The Her

The following events took place at an elementary school in Tempe, Arizona between 2001 and 2003. The accounts are personal experiences that I had while working there as a computer lab assistant.

I worked in the computer lab with grades k-5. The lab is positioned in the rear of the school where not a lot of people travel often. That is an important detail for the story. The school was established in 1971, so it's not that old, but who knows what happened on the land. Okay, so on with the true stories.

One day when a kindergarten class was in the lab (a particularly well behaved group). One of the little girls who did not speak very good English ran over to me and was crying. She was speaking Spanish, which I was not fluent in, so I didn't really know what was wrong. Another little girl who was bilingual told me that she saw a ghost. I tried to question the child further since I have always been intrigued, but she didn't want to talk about it really. I coaxed a little more and finally got her to say, "It was the her." I'm guessing that she called it "the her" because she only spoke a little English and mostly Spanish. She probably didn't realize the translation of language or something, but then that combination of words freaked me out big time! The class finished and I was left alone in the lab with no further incident for that day.

Another time, one of the custodians helped me move paper to a storage room in the lab. A little history is necessary here, but I'll keep it brief. The computer lab bordered the wall of the library. This is the same side that the kids were sitting on when they said they saw "the her". Over the first summer of my employment the lab was remodelled, as was the library, to have a space between the walls with an office on either side. My almost-office became a storage room instead. So like I said we moved a whole year supply worth of paper into this storage room and stacked it neatly in the corner. There were dozens of boxes and it took a couple hours to move them all over and store them.

So around two weeks later, someone came and needed some paper for a printer. I unlocked the door (only myself and the custodian had a key to the door because they hadn't made copies yet) and found the room in total disarray. Paper boxes were moved around into weird nonsensical positions and some were even emptied out onto the floor. For example, three boxes were stacked on the opposite end of the room on their sides. Several boxes were crammed onto the tiny server table, etc. Nothing like we left it.

I contacted the custodian and he swore that he did not go into the room. I believed him, and I didn't see why he would trash the place even if he had.

Another incident happened when I came into the lab early one morning to start up the computers. I noticed something in the middle of the room on the floor. I turned on the lights and it was a pyramid style pile of sand on the floor. I called the custodian and asked if my room had been serviced the previous night, and he informed me that it wasn't scheduled until the current night for cleaning. I asked him if he could come over and vacuum real quickly because there was sand all over the place. Well he came and looked shock and just said, "Wow! There IS sand all over the place!" Now the funny thing is that after the sand was vacuumed from that spot, he went around the surrounding area and there was no clank of the sound being picked up by the vacuum. It was as though someone emptied all the sand in the room into a small pile in the middle of the room. Usually when the lab would be vacuumed, it would be very clinkity sounding since it didn't get vacuumed but a couple times a week and it was heavily trafficked.

One final incident, and the most significant in my mind, happened when it was time to film the students for their student council advertisements. It was my job to record them and upload them onto the closed circuit television. It was a somewhat new use of the technologies at that time. So I filmed all the kids without incident, usually taking them in small groups. There was one kid left that I had to film alone, a fifth grader. I filmed her speech without incident and remarked on how well I thought she had done on her speech. It was really one of the best I've ever heard a kid her age give. So when I was editing all the film to go up onto the television system, I got to her recording, and mid way through the shoot, the screen went black with a booming sound as though something hit the camera. There was muffled noise, almost like the tape was old or something, although the entire tape worked perfectly except for these 20 seconds or so. It was almost like you could hear a static sound building up, and then some sound like if you whip a taut wire. You know how it makes that tinge noise. Well I slowed the film down using my cheesy program, and did a frame-by-frame advance on it. There was one frame right before the bang and black screen where you could see a little corner of light on the top of the film. Then, after the period elapsed, the film just came back, instantly in the next frame. It was the weirdest thing I ever saw film do.

The only other thing that happened was I told one of the teachers that I thought the school had a ghost, and she said nonchalantly, "Oh yeah, there's a couple of them." I didn't do any real research on it, and most of the events I discounted until later when I thought about weird things at that school. I'm sure I forgot a couple, can post them up later if I remember. Anyway, what do you guys think? Does any of this sound ghostly or paranormal to you all? I sure felt like most of these things did. Anyway, thanks for any thoughts you have on this.