By Becky
Flash staff writer
“I just want to say that I’m not one hundred percent convinced that there is a ghost,” Toepke says. “There are strange things that have happened, but I look for a logical explanation first.”
Rumors have gone around about “Billy” the theater ghost.
Toepke and some of her students had joked about some weird occurrences “being Billy”, such as something falling. Some people take the “ghost” more seriously now that strange occurrences have happened.
“I fear this ghost; I fear it’s evil glares, it’s menacing teeth gnawing on the air that is nothing,” Jason, a senior says. “Woe to those who close their eyes.”
“Billy is trying to kill me,” Melissa, a sophomore says.
Others have a different approach to “Billy”.
“Billy’s cool!,” Angela, a senior says. “He can’t spell help right, but he’s cool! And he’s real. Oh yes, Billy is real indeed.”
There have been several strange occurrences.
One of these occurrences happened when two people were locking up the theater at night. They had locked every door and there was only one light on, which was near the entrance to the gym lobby.
The two people wre leaving, and suddenly they heard footsteps walk across the stage. No one else had been there.
Every summer, Toepke stays one week after school is over to clean up in the theater. This last summer, she was painting the black walls, “touching them up”.
Two students were on the other side of the stage painting- one on a ladder, one laying down painting.
Toepke ran out of paint and went to get some more in the next room.
All the curtains were tied and pulled back, enough so that anyone could see clearly across the stage.
Toepke put the paint in the pan she was using. She came back and saw the words “Halp” on the black wall behind the curtains.
Billy is six years old, supposedly, and most six year olds cannot spell well. Was it supposed to be “Help”?
Toepke checked the two kids, and they were in the spots they had been in last. She had not heard or seen anything, no doors were open, and the wall was right next to where she had been painting, and that was the first thing she noticed when she got back.
Toepke feels strongly that she would have noticed it had it been there before.
Toepke and the kids searched for some logical clue, but could find nothing.
Another unexplained event happened in the theater in December of last year. A custodian finished cleaning in the theater and there was a power outage throughout the school.
The lights in the theater began flashing and she could clearly see that the lightboard was off, and there was no power going to them.
She ran out to the lobby. She then got on a walkie-talkie that the custodians use and said, “There’s something in the theater and it doesn’t want me in there.”
Right after those words, a picture flew off the wall and landed at her feet.
The picture was of Mark C________. This picture is in the lobby and has a fuzzy glow to it.
And in the third year that the school was built, Toepke’s five-and-a-half-year-old daughter was standing in the way of the fire door.
The door weighs 1,000 pounds.
Toepke pressed the button to close the door. Normally the door closes slowly, but this time the door closed quickly, crashing down.
“If she had not had a hooded shirt, she would not be here today,” Toepke says. Toepke had been able to pull her by the hood of her sweatshirt out of the way, just in time.
In the first graduating class, there was a Mask unit, where each person had to create a character. Nick A_______ was participating in this unit, and he did not know what to do for his performance.
On the last day of class before they had to perform their scenes, Nick confronted Toepke about his problem. Toepke advised him to see if he thought of anything before the class ended that day.
At the end of class, he told Toepke that he had an idea. It was about a six-year-old boy named Billy.
Billy was a lonely boy who didn’t have any friends. He had an imaginary friend who talked to him.
It was his birthday one day, and his mom left a note, saying that she wouldn’t be home for awhile, “Happy Birthday,” and that the cake was in the refrigerator. So his imaginary friend visited him and they had some cake.
Later, they went to the park. His imaginary friend started trying to talk him into doing some dangerous things.
First it was climbing a tree. Billy was hesitant, but climbed the tree.
Then, it was to climb the top of the monkey bars. Once again, Billy was hesitant, but climbed to the top of the monkey bars.
At the end of the story, his imaginary friend suggested he walk on the train tracks, and a train then hit Billy.
A couple of years later, Tyler C_______ was in the same position and came up with the same idea, with the exception that Billy was a teenager who talked to himself, and was about to die or was already dead.
The next year, Brett Teresa had the same scenario and came up with the same basic idea.
Last year, DJ A_______ had an idea ready for his scene.
However, he came in to talk to Toepke one day. He told her, “This is going to sound crazy, but. . .”
He told Toepke of a scene which “came to him during work last night,” about a lonely kid who was going to die or was dead. Before he could reveal anymore, she screamed out, “That’s Billy!”
The logical explanation is they could have conveyed the story to one another, or searched through the scripts and created this coincidence. However, Toepke does not keep those scripts in her office (she keeps them at home), for the reason that she doesn’t want anyone to know “too much” information about the Mask unit; she wants them to experience it for themselves.
Although Nick and Tyler knew each other and were friends, Toepke says that Nick would not have told Tyler anything about the Mask unit. He had the attitude that he wanted Tyler to experience it for himself, and as for Tyler and Brett, they barely knew that either one existed.
DJ had written what he thought up on comic cards (the “script”). Toepke pulled out Nick’s script and they found that some of the lines from Nick’s script and DJ’s cards were word for word.
