The Hollow Hymn of Room 7

I never believed in haunted places until I took the night custodial shift at Clementine Elementary, a squat brick building squatting on the corner of Meridian and 13th, a block that the city map shaded in a color that looked like a bruise. The school itself was a patchwork of remodeled decades: the original 1950s core, a 1970s wing that smelled permanently of stale milk and despair, and the 2000s office complex that was all glass and stolen angles, designed to look fresh but only succeeding in looking out of place. My job was simple: scrub the hallways, empty the trash, and make sure no one was hiding in the boiler room. But the boogeyman had found a new address.

I saw the first one on a Tuesday, around two in the morning, near the kindergarten wing. The lights were mostly off, but a security lamp cast a sickly amber glow across the linoleum. I was pushing my cart, the wheels squeaking a rhythmic complaint, when I caught a flicker out of the corner of my eye. I turned, expecting a raccoon or a stray cat, but what I saw was a thin, dark silhouette—almost like a column of smoke—stepping quickly from the doorway of Room 7 into the shadow of the water fountain. It was gone in a blink, but I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature. I told myself it was a trick of the light, a tired mind. But I started carrying a flashlight everywhere, even in the daylight.

The apparitions didn’t care about schedules. I saw them at noon when the building was thrumming with kids. A minuscule figure, just a flicker of darkness, would dart behind a teacher’s back or crouch in the corner of a classroom where the reading rug was perpetually tousled. The children felt them too. I overheard a little girl in the restroom tell her friend, ‘The black people stand in the corner and watch me,’ and her friend nodded with the calm of fact. The teachers whispered about ‘bad vibes’ and ‘the mood,’ but no one said the word ‘haunted.’ The principal, a woman named Principal Alvarez with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, called a staff meeting and warned us not to spread panic. She said the school had been ‘renovated to support a positive learning environment,’ which we all knew was code for ‘we can’t afford a proper exorcist.’

My breaking point came during a late-night inventory check in the gymnasium. The gym was a cavernous space with a high ceiling where basketball hoops hung like idle gallows. The lights hummed and buzzed, creating a symphony of flickering that made me see shapes in every dark corner. I was counting basketballs in the storage closet when I heard a sound—a faint, high-pitched giggle, like a child’s but stretched and warped, as if it were coming through a broken radio. I froze. The giggle turned into a chant, a nonsense singsong that seemed to wrap around me. I stepped out of the closet, and in the center of the gym floor, a ring of shadow figures stood in a loose circle, their heads bowed. They were tall and impossibly thin, like dried ink stains that had been pulled upward. They didn’t have faces, but I knew they were looking at me. One of them raised an arm—or what passed for an arm—and pointed at me. And then, as one, they all took a step back and vanished, leaving the gym empty except for the echo of that chant, which I realized was the only sound I had heard in my life that felt like it was being carved into me.

I ran. I didn’t stop running until I was in my car, the engine shaking, my hands slick on the wheel. I called my supervisor, claiming a family emergency, and drove home trembling. The next day, I quit. But the image stayed burned into my eyelids. I couldn’t sleep. I felt watched in my own apartment, in the shower, in the grocery store. I started seeing them everywhere—at the bus stop, on the subway, even in my kitchen doorway. My therapist said I was suffering from stress-induced hallucinations. I told her about the kids, how some of them would stare at empty corners and weep, or laugh at things that weren’t there. She gave me a referral and a pamphlet. I threw the pamphlet away.

A week later, a friend who worked at the district called me up, her voice hushed. She said that Clementine had been closed down. A teacher had been found in the gymnasium, terrified, babbling about ‘the children in the dark.’ The district was calling it a structural issue, but everyone knew. My friend was moving to a different school, but she said she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being followed. I asked her if she had seen them. There was a long pause, and then she whispered, ‘They don’t hide in the hallways anymore. They hide in us.’

I hung up and sat in the dark of my living room. I could feel the cold beginning to seep in from the corners, and I knew, deep in my bones, that my story wasn’t over. They had found me. They were just waiting for me to stop running. And then, softly, I heard it again—the faint, warped giggle from the gym, but closer now, almost in my ear. I didn’t turn around. Because I knew that if I did, I would see a dark figure in the corner of my own home, smiling without a mouth.

I don’t leave the house anymore. But they’re always here, waiting just at the edge of the light. And sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see a shape that is not quite my own, and I realize that I never truly left that school. It left me, and it brought its song with it. The hollow hymn of Room 7, playing on an endless loop, for an audience of one.