Need horror setting in a school

What about the school theater? Football stadium? Band room? Computer lab? Lunch room? You could get pretty creative with making the mundane things in those settings into lethal ghost weapons.

Band room.
Chem lab.
Theater.
Art lab.
Cafeteria.
Sporting areas: baseball field, tennis court, school pool, track, football field, etc.

I was going to say the stage - but Scream (whatever number) comes to mind. Woodshop/auto mechanic shop is freaky as it's usually in a basement. Or the band room.

If you're worried about cliché, I don't think changing the room in which something happened is going to help.

That said, you can find maps and floor plans for a lot of schools on the Internet. Why not start there and Google "high school campus map."

In most of the high schools (newer as in built in the last 50 years or so), the wood/shop rooms are not in the basement but often in their own wing or in larger campuses, their own building which offers a lot of potential.

How about a home ec room? Vocational ag room or building? Just hallways or stairs?

Administration Area?

dirtsider said:

Administration Area?

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Many kids think that the principal's office is pretty scary. How about the teacher's lounge. It's forbidden territory.

I recall the shop where I went to high school had a band saw, a spot welder, various awls, and at least one cutting torch. All of these devices could injure someone. The spot welder in particular was ominous, containing two prongs, which you would put around the thing you wanted to weld, then you would flip the switch to send a high current through it. I'm not sure if you could get your head in there, but definitely your hand or scrotum or something similarly unpleasant could be put in there.

theatres always have ghost stories. the rigging can be pretty dangerous.

we had a custodian in my high school who wouldn't go near the pool room because he said he walked in once late at night and it was "boiling". freaked me the hell out as a kid.

From what I can remember of my school days...

Bunsen burners were always played with in Chemistry. It was one of the unwritten rules that at least a dozen had to be turned on by students and used as playthings. There was a few moments I remember of people getting their clothes burnt, but mostly they were used for show rather than anything else. Jeez, kids can be little shits...

At the side of the school, in a wooded area, there was a big tree which - as the rumor went - used to be used for hangings. The tree was probably a couple of hundred years old, so it is possible, but it doesn't really matter if it had actually been used for that purpose or not. The mere possibility that it had kept students from going near it.

There was at least one OD in the toilets, but I never found out if they died or not.

elissa said:

we had a custodian in my high school who wouldn't go near the pool room because he said he walked in once late at night and it was "boiling". freaked me the hell out as a kid.

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There is a long tradition of water-based horror, especially from Japan. The school I went to had a few stories about the pool and the changing rooms, but the endless FOAF stories about creepy noises and spectral happenings probably had more to do with narcotics than ghosts.

Ah, the good ol' days...

Band room is pretty scary

School library would be a nice choice as well.

What about the auditorium?



Similar to the theater, but the projector could blind the MC with its light... and when he steps away, he realizes it's projecting a scary movie...

At my school, the woodworking room was also the electronics room. There were dykes, strippers, sodderers, wires, vices, saws, drills, electrical outlets, uh...yeah! Good luck!

For me and my classmates it was post graduate statistics class. Our professor was Korean and had a terrible accent. He talked for 5 weeks about "Bells of uwl". No one in the class knew what he was talking about, and he would get mad if we asked him to repeat his words. Finally I got up enough nerve to tell him we had no idea what "Bells of uwl" were. he said you know "You know, from sheep, uwl". I said "wool" he said yes, "Bells of uwl." I turned to my classmates and said "Bales of wool" and received a general sigh of relief from the rest of the class. That was a horror.

I hated the boiler room when I was a kid. My father was a custodian at the elementary school I went to, and he would take me down into the boiler room once in a while, where some of his supplies and stuff were. When those boilers came on it was a pretty noisy, scary place to be as a kid.

I once worked in a cafeteria, in a college, but it was a small college. The best thing there was a pair of huge metal cauldron like devices that we used to boil macaroni. You had to stir the macaroni with a giant metal oar. I always wanted to used that oar in a fight...but, I digress. There was a hot water faucet just above the containers, on a swing arm. After the pasta was done cooking, you would open a valve at the bottom and dump the hot water into a grate below.
It has a lot of potential.
Good luck!

In many old schools there are areas that few, if any, pupils get to see. I went to a school that was built in about 1890ish and the attics there were awesome. I only got to see them because the costumes for school plays were stored up there. There are also countless stock rooms and offices, many of which pupils do not know about. I worked at one school that had originally been built as a hospital and it had two wings which mirrored each other. There were lots of little offices and stock rooms that staff could go to for peace and quiet. Large old houses are sometimes used as schools and they would make ideal settings for creepy stories - cellars with unspeakable nasties creeping about in them!

My High School was a very old school. Its a historical landmark now....built in a campus style. Original paintings, a marble staircase you only walk on if you're an alumni, etc. You get the picture (but it was a public school for the record and in a rural town). You can probably tell I am very proud of my school.

The auditorium/theatre would be an excellent place though very cleshay. Especially in our old theatre....it would be very....theatric haha. sorry....

Or and this is my suggestion. In my school we had tunnels that ran under the entire campus. They were steam tunnels of some sort and held all the electric,phone, plumbing, etc. You could walk through them comfortabley as they were quite big. And under certain buildig there were whole rooms......especially under the swimming pool there was a large room full of machines. Anyway these tunnels were strictly off limits and usually all entrances were locked up tight. But of course we would sometimes find our way in...hehehe.... Perfect location for a horror story. They were creepy as heck! Old, dead silent, pipes dripping, and that feeling of claustorphobia or inability to escape quickly if needed. Also lots of turns and dead ends so the tunnels spread to everywhere they were needed.

Science room - all those burners and chemicals - also benches to hide behind.
Woodwork room - great possibilities, already mentioned.

Is it a high school? An elementary school could be spooky - there's something icky about evil ghosts and little children.