Case 12: Green Rock Corners Schoolhouse in Dana

The Green Rock Corners Schoolhouse served elementary school children in the small hamlet of Dana from its construction in 1896 until it closed in 1956 when the modern Dana Elementary School was built. Ever since its closure, it has served several functions, including as a post office for several decades prior to a new one being built in the 1990s. As of the 2010s, it was a small museum under the care of a homeowner next door, and it was during the restoration of the schoolhouse when activity really picked up.

While there had been reports of paranormal activity dating back to its days as a post office, the owner of the property explained to us that when he began renovating the schoolhouse and restoring it to how it looked just before it closed, there was a huge spike in ghost sightings. In particular, it seemed as though a poltergeist had taken hold, as during the renovation process itself, tools would often be moved or go missing. He had done some of his own amateur investigation, and even showed us a few EVPs he had captured inside the schoolhouse. All of them featured either the voice of a woman or the voice of a child, which makes sense given the building’s use.

One particularly disturbing EVP was captured when he left a digital voice recorder inside the classroom for half an hour. The ghost of a young child was heard singing something in the background before suddenly letting out a loud scream, at which point the digital voice recorder was knocked off the desk it was sitting on and slid across the floor. When he went back inside to grab it, it was sitting on the floor next to the teacher’s desk despite the desk it had been placed on being three rows back. It could not have been thrown by a human, as such a throw would have damaged the digital voice recorder and maybe have even stopped the recording, but in this case, it kept going for another ten minutes, even capturing a woman’s voice a few minutes later that appeared to be instructing someone.

Why was this schoolhouse so particularly active? Was there something that happened during its history that could explain why the spirits here seemed so unusually active and potentially malevolent? Well, while nothing of note happened when it operated as a schoolhouse, something tragic happened during its time as Dana’s post office between 1957 and 1980 that might shed light on the darkness within.

In 1971, one of the postmen who worked out of the office committed suicide while on duty. He had just been served divorce papers, and was not taking the separation from his wife and children particularly well. He shot himself inside the building right before it closed, resulting in no one finding his body until the following morning when another postman came to open it for business.

In 1980, the schoolhouse was abandoned again. For a time, it was a convenience store and then a flower shop. It was abandoned for a third time in 2003, and it sat derelict until 2011 when it was purchased and restored. When it was purchased, vandals had tagged the walls with graffiti and had left trash all over. Disturbingly, the current owner even found two pentagrams drawn with spray paint, one on a wall and one on the floor near what’s now the teacher’s desk. Perhaps people had broken in and conducted some kind of rituals in the building.

Our plan was to be on site for a whole night, staying from dusk on Friday to dawn on Saturday. With all of our equipment ready to go, we were let in by the building owner and began to get ready. Little did we know we were walking into a spiritual ambush.

…

During the daytime, we began to do a walk-around of the school, talking with the building owner, an older man in his early sixties, who we will keep anonymous, and figuring out how we would approach tonight’s investigation. It was a very foggy day out, with all of us barely able to see out more than ten feet in front of us, making for a rather eerie atmosphere. “So,” Marie asked him out in front as Yukiko filmed them. “At what point did you feel like the activity here became malicious?”

“I wanna say it was when a contractor I hired for wiring quit on me out of nowhere,” replied the building owner. “He said he got something thrown at him when he was inside by himself. After he finished for the day, he called me and told me he was done.”

“How did you take the news?”

“I was shocked. I knew there had been some disturbances or whatever, but I had no idea it could get violent. I mean… The idea of ghosts at all seems so weird, and now you’re telling me they can hurt people. It was around that time that I began to do some investigating of my ow-“

Both he and Marie were interrupted when Yukiko heard something in the school and said, “Guys, hold up. What the Hell was that?”

Marie turned towards the school, having heard the same thing. “(building owner), did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “It sounded like a man. There shouldn’t be anyone inside there now.” All three of them walked into the school, the building owner unlocking the front door to let them in. “Hello? Anyone here?”

“I wonder if I got it on camera,” Yukiko thought out loud. “It wasn’t loud, but it was noticeable.”

It seemed as though Marie felt an unnerving presence as soon as she walked in, as she took a deep breath and told the other two, “I don’t feel so good, guys. Something’s in here that doesn’t want us.”

The building owner, unaware of Marie’s abilities up to now, asked her, “You can sense them?”

“I’m sensitive to the paranormal,” she explained to him as she sat down at a desk. “Out of everyone in the group, I’m the first to usually realize when something’s off.”

“Can you see or hear them when we can’t?”

“Sometimes.” Marie then asked him, “Just to be clear, there’s no gas running to this place, and there would be no reason for a carbon monoxide leak, right?”

“No,” the building owner shook his head. “There’s no gas here. Besides, I got a few windows open.” Sure enough three of the eight windows into the main room of the school were indeed open. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m just making sure it’s not CO poisoning that’s causing this. We try to cover all of our bases with natural explanations.”

“Ah, okay. That makes sen-“ The trio then heard what sounded like a child whimpering inside the school, which was also captured on the camera. All three of them froze up in fear. “Oh no…”

Yukiko whispered, “Did you hear that, Marie?”

“Yep…”

The building owner called out to whichever spirit had spoken, asking, “Who was that? Were you a student here? Can you give us another sign you’re here?” The trio waited for half a minute, wondering if they would get a response, but ultimately, nothing else came. “Huh… Maybe they’re gone.”

Marie meanwhile was feeling sicker and sicker by the second. “Ugh… I don’t know what it is, but I feel like I’m gonna puke.” Realizing she had sworn in front of the building owner, she apologized to him with, “I’m sorry for swearing. I just don’t feel too great.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “Your skin looks pretty pale, actually.”

“Yeah,” Yukiko also noticed. “You’re as white as a ghost.” All three of them laughed when they realized she had made a pun unintentionally. “Wow, I didn’t even realize.”

“Speaking of ghosts,” Marie then added, feeling some relief from her queasiness due to Yukiko’s pun. “I feel like there’s definitely someone watching us, and they want us out.” She then stood up, but almost tripped as she did, catching herself just in time. “Woah!”

Concerned, the building owner asked her, “Hey, are you okay, Marie?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She then took a deep breath. “Let’s stay out for now.”

…

Once all of the cameras were on and we were ready to begin, I told the group, “The building itself is pretty small, so we’ll split up into teams again and explore the grounds too. Team 1 will be me and Yukiko. Team 2 will be Ashley, Marie, and Jared. Team 1 will start in the schoolhouse and Team 2 will start outside.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jared replied as he scanned the main room of the schoolhouse with his camera. He then asked Marie, “You said you wanted to stay out of the schoolhouse for the time being, right?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “There’s something in there that doesn’t like me for some reason. Eventually, I’ll have to go in, though.”

“Just let me know if you feel like you wanna end early,” he assured her. “I can take you home.”

“I’ll be fine. Trust me, Jared.”

As Team 2 left the schoolhouse, me and Yukiko got ready. As I turned on the EMF meter, my sister said to me, “I’m worried for Marie. She did not look great when she came in here earlier.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine later,” I replied, unaware of what would eventually happen as the night went on. “It doesn’t sound like anything she hasn’t gone through before. Besides, if the worst comes to worst, Jared could take her back home.” I then turned on my digital voice recorder and began an EVP session. “Alright, here we go. Is there anyone here with us? We want to speak with you. We heard that you’ve been really bothering the man who owns this building.” Pause. “You know he’s been trying to clean this place up. He really cares about the history of this place and wants to preserve it. I don’t understand why you keep bothering him when he’s trying to save the place you’re living in.” Pause. “Did you go to school here?” Pause. “Did you work here as a teacher or maybe as a postman?” Pause. “Can you give us a sign you’re here?”

At this moment, we both felt a cold breeze inside the school. Yukiko, confused, asked me in Japanese, “Did you feel that? Did someone leave a window open?”

“No,” I replied. “None of the windows or doors are open.” I then began asking more questions. “Was that you? Did you walk by us?” Pause. “Do you have something to say to us?” Pause. “Do you like the fact we're here?” I then looked over at the EMF meter and realized it was registering rather high readings. “The EMF meter is going nuts,” I told my sister as I picked it up and held it to the camera. “Look at it.”

“Wow, that’s high,” she replied. “I’m sure you’re gonna get some voices on the rec-“

Just then, we heard a chilling voice emanate from a closet near the entrance to the school, causing both of us to stop. An older male voice called out from the closet, giving me an answer as to whether or not the spirits, or at least this spirit, wanted us to stay in the schoolhouse: ‘Get out.’

“Get out,” I whispered to my sister in English, repeating what the male spirit had said. “It just said get out.” I then asked the spirit who told us to leave, “Why do you want us to leave? What did we do to you?”

After another pause, Yukiko told me, “Let’s see if we got anything.”

“Yeah.” I stopped the recording and began to play it back to see what kind of answers we got. Sure enough, we got several, and none of them were particularly comforting.

In response to being told we wanted to speak to the spirits inside the schoolhouse, we were told in a hushed whisper to ‘fuck off,’ making this the first time we had ever been cursed at by a spirit, but not the last. Honestly, I was surprised it had not happened sooner. Then, in response to being asked if they went to school here, a different, younger voice chimed in, one that seemed far more benign but still creepy given that it sounded like a child: ‘I went here.’ Next, in response to being asked why they wanted us to leave, a low-pitched growl was heard.

Yukiko asked me after the recording finished, “Did one of them tell us to fuck off?”

“It sounds like it,” I replied. “That little kid who said he went here creeped me out a bit.”

“No kidding. Child ghosts are always terrifying to think about. There’s just something off about them, like… I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s something really weird about it.”

“No, no, I get it. I agree. It’s scary as Hell.” Then, Yukiko jumped up a bit, almost dropping the camera as she did as she yelped in fright. “Woah, woah, woah, what happened?”

“I just felt a fucking hand on me,” she told me, visibly shaking from what seemed to be the touch of a ghost. “Someone just grabbed my ass and squeezed it.”

“For real? Like, right now?!”

“Yeah,” she replied as she set the camera down on a desk, clearly agitated and understandably feeling violated. “I could feel the hand, too. It was ice cold, Takeo.”

Needless to say, I was not happy with whoever had touched my little sister. If a living person had done that, I would have probably broken the hand they used to touch her. Given this was a spirit that I could not see nor beat up, I instead yelled at them. Normally, you are not supposed to antagonize spirits, but this crossed the line to the point where I had to. “Okay, what the fuck?! That was my little sister! She’s only fifteen years old, man! You’re lucky you’re dead, because if you were alive and you grabbed her ass, I’d beat the living shit out of you!” I walked over to the closet where we had heard the ghost from earlier, still fuming from what had happened to Yukiko, and flung the door open, yelling into the closet, “Are you still in here, asshole?! Why don’t you come on out and face us, coward?!”

My antagonism seemed to have set this same spirit off, because a chair was knocked over near my sister, causing her once again to scream in fear. “Holy shit!”

I ran back over to my sister and asked her, “What happened?!”

“The fucking chair got knocked over,” she told me as I looked down at the fallen chair. “I saw it happen!”

I then looked over at my digital voice recorder I had left on a desk and found that it had been drained of all of its battery power, as had the EMF meter. Realizing what this meant, I muttered, “Oh, that’s not good…”

This was then followed by two loud bangs on the walls, which scared both of us half to death, followed by a box of chalk sticks on the teacher’s desk being thrown at me, barely missing my head when I dodged it. The box hit a wall and fell, spilling its broken contents onto the floor. My sister yelled as she ran for the door, “Go, go, go!”

“Right behind you!”

As we ran out of the schoolhouse, Team 2 had been talking near the truck when they heard us yelling and screaming. Marie looked over and asked us, “Hey, what happened in there?!”

“We got attacked,” I explained as we stopped in front of them and caught our breath. “My sister… She got her ass grabbed, and then a chair got knocked over, and then someone threw a box of chalk at me… Holy shit… Whatever’s in there hates us.”

Yukiko at this point broke down and began to tear up, the weight of being inappropriately touched beginning to hit her. “It… Oh my God… I felt a hand grab me and squeeze.” She clearly was sickened by what had happened to her.

Ashley told my sister, “Maybe you should sit in the truck for a bit.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That sounds like a good idea, actually.”

Marie then suggested, “Why don’t we swap? The three of us will go in. You can stay out here with your sister.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Jared replied with a nod as he reached into his pocket and handed me his keys. “Here you go.”

“Alright,” I nodded as I took the keys. “We’ll do that.” I then hugged Yukiko and told her as she wiped the tears away from her face, “There, there, it’s gonna be okay.” We then walked to Jared’s truck together. “I just gotta get new batteries for the EMF meter, and then you guys can head in.”

…

Team 2 was now inside the schoolhouse. In contrast to what had happened before, for a while, nothing of note went on. “This is odd,” Marie commented. “I thought for sure I was gonna get blasted with negative energy as soon as I walked in, but I don’t really feel any of that right now.”

“Yeah,” Ashley replied. “It’s been pretty quiet for the past hour.”

“I’m still shocked the EMF meter and one of our recorders got drained at the same time. Two pieces of equipment going down at once is unusual.” She then picked up a photo camera and began to take pictures of the school. “Let’s see if anything comes up in pictures.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Ashley pulled out her phone to also take pictures of the main room, but after taking four of them, she felt the air in the room get colder. “Hey, it’s getting chilly here.”

“Yeah,” Jared nodded. “I feel that too. It’s not too cold out for October, but now it feels like it’s freezing in here.”

Marie shot two photos of the teacher’s desk and then set the camera back down. As soon as she did, you could tell from the footage that she was beginning to feel something given her expression. “Hmm…” She took a deep breath and looked around, seemingly getting more agitated with every passing second. “Ah… Uh…”

Jared noticed this first, asking her, “Uh, Marie, are you okay?”

Ashley turned around and asked the two of them, “What’s going on?”

“Oh no,” Marie said with a sigh. “I feel something. This isn’t good.” She then turned around and looked at the entrance to the main room. “Oh my God… Don’t tell me…”

A confused Ashley asked her, “Marie, what’s happening? What’s going on with you?”

Marie turned away from the entrance and closed her eyes. “No, don’t tell me it’s back…”

Jared was getting increasingly worried. “Who’s back, Marie? What the Hell are you talking about?”

It was at this point that I walked back into the schoolhouse. I had decided to run in and check on the others, with Yukiko insisting on staying in the truck for the time being. As I walked in, I opened the door to the main room and announced my presence. “Hey guys, it’s me.”

“Something’s up with Marie,” Ashley told me. “She’s not acting right.”

“I’m not possessed,” Marie denied. “Not this time. It’s not like that. It’s just… I think it’s back.”

I asked her as I walked over, “What’s back?”

“The spirit from Leesville. Somehow… It came back.” The rest of us went totally silent as we realized what was going on, fearful for what was to come. Little did we know just what this spirit’s return would mean for all of us very soon. Marie sat down at a desk and commented, “God damn it, just when I thought I was out of the woods…”

Jared said in disbelief, “Are you kidding me? This piece of shit is back?!”

“This isn’t good,” I said as the full weight of this revelation hit me. “Now we not only have to deal with the spirits here, but this asshole from Leesville too.”

“The ones here are not happy about it, either,” Marie commented. “I feel a lot of negative energy now. It’s like a light switch got flipped on.”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. As I too sat down at a desk, I asked my girlfriend, “Can you promise me to be careful tonight? This investigation’s already proving to be an interesting one, and not in an entirely good way.”

“Yeah,” she assured me. “I’ll be fine.” This assurance, however, was the last thing I remembered for several minutes, and what was captured in the footage would explain why.

Marie decided to try an EVP session, and began recording and asking questions. “Who’s here with us? We know there’s multiple of you.” Pause. “Can you give us a name?” Pause. “Are you from Leesville or Dana?” Pause. “Why are you tormenting the people who live and work here?” Pause. “If you’re attached to me, why?”

In response to that last question, the three of them heard a hiss from the other end of the room, causing them all to turn towards the closet near the entrance. “Woah,” Jared said out of shock. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” Ashley replied. “Something hissed at us.” It should be noted that in addition to this audible response we all could hear, Marie also got a response to the question about names that was only captured on the digital voice recorder, with a spirit giving the name of Richard. This, eerily enough, was the first name of the postman who committed suicide inside the building when it was a post office. Ashley looked down at the EMF meter and saw that it was registering high readings once again like it had when me and Yukiko were inside. “The EMF meter’s going off.”

“How much?”

“It’s over the halfway point,” she replied as she picked it up and showed the camera. “And it’s slowly climbing.”

Marie commented, “There’s something very evil in this schoolhouse. It’s not just the spirit from Leesville, either. It may not even be human. It might be demonic.”

Ashley asked her, “You really think so?”

“I do.” Marie then took a deep breath and turned to me. “Takeo, what do you think?” When I did not respond, instead only staring blankly into the wall behind her, Marie asked me, “Hey, Takeo, what’s going on?”

Ashley walked over to me and leaned in, asking me, “Yo, what’s up? Can you hear us?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I can hear you.” According to the others, my tone of voice was different, the first sign that something was very wrong. Again, let me reiterate that I remember nothing from this, and I am only going off of the footage Jared captured and the testimony of him, Ashley, and Marie.

Jared, getting worried about me, asked me, “Do you feel alright, dude?”

“I feel okay,” I said, giving him a thumbs-up. “I’m just sitting down for a bit.”

Marie then looked into my eyes and stared at me for about ten seconds. She would later tell me that though she was looking at my face, when she looked into my eyes, she began to realize that it was not me behind the proverbial controls. “Guys…”

Ashley turned to her and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

“Takeo’s possessed.”

Jared’s eyes widened in fear. “No way! He cannot be possessed, dude! You saw what happened when you got possessed, right?!”

“There’s no telling what he’ll do from now on,” Marie explained. “Not all possessions end in violence. We’ll have to sit and wait it out.”

I then looked up at Marie, apparently with nothing but contempt and hatred in my eyes. “You can’t get rid of me,” I said to her in a low-pitched voice. “Marie, I’m right here with you.”

Marie jumped up from her desk, startled by what I had said to her. “Oh shit! Don’t tell me he’s possessed by… Oh no!”

“I don’t know who you are,” Ashley told me. “But whoever you are, I’d appreciate it if you got the Hell out of my boyfriend’s body!” It should be noted that at this exact moment, the digital voice recorder Marie had captured a female voice saying ‘He won’t leave.’ Was this a spirit who belonged at the schoolhouse commenting on the spirit that had attached itself to Marie? Or was this spirit commenting on us staying in the building?

As I remained silent, still staring at the trio, Jared told the others, “This is bad. We need to tell Yukiko about this.”

“Don’t tell her,” I growled at him. “She doesn’t need to know.”

“Screw that. We’re telling her.”

Ashley picked up one of the portable radios and called out, “Yukiko, get in here. There’s an emergency involving your brother.”

She came back over the radio with, “What’s going on?”

“He’s possessed.”

After a few seconds, and with worry in her voice, she replied, “I’ll be right there!”

Angered by this, I yelled at Ashley, “I told you not to call her up here!”

“Get out of Takeo’s body,” she yelled back at me. At this moment, Jared’s camera captured a black mist exiting my body, which no one saw with the naked eye. We were unable to debunk this as a shadow from any of us due to where it appeared in comparison to our own shadows.

Marie by now was panicking. “Oh no, oh no, oh no. This is bad. This is very, very bad.” She walked over to me and put a hand on my shoulder, telling me, “Takeo, you need to listen to me. You need to get that spirit out of your body. It’s occupying yo-“

“Get the fuck off of me,” I then said as I forced Marie away from me with a shove.

“Woah, woah, woah,” Ashley warned the spirit possessing me as she grabbed me by my right hand. “Don’t you dare lay a hand on her! If you wanna hurt anyone else, you’re gonna have to go through me, bitch!”

I stared into her eyes, seething with rage. Ashley would tell me afterwards that my expression was the angriest she had ever seen me, and that it was clear I was not in charge of my own body. “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Yukiko then ran into the schoolhouse. “Takeo!”

I turned to her and yelled, “Get out, little girl! This doesn’t concern you!”

“Get out of my brother’s body!” Yukiko ran up to me and grabbed my other hand, pulling on it despite my best efforts to fend her off. “Ashley, make him sit down!”

“Got it,” my girlfriend replied as she began to force me to sit down at a student desk despite me doing my best to resist her. “Sit down! Agh, come on!” Once I was forced into a seat, Ashley got in my face and yelled, “I’m gonna tell you one more time: Get the Hell out of Takeo Nakamura’s body or else!”

I grew silent, not saying anything as I just stared into the distance. Yukiko looked at me and begged in Japanese, “Oniichan! Oniichan! Can you hear me?! You need to break free! Don’t let this spirit possess your body anymore!”

Marie then stared at the blackboard behind the teacher’s desk with a look of utter terror on her face. “Guys… Look…”

The rest of the group minus myself all turned to the blackboard and found something that shocked them to the core. Somehow, while they were busy trying to save me from whatever was possessing me, a message had been scrawled onto the blackboard, with a single stick of chalk lying on the ground in front of the board. The message read: ‘NO HE (illegible)’.

Sufficiently freaked out, Jared remarked somewhat sarcastically, “Oh, this is just great, man! Just fucking great! Now we got fucking ghost messages and shit!”

“Oh my God,” Yukiko said as she read the message. “This is getting even worse.”

“Ugh,” I then moaned as I blinked several times and looked around, slowly coming to. “What… Who… What’s going on? Did I pass out?” From this point on, I began to remember what was going on, the possession seemingly ending. “Guys, what happened?” I looked at the board and then asked, “Did any of you write that?”

Marie asked me, “You’re back?”

“Back?”

Ashley and Yukiko then surprised me with a bear hug, almost knocking me out of my desk. Both of them said at the same time, “Oh, thank God, you’re alright!”

“Woah, hey! What happened to me?”

“Dude,” Jared explained. “You got possessed. I’m not joking. You literally got possessed for like the past few minutes.”

A feeling of dread hit me as I began to wonder what I had done. “Oh God… What did I do?”

“You yelled at us,” Ashley explained as she and Yukiko split away from me. “You even yelled at your sister for running in here.”

“Holy shit…” I sighed and got up from the desk. “Anyway, did any of you write on the chalkboard?”

“No,” Marie insisted. “We didn’t write this. I don’t know who did!”

“It’s definitely none of our handwriting,” Yukiko commented. “It’s way too messy. I can’t even read what the third word is.”

As Ashley took several photos of the ghostly handwriting on the blackboard, Jared asked us, “Do you guys think maybe we should just take a break for a bit and head back outside? This is getting out of hand.”

“Maybe,” I wondered as well. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

…

After this had transpired, we all went back to Jared’s truck, reviewed some of the photos we had taken, and decided to take an hour-long nap. In the photos we looked at, we actually managed to get two with anomalies in them. The first, which was of a window outside, showed what seemed to be a white figure floating above the ground in the window frame. The second was inside the school, and showed a black shadow standing next to the teacher’s desk. Neither had discernible features, but were still creepy nonetheless.

To ensure we could capture some evidence even while we were away, we left a camera inside the schoolhouse on the teacher’s desk, aimed at the main room as a whole. For an hour and a half, it kept running as we rested up. In that time, it captured an orb traveling across the room and disappearing about thirty minutes in, followed by what sounded like footsteps another five minutes after that, and then finally indiscernible whispers about ten minutes before we woke up and prepared to head back in. To say the activity inside the schoolhouse was exceptionally high would be an understatement, especially given how small the building was.

We ultimately decided that Marie and Yukiko would enter the schoolhouse by themselves. The following is a description of what they captured, and it was some of the most frightening evidence we had ever gotten up to then.

…

Marie and Yukiko walked in and picked up the camera we had left inside, with the latter stopping the recording briefly to swap the batteries out. Once this was all set, she began to record again. “Okay, I’m ready.”

Marie held up a digital voice recorder and began to ask some more aggressive questions. “Why did you possess my friend earlier? Did you have a message for us?” At this moment, the digital voice recorder captured a chilling response in the form of a deep male voice saying ‘It was fun.’ Marie, unaware of this, kept going, asking and then demanding, “Why are you doing this? You know we want you to stop. You’re not doing anybody any good by bothering them! Leave the man who restored this place alone! Leave us alone, too!” Again, another voice came through, this time in the form of an indiscernible female voice.

Yukiko commented, “I do not like the vibe in here right now at all. I can feel something… Something evil.”

“Oh yeah,” Marie nodded. “This is bad. If you’re feeling it, I’m feeling it ten times more. Whatever’s in this schoolhouse really hates us being in here, especially given what happened earlier.”

At this exact moment, they both heard the closet door open on its own from the front room. Both of them quieted down as they then saw the door to the front room also open by itself, their blood running cold and shivers running down their spines. Both of them were too scared to even make a sound as they stared at the doorway in fear.

Yukiko turned the camera towards Marie, who looked at her with an expression of panic on her face as she whispered to her, “They’re in the room…”

Yukiko then turned the camera back to the doorway, only to be met with a tall male shadow figure with no face standing in said doorway that only appeared to them once she and Marie both had turned their heads back to the front. Both of them screamed as loudly as they could, panicking as they tried to find a way out, only to realize the only proper way out was the front door itself. As the figure slowly stepped into the room, Yukiko turned to a window next to her and said, “Fuck it, we need to break the window!”

“What?!”

“I’m breaking the fucking window, Marie!” She dropped her camera on the ground and picked up a chair, tossing it out of the window and smashing the glass. “Come on!” She then grabbed the camera and jumped out, soon followed by Marie, not once looking back as they ran from the schoolhouse, screaming and crying the whole way back to the truck.

When we heard them, me, Jared, and Ashley got out of the truck, confused as to what was going on. I asked the duo, “Guys, what happened?”

Marie yelled at a rapid pace, “There’s something in there! We just saw someone standing in the doorway!” She was so hysterical that she could barely be understood. “We gotta go! Fuck the investigation, we need to leave right now!”

“Calm down,” I told both of them. “What happened?!”

“An apparition appeared right in front of us,” Yukiko explained, breathing heavily as she did. “It was literally maybe twenty feet away from us when we got out!”

Jared then yelled out as he pointed at the schoolhouse, “Holy crap, look at that!” As well all turned back to the school, we saw the front door to the school was wide open, and a faint white light was emanating from the doorway. “What the Hell is that?!”

At that point, I made the determination to end the investigation. “Marie’s right. We’re leaving.”

No sooner did we get in the truck and close all the doors did the light inside the school suddenly dissipate. At the moment it did, we heard what sounded like a man screaming from within the schoolhouse. Jared floored it out of the driveway and onto the road the schoolhouse was on, eager to exit the area as soon as he could.

…

This investigation managed to eclipse the private home investigation in Harukawa as our scariest yet. As we drove away and got closer to the village to crash at me and Yukiko’s house for the rest of the night, I called the building owner, who thankfully answered the phone despite it being well past midnight. With Yukiko rolling on a camera to document the call, the building owner answered the phone with, “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Takeo,” I replied. “Uh… We had to end the investigation a little early.”

“What happened?”

“You weren’t kidding when you said this place was really haunted,” I explained. “And I want to apologize in advance before you head back up there later today, because a window got broken.”

Confused, the building owner replied, “Broken? How?”

“My sister and Marie went in there and apparently got confronted by a ghost. They said it was a tall figure with no discernible features and no face walking towards them from the entrance. They got much of it on video, actually. Uh… I think Yukiko threw a chair to break the glass and they jumped out.”

“Oh shit,” the building owner sighed. “That’s a new one. I’ve seen the postman before, but he actually looked like a postman.”

“So you’re saying you’ve never seen a ghost like that inside the building before?”

“Nope.”

I took a deep breath as I began to realize that perhaps the figure was not of the schoolhouse, but of the house in Leesville. “I see. I’ll let you get back to bed. We’ll talk more tomorrow. Again, I’m ready sorry for the damage to the window, (building owner).”

“Don’t worry about it,” he assured me with a yawn. “I can replace the window and repair the chair. I’ll see you at noon tomorrow, Takeo. Have a good night.”

“You too.”

…

At noontime that Saturday, I met up with the building owner and showed him some of the evidence we had captured. Needless to say, he was disturbed, but also somewhat comforted knowing that he had even more definitive proof that he was neither crazy nor making any of this up. When I showed him the video Yukiko got of the figure that had chased them out, he confirmed that he had never seen that spirit before, and when I told him about the spirit attachment Marie had been dealing with, he suggested that perhaps that the figure was a manifestation of said spirit.

After more analysis over the next few days, we made the determination that the spirit from Leesville had possibly induced higher levels of activity than usual within the schoolhouse, which was already pretty active on its own. Marie felt really bad for it, even though we all assured her that it was not her fault. I soon catalogued all of our evidence and stored it away, already making plans to edit and release evidence from our earlier investigations online.

Our last case, however, would delay that release, and change our lives forever.