12/28/2009: Thanks an anonymous contributor for sending in photos of the haunted pool room of Stivers Middle School in Montgomery County. In the 1920s, there was a teacher who swam in the pool every Friday. The teacher’s body was found floating face-down in the pool with a broken pointer in one hand and a locket in the other. One photo was of her parents and the second of a man, but the head was torn off of the photo. It was thought that the teacher had an affair with her senior aide, who never returned. The pool was built over in the 1930s to make way for new classrooms.
After Ms. Tyler, a teacher back in the 20s, mysteriously drowned in the swimming pool, it was floored over and made into a photography classroom complete with a film developing lab and darkroom. My class was the first to go down there after a few decades of it being sealed up. After taking the pictures I submitted, I was climbing back up when my camera strap somehow slipped off my wrist (that was holding onto the bar of the ladder) and my camera fell back onto the floor, batteries flying every which way. Soon after we entered the pool, paranormal activity seemed to pick up. I would hear water splashing behind me when I was printing pictures in the darkroom, and my film would turn out all splotchy no matter how careful I was. A friend of mine brought a glow in the dark Ouija board and we played it in the darkroom. The weird thing was that instead of talking to the teacher, we talked to a young boy. As far as I know, no there’s no explanation as to who the boy is and no one has bade contact with him since.
One of the scariest experiences I had with that actually took place in the photography class before mine that one of my friends was in. I was sitting in a different class when the power went out suddenly. Not just in my school…but in the surrounding block. It turns out that kids down in photo had been talking on the Ouija board. They had made contact with a malevolent spirit named John, who is most likely to blame for pretty much every truly scary paranormal experience in Stivers.
The following school year, there was a really nice, quiet girl in my class who had barely spoken to anyone all semester. She went to the restroom one day and came running back in a few minutes later, slammed the door, and started crying. She looked visibly shaken. Apparently she was standing in the hall when she heard footsteps, then a man’s voice whispered in her ear. The security tape showed a dark foggy figure manifesting next to her. Things like this happen fairly often at Stivers, believe it or not.