HOLLOMAN ACADEMY
Location: Holloman Academy is a picturesque private school located
on walled property located north of Boston. It is situated on the block of 299
Everett Street on the south side of Cambridge, Massachusetts across the Charles
River and a few blocks north of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Description Of Place: Formerly Holloman High School, Holloman Academy
is an accredited high school-level preparatory school (Grades 9-12) with a gated
veranda surrounding the 1.5 acres of property it covers. It includes a gymnasium,
maintenance shed and pool house with a separate gateway to the rear of the
school. Two stories tall, the French Colonial style structure includes fifty-five
classrooms, an auditorium, cafeteria and dining room for 250 students. It has been modernized several
times and includes fire resistant doors, fire escapes and both computer and
science lab facilities.
Ghostly Manifestations: Schools are rife places for hauntings. It is
just something about the long halls, empty rooms and the dwindling echoes of
human echoes that seems to stir the imagination of ghosts and spirits. Every
college fraternity has its residence spirit, the majority of deserted schools in
the Midwest are allegedly haunted by the ghost of a child abused into death by a
sadistic teacher and almost every closed school in the country suffers from the
indignity of the legend of being built over an old Native American burial
ground. Holloman Academy has its own stories as well to tell.
"I don't believe in ghosts." Principal Paul Spiro replies. "But I have to admit there is something about this school that doesn't make sense. Sounds come from empty rooms, shadows of people vanish around corners, students and staff describe things that couldn't possibly exist... I don't know if the school is haunted, but something weird is happening here."
Psychic Heather Burton first revealed the school to the attention of the Collinsport Ghost Society in 2008. She was the school librarian from 2007 to 2012, and she spent almost a year trying to get Principal Spiro to allow a paranormal team to examine the location until he finally relented. Activity has been going on here since the 1930s, a blink of the eye in the realm of the paranormal.
"I've collected almost three hundred stories of paranormal activity occurring here going back to the Forties." Blake Staples is a gifted computer programmer and amateur ghost hunter. Guided by Miss Burton and Hector Ortiz, the school janitor, who attended school here in the 1950s, Blake carries a journal which he uses to keep the random stories he hears through his alma mater. "Sounds are most common, but apparitions are not unusual. I myself have over a hundred photos of the school grounds and interior with orbs and anomalous forms. On several occasions, I've had the feeling of being watched, and at times, the sensation of a presence in the school."
That presence is believed to be former school master Algernon Danforth, whose apparition has been reported several times. Students in the school cellar sent after extra chairs or boxes of text books have come rushing up the stairs describing a huge figure of a man standing and watching them from the shadows. Their descriptions over several years apart are remarkably similar: "a tall imposing figure with thinning gray hair and large mustache in dark period clothes standing in the corner with his arms crossed in curious observation and his fingers lightly stroking his whiskers and chin."
"I haven't seen the ghost." Ortiz mentions. "But I believe I've felt him several times."
Ortiz has worked at Holloman for over twelve years, a lot longer than any other member of the housekeeping staff, which has a high turnover in employees due to the activity. Most of the cleaning occurs at night, and employees have heard boisterous laughter from the ends of dark corridors. Others have heard the voices of kids in the class rooms and the sound of chalk being used on a blackboard, which is odd because all the rooms have dry erase boards. Things move around. One night while waxing the floors on the second floor, Ortiz backed up into a desk that had been left in the hall. It didn't belong to any of the adjacent rooms, none of which had misplaced a seat.
“One
night I heard the trash cans being thrown around on the floor of the men’s
room." Ortiz adds, "I thought someone was in there, you know, a vandal or something. I figured
I’d catch whoever it was. I opened the door, the crashing stopped and there
wasn’t anyone. There was only one exit to the room, and I was standing in it.
There was no other way to get out of there.”
Another
time, he had gone to close a window that wasn’t supposed to be left open. As
he stood before the closed door of a classroom, he heard an unmistakable sound
of a chair being dragged across the inside of the room. Quickly, he opened the
door, fully expecting to find someone, and again, he found the room deserted and
abandoned.
“It
leaves you to wonder.” He continues. “There was just a door between me and
that dragging. I never did find out what it was, but I heard it. I knew there
was something.
In the library, Burton has discovered books left out, added them to a cart then returned to her desk, but minutes later, she would casually look up and see books left on the tables again.
"Sometimes, it would take less than a second." She reports. "I'd walk past a table, turn my back to it and look back and there would suddenly be a book there. Books also fall from shelves. Students will be quietly reading and all of a sudden there would be a loud noise from the fiction center. I'd walk over expecting to see someone horsing around, there would be nothing there.
“Nearest I ever came to seeing it was one night I was outside the school and I casually glanced up to the library windows. It would looked like someone standing in the window and peeking out from the windows, but this figure isn't Danforth. It's a female figure, but she's definitely from the same period."
The thing Ortiz, Burton and Spiro has heard most is footsteps. Spiro was once walking the upstairs hall and realized that other steps had fallen in alongside his or were rushing up loudly ahead of him. The frantic steps would continue until the lights went on, and he would hear someone, or something, running upstairs while he was on the first floor.
Spiro also recalled one night going down the back stairs near the gymnasium. At the time, the double doors to the gym were locked, but in front of his eyes, the doors suddenly flung wide open and just as quickly snapped back closed and locked once more. He’s never been able to explain it. As part of the fire prevention system, the doors will slam shut all over the school to contain any fire, but they have to be open to begin with. They cannot spring open from a locked position and then back to lock once more. Thinking it was a defect in the system, he had them inspected, but they were in in impeccable working order and the phenomenon hasn't repeated since.
Coach Michelle Hoover, the girl's swimming and basketball instructor, has also seen and heard things. She's heard splashing and in the pool area and running in the gym after school hours. Basketball have mysteriously been left out or been found rolling out of no where. From the balcony overhead, she once caught a woman in white watching her, but as she turned her head, she vanished. Footsteps are so common that she no longer goes to see who it is.
“I have definitely heard footsteps.” Hoover recalls. “It was 2010, and we had recorded grades on a Saturday. I had dropped by on a Sunday, and no one else was there. I went in that front door in the side where the offices are. The light switch is on the other wall, so it was dark. I heard heavy footsteps – like heavy leather boots in the room. I thought it was someone who had broken in. I was next to the exit, so they couldn’t get out without passing me. I turned on the lights, but there was nobody there.”
“They
were loud. It sounded like a man, not a woman. Slow and methodic, one… two…
that’s the reason I thought it was Principal Spiro. He’s the only one big enough
to make that noise walking so slow like that.”
History: At just over two hundred years, Holloman Academy has been a
practicing institution of schooling in one form or another for several years. A
small schoolhouse rested on this property in the 1680s and disappeared by the
Early Nineteenth Century. Civil War General Geoffrey A. B. Holloman plotted the
property out for a military school in the 1870s, but when he passed away during construction,
completion was taken over by Algernon Danforth, a former Siasconset
schoolteacher. After a bit of controversy in the Early Forties, the school reopened
as a private school in 1953 catering to the children of well-to-do local
families, a criteria which has since been softened to include students from
middle class families.
Identity Of Ghosts: Algernon Danforth, the school founder, was in
life a tall imposing figure of a man. He had no known degrees or teaching
certificates, but he was a closet sadist whose one hobby was an interest in
the occult and a proclivity for witchcraft. Assisted by a Polish mute named
Rosemary Kasminski who became his lover, he was often suspected of extraordinary
violence to students for minor offenses and of practicing reported dark magic
rituals in the underground rooms of the school. A few members of his coven even
made it into positions of authority at his school. Students were threatened with
violence if they revealed their punishments. Rule-breakers were often locked in
rooms without food or water, hung upside down and dipped underwater or used as
subjects recreating the old Salem witchcraft trial tests, such as buried under
rocks. Danforth and his coven usually gathered around to berate or insult the
students under these tortures, ignoring their pleas for mercy or help, but
things came to a head in 1938 when a girl escaped the school during one torture
session and was followed by police and angry parents breaking into the school
during one of Danforth's black magic rituals. Of the eleven members arrested,
eight committed suicide than testify against Danforth in prison. Danforth and
Kosminski seemingly escaped but had actually sealed themselves up in the school;
their bodies were found in 2012 within an underground vault off the basement during repairs
from water damage. Since their bodies were removed, activity has decreased.
Danforth is not typically included in the history of the school
"Another ghost I believe is haunting the school is
Marisol Vasquez." Hector Ortiz adds. "We went to school here in the
1950s, and I was very much in love with her, but we had a fight one weekend and
broke up. To get even with me, she began dating one of the football players, but
that turned fatal because he started propositioning her. He eventually broke her
neck and killed her, and I believe she comes back here searching for
forgiveness."
Source/Ghosts: School Spirit (aka Ghost Quake) (2012) - Activity
based on Ellis Middle School in Hendersonville, Tennessee, Founders College
in Charlotte, North Carolina, St. John's Military Academy in Delafield,
Wisconsin and assorted other cases.
Psychic Heather Burton from "House Of Bones" (2006)