Everyday Paranormal Experiences, Interview #7
“I used to live out in the sticks, you might say,” Jenny told me apologetically, “I mean, it was a small town. Still is. And with them small towns like that, they come chock full of stories, I’m sure you know.”
Having grown up mostly in small towns myself, I did know. She was right, small towns seem to have a story of intrigue attached to nearly every family, building, or landmark. Wetumka, Oklahoma was no different, and had its share of stories, including one about the haunted old school house just outside of town.
“Nearly everyone knows about it,” she explained, “Most folk pass it sometime or another – being that it sits nearby the Wetumka Cemetery. Now, it isn’t the cemetery that makes the school spooky in itself – fact is the school isn’t hardly that spooky at all. Neither is the cemetery, now that we’re on the topic.”
Jenny describes the town, a small farming community near a few bodies of water and rivers, mostly flat grasslands with trees clinging to the edges of creeks and ponds and other places too difficult to farm. She describes how the schoolhouse was used back in the ‘old days’ as the only source of education for the entire county. It was a single room school serving children from the age of 8 to that of 16, and only held classes for 4 hours a day so that the children could be home to help with the farm work at the beginning and end of each day.
“Well, some of them farmers thought four hours of schooling was a might bit much for kids that were going to be farmers themselves,” Jenny painted the back story of the school for me, “Especially since the farmers never had no education to speak of! So they went round and round with the schoolmarm: she said the kids needed the learning, and of course the farmers argued they didn’t.
“No one knows rightly who did it, but the schoolmarm was found dead one morning by the children. She had been beaten and apparently succumbed to her wounds. That was the last day of school in Wetumka until a right public school was built after World War Two.”
Jenny then goes on to describe that the story surrounding the old school house as most people know it: that the ghost of the old schoolmarm haunts the building. Jenny, in her adventurous youth had to find out for herself. She describes going to the building with her friends and spray-painting ghosts and foul language on the interior walls. They were having a great time trying to scare each other and just being hooligans when one of her friends decided they should burn the place to the ground, and then they could each claim to have burnt a school building (since school was not in any of their highest esteem).
Jenny rubs her arm as if cold when she describes the next part, “So he stuffed one of his socks into the bottle of vodka – none of us knew much about Molotovs but figured that was good enough. He lit that sock and chucked that bottle right at where the front of the classroom would have been. We all expected it to shatter and fire splash out over the room, but it didn’t. Instead, the bottle bounced off the wall and rolled back to the feet of the kid that threw it – shocked as he was and considering it was still on fire he kicked it right back towards the front of the room.
“It bounced off again and rolled back to the same kid. This time, the fire was out and it got awful warm in the room – all of us felt it, like the heat of fire! We were looking back and forth at one another trying to figure if we each felt it, but before we got a chance the bottle broke – but since the fire was gone we were safe from the Molotov – little pieces of glass hit us all, and it hurt. But the worst was the voice, just a deep and unnatural noise like a big truck’s engine! All it said was, ‘Leave!’ all long and drawn out, but I figure we each was out of there before we heard the end of the word, so fast we fled out to our cars!”
Jenny’s story ended in a rush, her words came out almost too fast for me to understand what she was saying. I could tell she was reliving the experience, and was both excited and scared of it. She finished by slowing down and telling me of a few others that have had odd experiences at the old schoolhouse, but none of them as colorful as her own.
Do you know of a place haunted by an angry spirit? Does it linger and frighten would-be trouble-makers? Have you been there? Wetumka, Oklahoma is a tiny place with a big ghost – if you believe in those types of things. What kinds of stories are in your town?
Next Week’s Everyday Paranormal Experiences, Interview #8: “Probe Me, Do It!”
On the Article Series:
I myself am a huge skeptic of all things paranormal or extra-terrestrial and I tend to take most tales of either with a huge grain of salt – sometimes even an entire salt shaker, depending on the tale that’s being weaved. I have even had a couple ghostly and otherworldly experiences myself, which I may relate in later stories – and I’m skeptical of those! Is what I experienced the truth of the experience or is there an empirical explanation that I simply have not yet unlocked? Regardless of my skeptical nature, ghost stories and alien encounters have always fascinated me as they have all of humanity for thousands of years.
It is this fascination that I wish to convey in a unique and different paranormal or alien experience every week – Thursday, to be exact. I will be conducting interviews with everyday people to hear their stories and relate them back to you, the Paranoid Gamers. Perhaps I’ll be interviewing some of you, as well.
Do you have an experience of a haunted item, place, or person? Have you been visited by aliens or heretofore undocumented intelligent life – terrestrial or extra so? If you’d like to share your experience and possibly have your tale published in this series of articles, please contact me and we can relive your experience.
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Daniel Flatt
October 14, 2012 @ 3:24 pm
Perhaps I see a pattern because I’ve caught up reading all 10 of your articles within the last hour, but it seems that either most people you talk to speak like country yokels or you color them that way.
Either way I’ve only visited a supposed haunted place once of my own accord and it was during Halloween at a KKK meeting place that is supposedly also used by satanists. Each of us were dared to head up the stairs of the rickety house, peer out of the second story window so the others could see, and return bravely triumphant.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared when it was my turn, but since there were girls present I tucked that away and headed bravely into the building. There were discarded and disgusting matresses, stained with who knows what, as well as discarded needles and satanist symbols on the wall. I made my way up the stairs two at a time, eager to get this over with, and each one creaked loudly with the strain.
Halfway across the floor of the second story something terrifying happened. A sharp crack sounded as loud as a gunshot and my left leg plunged through the floor. Of course I hadn’t expected this and thought for sure a ghost had me and screamed in a fashion much like a small girl. It was extremely embarassing and terrifying, whether or not there were no ghosts there.
From then on I make it a habit not to visit old buildings that seem to be frequented by crackheads. I feel it’s a good policy.