The Empty Floor

The smell of burnt sugar and canned peaches clung to the air, a ghost of countless failed attempts at pie crust and apple crisp. I was a junior at Millbrook High, and our school district had just shuffled things around again. The old junior high, a squat, two-story brick building that had sat silent for years, was now the district’s administrative headquarters. They’d installed the superintendents and bookkeepers on the ground floor, and for some reason, they decided to keep the second floor as a sort of time capsule, locking off the old classrooms except for one: the home economics room.

Mrs. Ellery, our home ec teacher, was a wiry woman with a perpetual frown and a habit of clucking her tongue at our sloppy knife cuts. She’d been teaching for thirty years, and though she was strict, there was a kindness in her eyes that made me think she’d seen more than she let on. I’d signed up for her cooking and nutrition class as a sophomore, and I’d also taken her child development class. It was during my junior year, 2015, that the new arrangement came to be. The second floor of the old building was officially ‘closed for renovation,’ but Mrs. Ellery’s classroom was still in use. We had to walk up the creaking stairs, past the doors of empty classrooms with their dusty chalkboards and stacked desks, to reach the two small rooms that comprised her domain.

At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We’d measure flour, crack eggs, and bake our undercooked cakes in the four mini kitchens that lined the back wall. But as the weeks went by, I began to notice things. A faint, rhythmic tapping would start in the unused classroom next door, just as we were setting out our ingredients. It would stop the moment Mrs. Ellery raised her hand for silence. One day, I was in the back by the windows, and I saw a shadow flicker across the frosted glass of the locked door that led to the old hallway. When I turned to look, it was gone, and the door was still sealed with a heavy padlock.

I tried to shrug it off, blaming it on the old building settling, or the wind rattling the pipes. But the activity escalated. One afternoon, I was alone in the classroom, gathering my belongings after the bell, when I heard a clear, childish giggle from the empty room next door. It was high-pitched, like a young girl, and it was followed by the sound of something small and metal dropping on the floor – a pan? I froze, my heart pounding. I crept to the connecting door and pressed my ear to the wood. Silence. I tried the knob, but it was locked.

Later, I mentioned it to Mrs. Ellery, thinking she’d laugh it off. Instead, her face went pale, and she whispered, ‘You heard it too?’ She told me that ever since the building had been converted, she’d been hearing noises – footsteps in the hallway at night when she was grading papers, the faint chime of a bell, and once, she even saw a small handprint appear on the window despite the room being locked.

The breaking point came during our final exam in child development. We were supposed to be carrying around our ‘flour babies’ – five-pound bags of flour wrapped in swaddling clothes. I had to take mine with me to the bathroom down the hall. As I passed the locked classroom, I heard a low, mournful hum, and the door creaked open a few inches. A draft of cold air rushed out, carrying a strange, sweet smell – like rotting peaches. I looked inside, and I saw a dust-covered room, but in the corner, there was a small rocking chair, slowly moving on its own. On the seat, there was a baby doll, its plastic face cracked, and it was crying – a real, live cry. I slammed the door shut and ran.

I tried to tell the principal, but he dismissed it as an overactive imagination. Mrs. Ellery, though, believed me. She confessed that she’d always felt an unease up there, and that one night, she’d found an old photograph in the back of a drawer, showing a little girl with a sad smile, dressed in a pinafore, standing in what was now our classroom. The girl was named Emily, and according to an old yearbook note, she’d died in a fire that had destroyed the original building back in the 1960s, before the junior high was built. The school had been rebuilt on the same spot.

Determined to uncover the truth, Mrs. Ellery and I decided to investigate during spring break. We got the keys to the locked rooms – she’d kept an unauthorized copy for years. Up there, we found not just dust and cobwebs, but evidence of a classroom that had been frozen in time. Textbooks with a copyright date of 1962, a chalkboard with a single date written on it, and a row of small, dusty coat hooks. In the far corner, we found a door we hadn’t noticed before, painted the same color as the wall. It was a small, low door, like something out of a fairy tale, and it was locked with a rusty padlock. Mrs. Ellery’s hands shook as she opened it with a key she found in the drawer.

Inside was a tiny room, no bigger than a closet. There were toys – wooden blocks, a doll’s house, and a rocking chair. And there, in a pile, were the skeletal remains of a small child. The bones were charred, and the tiny fingers still clutched a blackened, melted kitchen knife. We stood there, horrified, when we heard the giggle again, loud and clear, right behind us. We turned, and there she was – the ghost of Emily, her face pale, her dress singed, her eyes dark. She pointed at the knife and then at the stove in the old classroom. ‘She made me,’ she whispered. ‘She made me all alone.’ It wasn’t Mrs. Ellery – Emily was talking about the other presence, the one that had not left when she died. The one that had been waiting for children to come back.

We fled, and the police came, but they found nothing– the remains vanished, and Mrs. Ellery was fired for trespassing. The building was condemned shortly after, and the administration moved to a new office. But sometimes, at night, I still get calls on my old school lifeline from a number that’s disconnected. When I pick up, I can hear that giggle, and the sound of a rocking chair creaking, and I know that the empty floor is not empty at all.