The Bathroom Ghost That Put Our School on the Paranormal Map

When I was a student at the town’s only primary school, I couldn’t have imagined that I’d one day be reminiscing about it in the same vein as one would recall a bad hangover after a particularly memorable evening. You know the type—fragments of recollection that haunt you in the most inconvenient moments. But that’s exactly how it feels as I think about one of the more sinister, yet oddly fascinating, stories from that crumbling institution.

The old school building itself was, and still is, one of those classical architectural paradoxes. It stubbornly refuses to die, clinging to its red-brick charm like an aging actor unwilling to bow out of the spotlight. Although the building’s layout has been more or less preserved over the years, they’ve done that thing where they try to make it modern by converting the bathrooms into classrooms. Yes, bathrooms into classrooms. Because, apparently, the best place to stimulate young minds is where old ones used to take a leak.

But let's not get bogged down by plumbing details, tempting as it is to ridicule. When I was a fresh-faced, mischief-making student, those bathrooms were a different story altogether. They were a dank, eerie labyrinth of broken porcelain, rust-stained sinks, and a pervasive stench that suggested they were abandoned not because they were past their prime but because the very bowels of hell had, at some point, backed up into the drains. In our day, they were used as storage rooms for equipment that even the most optimistic packrat would call "utter junk." Discarded desks, faded sports trophies, and boxes containing materials so ancient they might as well have been from a bygone civilization.

But the real story, the one that kept us all wide-eyed and terrified during overnight field trips or evening errands, was not about the junk but about what—or who—was rumored to haunt the place. Now, this isn’t some friendly Casper-type affair. No, what we’re dealing with here is a ghost story as delightfully spine-chilling as any horror novelist could dream up.

The tale circulated most frequently among the older students—those authoritative figures in our school society who were at the pinnacle of knowledge, or so we thought. These were the twelve-year-olds, practically wise old sages to us eight-year-olds, and what they said held the gravitas of a prime minister’s speech. According to these upper-graders, on particularly quiet nights when the moon was at its fullest and eerily bright, anyone venturing to Don Benito's little store down the street might just have the misfortune of catching sight of a figure draped in ghostly white.

The apparition had a favorite haunt: the second-floor windows of what were then still barely-functioning bathrooms but now serve as classrooms. A hauntingly pale form drifting back and forth, silently and purposefully, past those grubby, barred windows. Even the bravest of us—and, mind you, bravery at that age meant you had once successfully snuck into the teachers’ lounge—had to admit that the mere thought sent a shiver down our spines.

Some students claimed, with that fervent, youthful certainty reserved only for ghost stories and dares, that they had seen her in full form: a woman in white. They described her in meticulous detail, though each account varied as wildly as one’s imagination after three cans of fizzy pop. One boy swore she had long hair cascading like a waterfall of despair; another said her eyes glowed with a ghostly light. Either way, she was a figure to be avoided, not just because she was obviously the star of every one of our nightmares, but because the legend claimed she never stepped outside the hallowed, ghostly grounds of the bathrooms or the second-floor classrooms.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: this woman in white had standards. No, really, she didn’t make cheap appearances on the basketball court or bother scaring the teachers in the staff room. She was too refined, too discerning for such things. Her haunting, you see, was reserved for the echoey, shadow-filled hallways and the cracked windows of the second floor. And for those of us foolish enough to forget, there were always reminders—stories of fleeting glimpses, footsteps in the dark, and the sound of a whisper that was always too close for comfort.

There was one particularly sensational rumor, one I recall with a mixture of horror and reluctant admiration, about a brave—or profoundly stupid—student who ventured up to those windows late one evening, all for the sake of a dare. He swore, and I mean swore on every comic book in his possession, that he had seen her. Not drifting, not fading in and out of view, but standing perfectly still and watching him. Her eyes, he claimed, were not eyes at all but empty, yawning voids that seemed to pull him in.

It was a tale made all the more terrifying when retold in hushed whispers under the safety of our blankets. Of course, skeptics among us tried to debunk it. "It’s all just shadows," they’d say, with the confidence of people who had never been within fifty feet of that accursed second floor at night. "Old buildings creak," others would argue, although no creak in the world sounds like someone—or something—walking just a few steps behind you.

Looking back, I can’t help but think of the legend with a strange fondness. In a world where our greatest worry was whether we’d get detention or not finish our homework, the ghostly woman in white added a delicious element of danger to our lives. The kind of thrill that makes one’s childhood memories feel so much more vivid and adventurous. The school may have changed since then, but that haunting tale remains etched in the psyche of everyone who ever passed through its doors.

So, should you ever find yourself wandering near that old school, and should the moon be full and the air thick with that peculiar, electric stillness, perhaps you’ll feel the chill of a ghostly presence. And if you do, don’t be foolish enough to peer into those windows. The lady in white, with her whispered tales of woe and forgotten secrets, might just be watching you too.

In-text Citation: (Cervera López, 2021, p. 44)