The Broken Stage

Our school, St. Evangeline’s, was built on the site of an old Victorian orphanage, and it feels like it. The halls are long and drafty, the windows are narrow and tall, and there’s a constant, low hum that might be the heating or might be something else. We’ve all got our stories. Most are just whispers, meant to scare the first-years, but a few are real. There’s the boy on the stage, for instance. His name is Oliver, and he never leaves the theater. He’s small, maybe nine or ten, with a thatch of dark hair and a threadbare suit that looks like it’s from a hundred years ago. Ms. Albright, our drama teacher, was the first to see him, perched in the catwalk above the stage. She yelled at him to get down, thinking it was a student playing a prank, but when she climbed the rickety stairs to the catwalk, he was gone. Later, she found the door to the catwalk locked from the inside, and the key was in her pocket. Since then, several of us have spotted him during rehearsals, just a flicker in the corner of your eye, a shape in the darkness above the stage. The story goes that he was a young orphan in a performance, and the old balcony collapsed under him, dropping him to the stage below. I’ve heard the new floorboards creak even when no one’s standing on them, as if remembering his fall.

Then there’s the girl in the west wing. Her name is Beatrice, and she haunts the corridor by the old language classrooms, especially the restroom at the end. We often see her standing by the fire escape doors, just staring out at the overgrown yard, but when you approach, she vanishes. The story is that she was a student here in the 1970s, and she took her own life in that restroom. I’ve heard her crying in the stalls, a soft, hiccuping sound that makes your skin crawl, and the doors will slam shut one by one when no one is there. It’s not scary in a jump-scare way; it’s more of a deep, sorrowful presence. You feel like you’re intruding, and you hurry out.

And there’s the one in the history room, number 204. We call her Mary. She moves the chairs. You’ll walk in for class and find all the chairs arranged in a neat circle, facing the walls, even though they were in rows the night before. The caretaker says it’s a draft, but we know better. Some kids have seen her—a thin woman in a gray dress, standing by the window, her back to you. If you say hello, she slowly turns her head, but no one has ever seen her face fully; they always look away before she completes the turn.

But the one that bothers me the most is the new one. It started after the fire in the art room. They closed off that wing, but we can still see the scorch marks through the windows. Now, there’s a feeling in the main stairwell, a pressure, like someone is standing behind you on the stairs, breathing down your neck, but when you turn, there’s no one. And sometimes, in the corner of your eye, you see a black shape, like a tall man in a long coat, but it’s gone when you look directly. It’s not like the others; it feels angry, malicious. It feels like it’s waiting.

I’ve started taking the long way to class, through the gym, just to avoid the stairs. And I’ve started carrying a small iron key in my pocket, an old one I found in the theater. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel a little safer. But I know it’s only a matter of time before the new one makes itself known. And I’m terrified of what it will do.