Terror in the Shadows vol. 8: Terror in the Shadows Anthology

Mount Pleasant

By Ron Ripley

The town of Melbourne, New Hampshire, had closed Mount Pleasant Elementary School early in 1980.

The main reason for the closing was simple enough.

Mount Pleasant was old. None of the doors or windows were up to code, the wiring was out of date, and there were more pipes that leaked than those that didn’t.

Many of the teachers and most of the students were happy to see the school sealed and the doors padlocked. The school had always been too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter, and there was always something just a little bit off about the three-story building. Books would disappear, pencils would vanish, and doors had a habit of keeping themselves open when anyone wanted them closed.

The students insisted that the school was haunted. All their teachers told them they were wrong and that there was nothing to worry about. The wise and learned adults reaffirmed that the building was just old and that’s what old buildings did.

Most of the teachers, however, knew that the building was, in fact, haunted. The structure had been originally built in 1892; the school had been verifiably haunted since 1947.

Often, children would see an adult who wasn’t really there, an adult who looked as if he was from another time. The teachers dismissed these sightings, saying the students saw things, or perhaps it was just someone visiting, despite the fact that no one was listed in the visitor’s log.

While some of the teachers suspected who the ghost might be, two of them knew exactly who it was.

The second grade teacher, Mrs. Annabelle Callahan-Smith, and the first grade teacher, Mrs. Eleanor Black-Jackson, both knew who the ghost was.

Annabelle and Eleanor had gone to school together at Mount Pleasant Elementary in 1946. They remembered the principal, Mr. Peter Harris. Mr. Harris was, the ladies recalled, a force to be reckoned with. He refused to accept anything less than the very best from the staff and their small student body.

He was as hard on the students and the teachers as he was on himself, and when he failed to do something, he took it quite personally.

Mr. Harris was a veteran of World War One and of World War Two. He had even been wounded at the landing on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. In addition to his wound, Mr. Harris had watched his brother and 3 friends drown off the coast of Normandy, France.

In 1946, Mr. Harris had been the principal of Mount Pleasant for less than a year. On December 2, 1946, two students, Alex and Nicholas Hall, had gone into the basement to see if they could get more heat out of the furnace. Their father, Michael, had taught the boys how to work their own furnace in case anything happened to him. The brothers were sure they could make the school’s furnace work better as well.

Unfortunately for the boys, they were unable to do what they wanted, and instead of increasing the heat, they set themselves on fire.

Mr. Harris attempted to save the boys, and while he did manage to retrieve their bodies, he was unable to save their lives. The man who had survived two world wars and the Great Depression was burned over thirty percent of his body in the effort to rescue the boys, and he was heartbroken at the loss of the two brothers.

On December 18, 1946, Mr. Harris left the burn unit at the Concord Hospital in New Hampshire. Somehow, Mr. Harris returned to the school that evening. Using his keys, he went inside, up to the third floor, opened a window, tied a length of rope around his neck, and hanged himself when he leaped out of the window.

The janitor found Mr. Harris early in the morning, thankfully before any of the students arrived. There was no note, no clue other than memorial cards for Alex and Nicholas Hall.

Annabelle walked to the third floor, taking the back stairwell and singing softly to herself while looking forward to the weekend. As she neared the landing for the third floor, she caught a slight whiff of pipe tobacco. It caused her to hesitate at the landing, for the only person who had smoked a pipe had been Mr. Harris.

She ambled towards the window, prepared to look out and down onto downtown Melbourne, unaware that it was the same window from which Mr. Harris had hung himself.