws. Having absolute trust in her ability to feel when something is going to happen, she would handle leadership when our people split up for exploration. She could also limit the amount of damage we would do, as the rest of the group was akin to swinging a baseball bat in a crystal shop.
Matt: code-name “Stubs.” Stubs is the member with the most experience going on these misadventures. He would be our tech specialist, making sure we were using the right gear—that is, digital cameras, audio recorders, flashlights, and so forth. Being that he is the man with the most hair, I made an executive decision to disallow any use of candles during our surveillance. He also has a never-ending reservoir of sadism that manifests in tormenting the next person on our list.
Lauren: code-name “Lady.” Lady is what we will call “the divining rod” for the expedition. In other words, she is terrified of what we are going to do, what we are going to see, and what we are going to put her through. She has a propensity for screaming, running, and shaking uncontrollably. Quite frankly, it is fucking hilarious to freak her out. She is also one of the sweetest people I have ever known, which makes me feel bad about torturing her as much as we do, though I am sorry to say that bad feeling is very short-lived.
Chris: code-name “Big Truck.” Truck is exactly like his nickname implies—a man the size of a fucking truck. Trust me—think “Mack” more than “Ram.” He is also a novice to this whole “ghost hunting” thing. But his enthusiasm for the project made him an obvious choice. Killjoys can suck the fun out of an auditorium, and I have no room on this squad for dick bags. At the end of the day, believe what you want. Just do not get your peanut brittle on my chocolate. So Truck was invited for his exuberance . . . and his high-end camera.
Kennedy: code-name “Kennedy.” Kennedy is the king of what they call in sports entertainment “color commentary.” If there is a quip to be made, Kennedy will jump off a cliff to get to it first. That is what I want from him—the line that no one else could come up with. Oh, and he also has a sick addiction to scaring the fuck out of Lady. So he and Stubs will be perfect teammates together. The benefit of this setup is even if we are not able to get any evidence, it will still be ridiculous.
First, though, I needed some locations. In Iowa alone there are several famous or infamous destinations with purported “paranormal activity.” The most famous of these is the Axe Murder House in Villisca. An hour and a half outside of Des Moines, it has enjoyed national notoriety for over one hundred years. Sometime in the wee hours of June 10, 1912, eight people were found bludgeoned and axed to death in the home of Josiah Moore, including Josiah, his wife, Sarah, their children, and two young visitors who were staying the night. It is one of the earliest examples of mass murder and psychotic criminal pathology in American history. It is also one of the most grisly unsolved murders ever. Over the years the ghastly ghostly goings-on have made this place a haunted hot spot for aficionados around the world: things fly about, screams cry out, children laugh and shriek in horror, and so forth. A friend even told me about being hit in the face with a tennis ball he was fucking about with Great Escape style. He was hit so hard, in fact, that it bloodied his nose. He almost broke his ankle fleeing the place.
It had everything I wanted in a ghost hunt. It was perfect.
It is also almost always completely booked full pretty much year round—no open reservations, much to my chagrin. I even dropped my name—to which they replied, “Corey who?” Never let it be said that an attempt at using fame to your advantage can bite you in the ass from time to time.
SO! I turned my attention to an old school building thirty minutes from my front door.
In 1919 the Washington Township Consolidated School District was established, and three years later a schoolhouse was opened in Farrar, Iowa, that would cater to kindergarten through twelfth grade. Many of the local rural towns and counties utilized it until it closed in 2002 after eighty years of service. Then it sat for five years abandoned. In 2007 Jim and Nancy Oliver purchased it, hoping to make it a unique home while also restoring the old girl to its original luster. However, even before the couple took up residence, tales of strange goings-on had persisted for years. When they eventually moved in, they found they were not alone. Orbs darted about. Shadow people ran amok. Voices could be clearly heard everywhere. Small children were seen in the stairways before they would vanish without a trace. Nancy Oliver herself was steadied on a staircase when she nearly fell. Turning to thank her husband, whom she assumed was the one who had given her the helping hand, she found herself standing alone.
After reading all this, the place definitely had potential. I also liked the fact that it was not very well known. It was not one of the common names that you see when you look up a list of “popular haunts,” like the Stanley Hotel in Colorado or the Amityville House (whichever one that is; it is widely believed that was a hoax). But something was bothering me. All the research I had done did not uncover one tidbit of evidence to explain why the place was experiencing this activity. With all the reports dating back to when the school was open, it was apparent this had been going on for a really long time, but why? For all intents and purposes, it seemed like a wholesome, friendly little establishment for that township, steeped in tradition and beloved by those who had called it their place of education. But nothing was reported involving a dark side—not even a crumb of violence. What had happened there, or what was connected to the site and was keeping it there?
I prepared for metaphysical battle.
Actually, I bought some digital recorders, appropriated some night-vision cameras, and made sure to bring a chair. And flashlights—oh my, did we have some flashlights! The Boss has an extensive collection of them and allowed me to borrow one of her high-end flashlights: a black Scorpion that she said could be dropped from the roof and would not break. I have been told that it always pays to be prepared. Honestly, I have never ever been paid for being prepared; I have been assured of payment, but there was never cash on delivery. But it never hurts to be ahead of the curve, so I scuttled about gathering these accoutrements. I grabbed a sweatshirt too—you know . . . because it gets cold.
Yeah, I get cold.
I am not a wuss.
Oh, fuck you.
We drove out in two vehicles, following directions that could only be understood in Iowa: “Well, when you get to the first distressed and decrepit grain silo, you are close. If you pass the second distressed and decrepit grain silo, you have gone too far . . .” As we rode along, the mood was loose and fun. The sky was doing some crazy shit, though. The colors looked like something out of a horror movie when the editors are finished with postproduction. But we passed the time by concocting terrible pranks to play on Lady, who was riding in the other car and had no idea what we were planning. We were wrapping our minds around the adventure that lay before us. Stubs was also using a fancy Internet website to call Lady from phone numbers that could not be recognized, taunting her with scary silences when she answered her phone and leaving terrifyingly cryptic messages in her voicemail when she ignored his calls. The one I liked the most was when he let her sit in silence for several seconds, then muttered, “Whatever you do, do not look in the
glove compartment.” She screamed something fairly cross and vulgar into the phone and promptly hung up on him.
Just as the excitement was making us giggle like mad people, we were there.
Taking a left at a quaint country church, we turned off the highway and found the schoolhouse set back on a plot a little off the road. Across the street was a family home and a cemetery that seemed to hold most of the old residents for a twenty-mile radius. The Olivers had hired a caretaker named Steve, who met us at the door and showed us to what he called the Safe Room. It turned out to be the old faculty lounge, with a TV, some couches, and a refrigerator. For a second, dragging a cooler and all those chairs along with us seemed redundant, but then I realized that if we had not brought those things, none of this comfort would have been there. So says the Laws of Murphy, anyway . . .
A few of us ventured across the street to the tiny rustic cemetery, and judging from the headstones, it had been there a long time—some of them dated back to the mid-1800s. It was no bigger than an average backyard in a city suburb, but the stones were ancient and the names barely legible from seasons of weathering the elements. As I strolled the rows, the names appeared to be a little clearer, and suddenly it occurred to me that I recognized almost every name here. I had come across these names in my research—here laid the family who had owned the land and had given it to the county. Here were the names of various faculty members and students. Here were the people who had grown up and died with this wonderfully unassuming school as the heart of this close-knit community. I had a strange feeling; I was about to trounce around the center of their universe. Even if they were no longer around, this was still their place. I was the trespasser, the transgressor. Was I spitting in their pool, laughing in the face of their heritage? I did my best to fill my mind with positive thoughts. I was not here to condescend; I was here to observe.
Steve offered to give us a tour but cautioned against it, saying that the feedback from other groups had told him that the activity doubled if people were not led around beforehand and that the experiences might be skewed if our forethought was saddled with preconception. So we decided to bypass the tour, thanking Steve for his time and accompanying him out the front door (the only exit that did not lock you out when it closed behind you) so we could have one more smoke prior to our first bit of exploration around the school. After extinguishing our cigarettes, we ventured back to the Safe Room to grab our gear and take a look around.
The first pass of the site was like being ten years old on a field trip to a museum. It seemed like every room had remnants of the building’s old life in it. Notebooks sat in empty filing cabinets, desks were shoved into corners or overturned completely, old pictures adorned corkboard above giant tears in the walls where people had come in to take whatever blackboards could be procured, and books from the past fifty years were shoved into the backs of cupboards to be discovered later like treasures in a killer’s house. The whole place had the feeling of mass exodus, like it had been abandoned during an air raid or an attack by a tornado. In turn, it made you feel like you should flee as well. But overall there was no malice in the air like I had felt in other places. As uncomfortable as it became later in the evening and in the early morning hours, the school never had the feeling like we were in danger, like it did not want us there. Maybe that is why we stayed as long as we did, even after all the weirdness started happening later on.
The layout was not very confusing. The school is three stories tall—four if you count the slightly below-ground gymnasium. Walking in the front door, you are confronted with two choices: upstairs to the second floor or through a pair of entries to the ground level that overlooks the gym. Through the gym and to the left is the boiler room; to the right are the only working toilets we could use. Each floor above had six classrooms and respective boys’ and girls’ restrooms. On the third floor were the principal’s office and a diminutive auditorium we started referring to as the Theater Room. We found the old kitchen, which had a really loud dumbwaiter and some hastily stored office supplies, but the floor seemed to be falling through in places, so we decided we would not spend a lot of time wandering around in a room where the ground could breach at any moment. As we made our way upward to the various levels, nothing was triggering our inner Venkman—that is, until we got to the boys’ bathroom on the second floor. Everyone who explored that room came away with a sickened vibe we could not put our finger on. It was pretty obvious something bad had gone down in there. I earmarked it for its own recording device and continued the preliminary walkabout.
After we were done we returned to the Safe Room for a quick snack and a chance to go over our initial impressions. Lady was excited, scared, but not uncomfortable. The Boss voiced what we all felt: this was not the site of a murder, but there was something not right, especially in that bathroom, where the ominous feeling had an emotional odor to it. Kennedy was still reserving judgment. Stubs was anxious to set up the equipment. Truck was just taking it all in. I was not sure what to think, but I knew it was time to get cracking. So we finished our snacks and plotted where we would plant our devices. One audio recorder would go in the second-floor bathroom where we all felt sick. One camera would go in the gymnasium, overlooking the entire room. Another camera would go in one of the classrooms that had given Kennedy a hinky feeling. Meanwhile, we would break up into pairs with recorders and cameras and roam, looking to engage whatever we could and try to pick up either EVPs or actual visual instances. We were finally here. The time for talk and speculation was over—it was time to get to work.
Kennedy and I started in the Theater Room, sitting on the stage in a booth I am fairly certain I last saw in an old A&W restaurant miles away. I do not know why it was on the stage or how it got there, but it was comfy and we could face each other. Meanwhile, Lady and The Boss were doing quick sweeps of some of the other rooms on that floor and the one below. Truck and Stubs were down in the boiler room by the gym. The silence was so thick that I started to think I had tinnitus. Other than the near-complete blackout, it was kind of relaxing. It was hot and smelled like a million kindergarteners had left their soiled undies in the ceiling tiles somewhere, but it was not too bad. Trust me—I have been in worse places. I once spent a night in a hotel room in Italy that reeked of dead hookers and strawberries. I could not check out of that place fast enough. The strange thing was that it had great wi-fi.
I was doing some EVP work with Kennedy. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it stands for “Electronic Voice Phenomena.” The human voice only registers at a certain frequency or megahertz. EVPs are supposedly sounds or voices outside those parameters that can be picked up with recorders. Basically, he and I were asking questions and sitting in silence, trying to allow time and space for an answer that we may or may not hear with the naked ear. We had been sitting there for a while, asking random questions and hoping we could illicit a response, when we both heard what was either crying, laughing, or moaning. We looked at each other and listened intently, hoping to discern if it was our compatriots or something we could not explain. We decided it might have been a dog, but we filed it away for further discussion later.
This is how it went for a while: sitting in rooms, asking questions to the night that had very little hope of being answered right away. As we went outside for another round of smokes, we talked about ways to beat the ennui. Stubs thought it would be a good idea to chain Lady up and leave her in the boiler room. He could not understand why she did not share his sentiment. We finally agreed on doing some EVP work in the Theater Room together. We went inside and moved some of the recording equipment around to different rooms, making sure to say that we were doing so aloud so it was documented properly. I went to another classroom to try an experiment: I set up some toy cars in an attempt to possibly broker some movement out of whatever was running around the place. Truck must have had the same idea, because he entered another room and opened one of the file cabinets to see if something would happen to it. Then we s
et up shop in the Theater Room, sitting in a circle in front of the stage like some bizarre campfire round robin.
You might want to grab your popcorn, because this is where it gets interesting.
It started with The Boss, who, as I said before, has an extra sense for these things, hearing singing. She described a little boy somewhere in the complex singing the “Pledge of Allegiance,” sort of showing off for us like children are prone to do. Every once in a while some of us could pick up on it a bit. The Boss could hear it plain as day, though. Suddenly, she shot up out of her seat and said, “What room is across the hall to the left by the stairs?” It was a classroom Kennedy and I had been inside while we were moving around the other recorders. We all grabbed our flashlights and, like some bizarre wayward football huddle, we moved in that direction.
There had been an encyclopedia sitting on the windowsill in that room when we were there, and the floor was clean. As we entered, the first thing I noticed were torn pages—torn pages—lying on the floor across the room from where that book was still sitting, now open and rent asunder. No windows were open and we were the only people around. Someone had torn pages out of this book and strewn them all over the place. We sat there, listening intently. The Boss was trying to get the little boy’s name. We all held our breath. The lack of sound was suffocating. So you can imagine our reaction when, from somewhere far below us, deep in the school, we heard a crash of metal on metal that was loud enough to make Lady cry out.
Like something out of a scene from the movie Clue, we all shot through the hallways and down the stairs to the room in question. At first we could not figure out what had made that horrendous noise. Then Truck calmly stated, “That file cabinet was open when I went upstairs.” He had opened it as a sort of test before we had corralled ourselves in the Theater Room. We looked: all the drawers were closed. When I yanked on it myself, the damn thing had been slammed shut so hard I had to jerk it to get it open. There was much conjecture and running of scenarios, but we all agreed that even if there had been a window open, the wind could not have shoved that thing back in. The rusty resistance was too strong. Someone had to have pushed it shut . . . hard.