The Shredded Testament

The old Pemberton School for Boys sat on a hill above the town of Ashford, its red-brick walls stained with decades of soot and rain. It had been a hospital during the Civil War, and the grounds were littered with unmarked graves. I was a student there in the late 1990s, and I had my own encounter with the things that lingered.

The place they called the ‘Orchard Room’ was in the oldest wing, a corner room that overlooked a tangled apple orchard where, legend said, wounded soldiers had been left to die. The door was always locked from the inside, but the key hung on a hook in the custodian’s office. No one used it. The room had a reputation: if you slid anything under the door, it would be thrown back with unnatural force. Once, a senior slid a metal hanger under it, and it shot out like a bullet, embedding itself in the opposite wall. Another time, a boy slid a piece of chalk, and it came back pulverized to dust.

One autumn night, dared by my friends, I took a small, leather-bound Bible from my footlocker. It wasn’t mine; it had belonged to my grandfather, who insisted it had brought him through the war. I knelt in the dim hallway, the floor cold through my jeans, and slid the Bible under the door. For a moment, nothing. Then a sound like tearing paper, and a thud. The Bible shot out from under the door, landing at my feet. It was in pieces, the cover torn, pages shredded, as if something had clawed through it. I never went near that room again.

The other incident was in the girls’ dormitory, which adjoined the main building through a covered walkway. The middle room on the second floor was always cold. Students would enter and see their breath mist in the air, even in June. At night, if you stood outside the door, you could hear the springs of the old iron bed groaning rhythmically, like someone bouncing, and the high-pitched giggles of children. One evening, I was dared to stay in that room for an hour. I sat on a wooden chair in the corner, my heart pounding. The cold was intense, seeping into my bones. The bed began to dent in the middle, as if a child were sitting on it, and I heard a giggle directly behind me. I didn’t turn around. I counted the minutes until the hour was up, then fled, and I never mocked the stories again.

The school was torn down a few years ago, but the orchard and the dormitory were left to rot. Sometimes, hikers report hearing the sound of springs and laughter coming from the ruined building, and they swear they see a figure in the window, holding a tattered book.