Chapmanville Grade School

Chapmanville East Elementary School is very spooky first of all. It’s a very large and exceptionally old brick building and it stinks inside. The school has a lot of character to say the least.

I knew a teacher that worked there very shortly. She said that sometimes if she was working after school hours she could hear spooky sounds, but always ending in a thunderous thump. I also have a very good friend who had a lot of awfully bad experiences happen to her on the school property, evil experiences at that.

I heard a story when I was about 15 years old, (I’m 23 now), and I asked an old person about the credentials of the story and he verified its accuracy. The story goes: Sometime in the middle of winter in the 1930’s, the furnace broke. The employees of the school wondered why it had not been promptly fixed. The school staff and everyone began to assume the handy man / janitor (whatever he was) had quit his job at the school and moved away. (While in the coldest days of the year.) Nobody could locate him; they needed him because he was the only one who knew how to fix the furnace.

The furnace was broke for a while (I don’t know how long) and they had to call off school until they got the furnace fixed. The conditions were entirely to cold to work or learn in. Being in the dead of winter, it most likely took a while to find somebody to fix the furnace, who wasn’t already tied up with other repair jobs.

The furnace repairmen eventually were found, and so they set out to expose the problem. They were cleaning it and found hard pieces that weren’t burned. The repairmen were able to immediately identify the pieces as bone fragments. They had an investigator look at the pieces and sure enough, it was bone remnants or whatever those bone – like things are that won’t burn easily. Through dental records they eventually confirmed these remains belonged to the school’s handy man / janitor. He had only worked after school hours and someone or something must have knocked him out or done something to get him into the boiler. It was determined that the body in the furnace caused the breakdown of the furnace. Nobody was ever convicted of the crime and the incident is still unsolved, but I heard most folk in Chapmanville speculate the KKK were behind it. They were in town around the time the janitor came up missing.

A lot of people living near the school claim to hear noise in it during late hours. Howling screams have been heard coming from the dilapidated building paralyzing its victims with fear. Maybe some of the sounds can be explained by the age of the structure or the building settling may be the cause. Whatever may be causing the sounds is up to you to ponder, but we do know one thing, schools don’t plague themselves with evil.