by Corey Taylor
We returned to our circle of trust, discussing everything excitedly. Stubs and I wondered if we were experiencing things now because we were ignoring it—before we were kind of chasing favor and got nothing. Now, though, we were paying more attention to each other, so the activity felt a little like “pay attention to me!” So it made sense to continue that approach: let it come to us and not the other way around. We repositioned the recorders and some of us went outside for a smoke while the others stayed behind to listen and watch. I was enjoying the chill and inhaling the smoke when I could have sworn I saw something in the trees around the corner from where we stood. I did not have time to explore that too much. A light came on in one of the rooms, and we were fairly certain none of our people were in there. Kennedy ran inside to check. The group who had stayed behind was right where we had left them, and a further search of the room in question left us scratching our heads.
As we finished our carcinogens, a car pulled up. It was our friends Biff and Knees (well, of course these are codenames—who would name their child Knees?). I did not want to give them too much info, seeing as I wanted a righteous judgment about the place. So I chose to wait to fill them in on everything until after they had gotten a feel for the surroundings. They were greatly intrigued and very excited—a couple beers imbibed on their part probably did not hurt their states of mind either. But I was not too worried about that.
I guided Biff and Knees through the hallways, showing them the rooms and the layout but not going into detail about anything other than the history. We were down in the lower section by the gymnasium. I was holding one of the double doors open for them to come through so we could descend the stairs down to see the boiler room. I heard something like movement through air, and Knees let out a yell. Biff and I turned to see what the trouble was, and he said, “Something just ran past me and stepped on my foot!” I scanned back down the hallway only to see nothing. Knees shook it off, and we laughed as we went to see the rest of the building. After we finished the brief tour we grabbed some more chairs and went back to find our friends to reassemble our kinetic circle for some chitchat.
Just outside the door to the Theater Room in the hallway I had set up a recorder on a chair. From my vantage point I could see the red light on the device, letting me know it was still on. This turned out to be terribly handy. While we were all sitting around talking about past experiences, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something was constantly blocking that red light. I started tuning everyone out and shifted my focus to the doorway. Sure enough, I saw something peeking around the corner at me several times. Stubs saw it too. It was like a spooky version of Catch Me If You Can. Just as we were all turning our attention to the doorway, we heard something in the room immediately behind us. There was a door that connected the two rooms, and as we stepped into it, I heard laughter in the hallway. Spine-tingling stuff, but I was starting to feel something else. I know I am (supposedly) a big, strong badass man and everything. Even so, I was frustrated; this was getting ridiculous, and not for nothing I wanted to kick that little shit’s ass.
Meanwhile, the temperature in the Theater Room was starting to get schizophrenic. One moment it would be nice and cozy, and seconds later it would be stiflingly uncomfortable. Sweat ran from our faces and then suddenly dried as it cooled. So we walked around some more. I took Biff and Knees to that bathroom where we had all felt physically ill. As we stood in the dark, around a corner by the stalls Biff whispered, “I think I am going to throw up.” I could feel her pain; this was a type of porcelain hell, draped in art deco and painted with some sort of unnatural misery. What the hell could have happened in there? I started looking at how the restroom was designed.
As you walked through the door you could go to the right to one set of stalls and urinals, or you could go to the left with an entirely different set of both. There was one catch: if you went to the left, one of the stalls cut off the rest of the room. But if you went to the right, you could keep going around by the window. I discovered there was a two-person sized nook back in the corner, hidden from view. It suddenly occurred to me that it was the perfect place for an attack. The layout was almost ripe for a sexual assault; no one would see anything from the doorway if they entered. My mind twisted that over and over like an equation. Was that why it was borderline unbearable in that bathroom? If so, who was victim and who was predator? Mind you, I have not one shred of evidence—this is all hypothesis. But I know what I am talking about. I have been on the dangerous end of that type of business. I recognized the feeling in my chest from standing in that room. I knew it all too well. Something very bad had happened in there, and though I was not sure exactly what that thing was, I knew it like I know the sound of rain and the feel of fire.
I took my friends and got out of there. We did some more walking around and some more EVP work, trying to chase down as many actions as we could. But the night was winding down. We decided to do one more round of the place. Everyone else went down to the first floor. The Boss and I stayed upstairs. We were in one of the classrooms talking and trying to coax a little more from our childlike visitor. Suddenly we heard whistling in the hall. We assumed it was the others and continued our conversation. But then we heard the others coming up the stairs—on the other side of the school. When they came to our room, they asked us if we had been whistling. We said we had thought they were the ones doing it. Luckily, there had been a camera set up in the hallway, shooting down to capture any movement. We rewound to the spot. Sure enough, with no one around, an unsettling bit of whistling began to lilt through the air. It made me excited to check what we had gathered that night. It was also the perfect capper for the evening.
It was 2 a.m. Even though we had the building until seven that morning, we were all tired and longing for our beds. So we began packing up and getting our shit ready to take it all home. We crawled into our vehicles for the trip. You can imagine the dichotomy: these adventurous scamps who had been so eager to see what the old madam had to offer, now so obviously exhausted that most of us fell asleep in the car before we got back to the two-lane highway that led the way back to the hearth. Our curiosity sated, we fell in between the sane and slumber, minds racing for the close embrace of sleep while cataloging our various encounters. Nuff said, as Stan Lee put it. Shut the machines down and recharge.
It was a few weeks before I was able to sit down and sift through the hours of footage and audio tracks to see what I could find, helped along with a healthy dose of coffee, smokes, and quiet. There were all the cameras in the halls and the gym, the audio recorders set in the various classrooms and bathrooms, and the handheld recorders we were all carrying around with us. Let me tell you: the only thing more boring than reading and recording your own audio book is sitting, watching, waiting, and listening to hours of content in the hopes of capturing something fantastic. Some shit did not even show up—there were various tracks that failed to record for some reason. Listening back, I could hear voices complaining that the power kept draining in the batteries. So some of the evidence did not get captured. Note to self: next time plug the shit into a wall socket. Of the stuff that was recorded, there are several conversations of past experiences that I will tell you about later on in the book. There are hours of nothing. There are noises from outside and squeaking wood—the floors in the Theater Room were especially peculiar sounding. It gave me the impression of breathing, somewhere between Darth Vader and Bane. So my investigation was moving in fits and starts, from silence to silly quips.
That was until I found something that could not be explained.
In some of the rooms, out of nowhere, the recorders picked up soft humming. This was not electric in any way; this was musical, the sound of a child walking around with a song stuck in his or her head. It showed up on several different recorders, almost like this kid was casually strolling through the halls from room to room singing for anyone who could hear. It made me wonder if this was the kid that The Boss heard when we were sitti
ng around in a circle. I also found breathing in the boys’ bathroom where we all felt sick. This was a recorder we had set up and left to see what we could get. The breathing appears hours after anyone has been in there. It starts, lasts a few seconds, and then it just stops. It is another thirty minutes before anyone comes in, and his or her presence is announced and punctuated by the heavy door opening and slamming shut.
The stuff that we witnessed and heard is also there: the file cabinet slamming shut is heard on several devices. More chilling was the shape I caught on one of the cameras. Upstairs, in what used to be the principal’s office, a shape blocks one of the lights for a full ten seconds, and then you can see it move away to the left. It disappeared into a storage closet that has no exit and nothing comes out the entire time afterward. Of course, there are things that can be explained right away. The moaning or crying that Kennedy and I heard most assuredly was a dog howling outside. There are whines that slowly materialize into car engines. Nine times out of ten, footsteps turn out to be Stubs—that boy has the heaviest feet of any person alive; he sounds like Frankenstein rolling out for a morning jog. There is a glorious moment on one of the devices when someone—and I will not say who—is sitting in a room alone and they cut one of the raunchiest farts known to all recorded history. This was a Roman fart, a fart that could conquer territories and topple governments. It was fucking funnier than hell and was made even more hilarious because that person not only says “excuse me” to no one in particular, but they also start to giggle uncontrollably. Someone else ends up coming in the room, and they must have gotten a whiff, because you hear a quiet little “what the fuck . . . ?” and the perpetrator loses control altogether. I laughed out loud myself when I came to that bit. It made my fucking night.
My analysis for the Farrar schoolhouse is simple but complicated, to say the least. I believe something is there. But I also believe that it has nothing to do with a murder or a death. I just think this building has become a home, a safe place, for a wayward spirit. I will explain it like this: aside from the dark feeling we felt in that second-floor bathroom, none of us had the impression that something bad had happened in that building. There is something to be said about that, because many people can really tell when a location has that kind of sinister feeling—places like Dachau and Neely Plaza in Dallas have those vibes, like the violent events cause something to change in the very environment, giving it an edge and a sadness that was not there before. My team did not feel that anywhere other than that bathroom. So my opinion is that, yes, there is something there, but it could easily be a spirit who resides in the cemetery across the street and has returned to the schoolhouse because that was where it was the happiest. It could also be the spirit of the child who had something happen in that bathroom and that torment has tied it inexplicably to this building in the middle of nowhere. It could be a shadow of someone’s life, like a teacher who both attended and taught at the school and returned because so much of their life was spent treading those hallways. Who knows, really? To me, it would most likely take someone from that same time to find out exactly who or what that person is and why its soul has chosen this place to replay and relive its days. I may never know, and quite frankly it will not cause me to lose sleep. But someone has that knowledge. Who knows if that question will ever be answered to the best of our abilities?
As I sit here months later thinking about it, I am struck by several notions. That schoolhouse felt like it had a personality unto itself. The more we spent time in it, the more we got to know it and to appreciate the adventures and the experiences beheld during our stay there. I remember walking around outside by myself, getting the lay of the land and just taking it all in. The sky still had that ominous hue about it, and all the playground equipment was rusty and dark, threatening us more with tetanus than anything resembling a good time. The trees around the place definitely helped set the mood; their limbs hung low around your head like hands reaching for fistfuls of your hair, wanting to drag you up into their leaves and digest you at their leisure. So maybe these factors set the tone for that evening and the things we felt and saw. But I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent and levelheaded chap; I do not panic easily and I do not run from danger or the unexpected. All I really know is that I have a handful of memories that I share in some way with the people I was there with, and we were all involved. Make your own mind up as far as I am concerned.
Some people might say we wanted to find something there. Others might say we left before anything else fascinating could happen. This debate will rage long after I am finished typing it up—who saw what and what was real, and so on. Personally, I feel like these rich visions are what they appear to be: a collision of data and stimuli that occurred in an environment to instill belief and satisfactory contemplation. You can try to figure it out all you want, like dissecting a magic trick behind the master’s back. You can twist it around forever, and maybe you will have varying conclusions each time. But those are rare privileges for the ones who did not make the journey. For those who stood watch and tested our mettle, we know the score better than the team who was playing. It is a matter of knowing and believing, like I have said before. I know because I was there. You can believe what you want, but because you were absent on the day in question, I rest my case gladly.
I guess the best way to tie this all up is to tell you about the last bit of evidence I found in the Farrar files. Here is the scene: we had all been camped in the Theater Room talking. After a while we all decided we needed to smoke our asses off again (like we ever needed any convincing), so we left the room. Kennedy stayed behind, quietly sitting and listening for anything that we might miss. The recorder was in the middle of the room, and it picked up our exit. For ten minutes there is nothing but Kennedy’s breathing. Finally, he says out loud, “Well, I think I am going to go outside with everyone else. We might be gone for a little bit, so if there is anything you want to say or do before I go, here is your chance. Can you make a noise, or a sound, or anything?” Silence reigned. You eventually hear Kennedy stand up and head toward the door, saying, “Well, it was worth a shot . . .” The words trail away, falling into silence, along with his footsteps. The room is left empty. It is very obvious that no one is in the room.
Out of nowhere, something knocks on a metal folding chair three times.
Paranormal Paralysis and Paranoid Parameters
SPOILER ALERT: this chapter is full of fantastic claims, biting commentary, and other things that will piss off cynics, atheists, and malcontents alike. It has a bunch of nonsense known as “scientific law” and other shit known simply as “the great halls of my memory palace.” Some of you might actually—dare I say it—learn something in this chapter that you may not have been privy to before you bought this foul piece of wood pulp. So my condolences to those of you who pride yourself on “keeping it real” or running your life according to horse pucky you picked up on the Bravo Network. Their motto is “Watch What Happens”—the only problem is that when you do watch what happens, you end up dumber than a bag of brand new hammers. So this chapter is full of shit that might make you smarter, even if the conjecture on my part turns out to be ridiculous and implausible. I warned you. Read with a helmet and at your own discretion.
Numbers have always interested me. I love rhythms and figures and calculations. Even though I am a very right-brained fellow, I have this bizarre left-brain bend that is fascinated with statistics, math, and symmetry. I have explained in other forms of literary drivel that I am obsessed with even numbers. This transfers to everything in my life. I can only chew pieces of gum in even numbers: two, four, or, in the case of long commercial flights where smoking is not an option, eight. This permeates my adult life like a phantom waiting to snatch the girl at the end of her sonata. I do not know why and I cannot help it—even therapy would have no affect on this tendency, or as my wife The Boss calls it, “my cute little neurosis.” That’s fine: she has the same thing with odd numbers—detests the n
umber three. I think that shit is funny. I will also be sleeping on the couch for a while, seeing as I just told you all about it.
The minutia of datum, facts, and figures—these things envelop my screaming id and give me a sense of stability, a grounded line in all this faulty wiring. I become engrossed in finding a solution instantly, causing many people to ask me “if I am all right” and members of my own family to question whether or not I am psychotic. I get absorbed in different ideas and solving problems, losing all concepts of time and presence to the point at which, when I come to, I find I have not shaved, I am missing my pants, and I am stranded at a bus station somewhere in New Mexico. Jesus, if I had a nickel for every time I was stranded at a bus station in New Mexico . . .
Maybe it is because I like to grab hold of the structure of any given concept, to get a grip on it and therefore some understanding. As lovely as chaos can be sometimes, especially when you are stranded at a bus station in New Mexico, to me order is the warm blanket waiting for you when you get home, along with a cup of coffee and the sports page. Chaos has no meaning without order and vice versa; there is no basis for relativity when there is nothing to use for comparison. A clean house is always going to look cleaner if the place next door is Hoarder’s Hideaway, but you would not know it if the two were not sitting right next to each other. So chaos and order are necessary bedfellows, allowing freaks like me to embrace both and hop to and from each individual bouncy castle whenever the mood takes me.