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I found something while renovating this old high school and I don't know what to do
In my twenty-six years of life, I've never seen anything like this, and I don't know who to tell. I work for a construction contractor, and we gotta renovate an old high school that has been in use since like the 20's. I think it had been an alternative high school called Caron Hill High. Some folks around Hillside say it's haunted.
I don't pretend to know much about all that. I dropped out of high school at seventeen and never got a GED and I’ve been kinda there most of my life. But this thing with Kennedy Lavalle still eats at me: why wasn't this in the news? There's no news of this girl or Charlotte Cruz, and I don't know what’s going on.
Me and my buddy Lyle are supposed to do the girls' bathroom. We took down the stalls with all the fuckin’ graffiti and weird symbols and whatever. There was a weird one on a door, but teenagers are weird. It was quick work and I was like whatever, then we tackled stripping tile and gutting drywall. When we pulled back the tile, though, a sandwich ziploc bag fell out from a hole in the wall. In it was a thumb drive, a sticky-note with a weird symbol on it, maybe the one from the stall door, and an old vape pen. I probably should have reported it, maybe whined about the extra work to fill the hole in, but something just felt, I don’t know, off.
There was only a video file on the thumb drive. Here’s the transcript of it. It was just a teen girl talking, a few snippets of other videos edited in. She's sitting in a stall in the bathroom, I think probably this one. She was more on the goth side, I probably would have wanted to date her when I was younger. But she looked scared, really fucking scared, the mascara running down her face. She said impossible shit.
She said ahem and started talking.
>My name is Kennedy Rose Lavalle. Um, I'm seventeen years old and I'm a junior at Caron Hill High School. My address is 726 Ironwood Lane and 22 East 9th Street North, depending on which parent I'm living with. My parents are Susanna Dee Burton and Jake David Lavalle. My mom drinks and lives in a trailer with my heroin-addict stepdad Danny Burton. My dad works on the oil fields in North Dakota for months on end. I have one blood brother, Peter, and a bunch of step-siblings I can't keep track of, including Danny's daughter Maya, who calls me her sister. That feels nice sometimes.
>I'm telling you this because I'm nobody, I'm trailer trash - and no one will look for me when I'm gone. But someone has to know. If you find this, I'm probably gone, just like Charlie. Try to get this to my family if you can - this is my last will and testament, I guess. The vape pen in the bag is if they find a body but can't identify it. Maybe my DNA can be identified as me and my family will finally give a fuck. If they don't, my best friend is Jordan Clark. Uh, he's a junior like me and is, like, extravagantly gay. I don't know his middle name. Sorry.
>I'm at Caron Hill High School for possession. Most kids get caught with a vape, but I got caught with a full-ass blunt in the Hillside High School bathroom and off to Caron Hill I went. My mom said I'm the best "self-sabotager" or whatever she knows, but it runs in the family. That's what made Charlie so intriguing to me.
>Charlie Cruz is a girl from my class. Her name is short for Charlotte. Her Spanish heritage, her blond hair and olive skin, makes her glow in the halls. We went to elementary school together and she was always beautiful. While most of us at Caron Hill are here for possession or behavior, Charlie took her freshman year off to help her mom recover from surgery. I forget what kind. Either way, she got behind.
>When she got here she immediately caught the eye of Michael Duran, the most popular guy at school. He was another one with a spotless record, although he and I smoked weed a lot with friends on the weekend. Michael was making moves on me and we had slept together once maybe after a party with too much tequila, so when Charlie told me he asked her out on a date, we realized how fucking shady that was. So Charlie and I made a pact and it made us friends, although I realize now that I probably took it more seriously that she did. She and I agreed that we would both ditch Michael and date each other to spite him. My heart leapt at the idea, because I'm pretty sure I loved her.
>Long story short, it didn't work out like that. Charlie dated Michael and I didn't really talk to either of them much again. Until Charlie went missing.
>Charlie's issue was absenteeism, sure, but she always kept Michael in the loop. I don't know, things like watching her brothers or her mom taking surprise trips to the city were normal, if I remember right. But this time there was nothing. No contact. Michael even asked me if I had heard from her, but nothing. He mentioned he went to her house and her mom said Charlie was supposed to be with him, but she was, like, knee deep in a bottle of rye whiskey and a hookah or something so she slammed the door in his face. Charlie was another nobody to the law so no one looked for her.
>Then the rumors started. I don't know who started them, but I heard them from Jordan that there was a TikTok or Instagram Live video somewhere Charlie had started at Caron Hill, and that the school security cameras showed that she never left the building. I managed to track down the video, which Charlie had posted to her Instagram story. Here.
Kennedy cut to a screen capture of the Instagram Live. It was night, in selfie mode looking at the sky. Charlie walked around, her face in view, trees and streetlights in the background. She was a pretty girl too, but there was something wrong. Something in the way that Charlie's eyes glinted in the nearby streetlights, in the way her smile stretched just slightly too far across her face, in the way she kept quiet and just kinda looked at the camera, that grin plastered on her face. I couldn't help but wonder what she was doing. The two-floor brick building of Caron Hill High School was right behind her. What was she doing at the school? Kennedy cut back to her video and continued talking.
>Yeah, I don't know either. That's not the Charlie I know. That Charlie grins too much, and I knew something was off. I got the help of Ben Ewing, or, uh - a senior who was at Caron Hill because he hacked into the system and changed his grades. He showed me how to view the surveillance footage from my phone. Sorry, I don't mean to implicate anyone.
>I could definitely see Charlie wandering around campus that night, late. She was just looking down at her phone while recording live, probably made at least five or six circuits around the school just looking at her phone. But then she just, I don't know, went into the building. I don't know how the door got open.
>Through the cameras I saw her movements, and what I saw I can't believe. I recorded what I could.
Kennedy cut to a screen capture again. This time of grainy surveillance from WideAngel, a grid of different screens showing the full campus, inside and out. One box was picked, and a camera above the front door showed Charlie enter and turn right, down the steps into the basement. Kennedy picked another view to the camera at the end of the basement hallway, and you could hear the door out of view open and close. I thought Charlie would start walking the length of the hallway, but it seemed she stopped just beneath the camera, so I couldn’t see her.
The hallway was long, and I had seen it myself. It runs the entire length beneath the gym and beyond, with windowed double doors at the end. I could hear Kennedy say "Here, let me fast-forward," and the grainy footage sped up, the only movement the pixels, I don’t know, dancing, on the dark hallway and the slightly lighter windows at the end of the hall.
Then I saw it. Kennedy resumed normal playback. A silhouette of a man filled the windows at the end of the hall. Hands and face pressed against the frosty glass, but I couldn’t see nothing, but I couldn't tell if it was the glass or not.
Two hands shot up from beneath. Charlie was still there beneath the camera, but her hands raised to the ceiling into view. Kennedy cut back to herself and continued:
>I don't know. I really don't.
>This continues until the sun rises nearly six hours later, Charlie's hands still up in, I don’t know, worshiping form. The figure disappears in the sunlight and her arms go down. But here's the thing: she never goes back up the stairs or down the hall, and there are no other ways out. School just resumes like normal the next day. ISS happens down there, so you can see Mr. Telles escorting kids down to the room and some others wandering through for lunch, but nothing more of Charlie.
>I tried to show my family, but they claimed I was smoking too much and wouldn't give me the time of day. Even Peter and Maya laughed. What was I supposed to do? The police would never take it seriously, especially given me as trailer trash and also having a probation officer for possession.
>So I took matters into my own hands. I hid in the bathroom one night, when I knew the janitorial staff was off, with my vape for courage and a can of Monster to stay awake. I cracked the can, took some puffs, and waited in the stalls.
>I tried so hard to stay awake but I couldn't. When I woke up I was slumped over against the stall, but it was more about \*what\* woke me up that freaked me the fuck out. Chanting. I couldn't make out whether it was multiple voices or one very fucked up one, distorted. It was almost like that throat singing thing that I've seen like Mongols do or something. I just know I froze, because it was coming from right outside the door.
>But what freaked me out the most is that there was now a symbol etched into the door - on my side. Someone had entered the bathroom while I was passed out and etched that fucking symbol on the door facing me - without me having heard it or seen it at all. And it's not like I could have missed it. I mean, the etching sound would have been loud. I wasn't that high. I drew that symbol.
She held up the sticky note for the camera. It looked like a cross from a church, but tilted to the left and a long line stretching down from the left beam. Kennedy kept talking.
>I’m scared shitless. My curiosity got the better of me. I followed the sound, and sure enough, it led to that damn basement hallway. I waited at the end like Charlie had done, but nothing happened. I walked down the hall, looking into the ISS room and the weight room and then...
Kennedy looked down and froze; she was so still I had to check the file to see if it was still running. She looked spooked, more terrified than anyone I had ever seen. A tear ran down her face. When she talked again, her voice was shaking.
>I saw movement. A figure darted past the window, and I couldn't help but look into the ISS room. Then I fucking saw it.
>A face emerged from the darkness, and it was smiling. The chanting had stopped and the face looked back at me, its mouth agape as if the funniest joke had just been told and its eyes wider than anything I'd ever seen.
>It was Charlie. It was definitely Charlie Cruz, but a distorted, possessed version of Charlie. I said her name and she cocked her head like a dog, then she licked her lips. I asked her if she was okay, and I pleaded with her through the door that we were all missing her, but she didn't respond. I'll never forget the way she looked at me. Hungry. Cruel. Empty.
>It got worse. I couldn't stop looking, it was like a train wreck. But then another face emerged next to Charlie's. Same mouth agape, same eyes unnaturally wide, flickering horrifically in the red glow of the basement exit sign.
>It was \*me\* looking back. Me, Kennedy Rose Lavalle. I was looking at my own face, distorted and twisted and disgusting. But not like I felt about myself looking into the mirror on the day Charlie chose Michael instead of me. No, this was darker, so much darker. It was like looking into the pit of hell, like my father's angry fist in a look, like the bottom of mom's bottles as she reached for another. It was violent ambivalence and fatal apathy.
>I ran. I ran as fast as I could. My only consolation was that that was not Charlie, and maybe that wasn't me. But the other part of that is that if it wasn't me then I would disappear like Charlie. I’ve pleaded to whatever god is up there, but I can't help this feeling of all-consuming dread, like I’ve seen too much and there’s a price to pay. I'm doomed. Maybe I'll go to the same place as Charlie, and maybe we'll be together. I don't know.
>This all happened last night, and I need someone to know, so I’m hiding it here. Maybe they'll tear this goddamn building down and release whatever's here, or even better, kill it. So please, take this as a warning. Burn this building to the ground because whatever's here is wrong, so fucking wrong.
>My name is Kennedy Rose Lavalle. I'm seventeen years old and I'm a junior at Caron Hill High School. My vape for DNA if they find my body. The post-it note so you know what to look for. Signing off.
The video stopped on this girl’s sad smile.
I'm scared. I can’t find anything with Kennedy Lavalle or Charlie Cruz, maybe I didn’t look hard enough. What do I do? How serious is this, and does anyone know anything about it? How do I convince my boss to listen to a random video of a scared teenage girl? Where do I go from here? I’m beginning to see her face out the corner of my eye.
#entertainment
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In my twenty-six years of life, I've never seen anything like this, and I don't know who to tell. I work for a construction contractor, and we gotta renovate an old high school that has been in use since like the 20's. I think it had been an alternative high school called Caron Hill High. Some folks around Hillside say it's haunted.
I don't pretend to know much about all that. I dropped out of high school at seventeen and never got a GED and I’ve been kinda there most of my life. But this thing with Kennedy Lavalle still eats at me: why wasn't this in the news? There's no news of this girl or Charlotte Cruz, and I don't know what’s going on.
Me and my buddy Lyle are supposed to do the girls' bathroom. We took down the stalls with all the fuckin’ graffiti and weird symbols and whatever. There was a weird one on a door, but teenagers are weird. It was quick work and I was like whatever, then we tackled stripping tile and gutting drywall. When we pulled back the tile, though, a sandwich ziploc bag fell out from a hole in the wall. In it was a thumb drive, a sticky-note with a weird symbol on it, maybe the one from the stall door, and an old vape pen. I probably should have reported it, maybe whined about the extra work to fill the hole in, but something just felt, I don’t know, off.
There was only a video file on the thumb drive. Here’s the transcript of it. It was just a teen girl talking, a few snippets of other videos edited in. She's sitting in a stall in the bathroom, I think probably this one. She was more on the goth side, I probably would have wanted to date her when I was younger. But she looked scared, really fucking scared, the mascara running down her face. She said impossible shit.
She said ahem and started talking.
>My name is Kennedy Rose Lavalle. Um, I'm seventeen years old and I'm a junior at Caron Hill High School. My address is 726 Ironwood Lane and 22 East 9th Street North, depending on which parent I'm living with. My parents are Susanna Dee Burton and Jake David Lavalle. My mom drinks and lives in a trailer with my heroin-addict stepdad Danny Burton. My dad works on the oil fields in North Dakota for months on end. I have one blood brother, Peter, and a bunch of step-siblings I can't keep track of, including Danny's daughter Maya, who calls me her sister. That feels nice sometimes.
>I'm telling you this because I'm nobody, I'm trailer trash - and no one will look for me when I'm gone. But someone has to know. If you find this, I'm probably gone, just like Charlie. Try to get this to my family if you can - this is my last will and testament, I guess. The vape pen in the bag is if they find a body but can't identify it. Maybe my DNA can be identified as me and my family will finally give a fuck. If they don't, my best friend is Jordan Clark. Uh, he's a junior like me and is, like, extravagantly gay. I don't know his middle name. Sorry.
>I'm at Caron Hill High School for possession. Most kids get caught with a vape, but I got caught with a full-ass blunt in the Hillside High School bathroom and off to Caron Hill I went. My mom said I'm the best "self-sabotager" or whatever she knows, but it runs in the family. That's what made Charlie so intriguing to me.
>Charlie Cruz is a girl from my class. Her name is short for Charlotte. Her Spanish heritage, her blond hair and olive skin, makes her glow in the halls. We went to elementary school together and she was always beautiful. While most of us at Caron Hill are here for possession or behavior, Charlie took her freshman year off to help her mom recover from surgery. I forget what kind. Either way, she got behind.
>When she got here she immediately caught the eye of Michael Duran, the most popular guy at school. He was another one with a spotless record, although he and I smoked weed a lot with friends on the weekend. Michael was making moves on me and we had slept together once maybe after a party with too much tequila, so when Charlie told me he asked her out on a date, we realized how fucking shady that was. So Charlie and I made a pact and it made us friends, although I realize now that I probably took it more seriously that she did. She and I agreed that we would both ditch Michael and date each other to spite him. My heart leapt at the idea, because I'm pretty sure I loved her.
>Long story short, it didn't work out like that. Charlie dated Michael and I didn't really talk to either of them much again. Until Charlie went missing.
>Charlie's issue was absenteeism, sure, but she always kept Michael in the loop. I don't know, things like watching her brothers or her mom taking surprise trips to the city were normal, if I remember right. But this time there was nothing. No contact. Michael even asked me if I had heard from her, but nothing. He mentioned he went to her house and her mom said Charlie was supposed to be with him, but she was, like, knee deep in a bottle of rye whiskey and a hookah or something so she slammed the door in his face. Charlie was another nobody to the law so no one looked for her.
>Then the rumors started. I don't know who started them, but I heard them from Jordan that there was a TikTok or Instagram Live video somewhere Charlie had started at Caron Hill, and that the school security cameras showed that she never left the building. I managed to track down the video, which Charlie had posted to her Instagram story. Here.
Kennedy cut to a screen capture of the Instagram Live. It was night, in selfie mode looking at the sky. Charlie walked around, her face in view, trees and streetlights in the background. She was a pretty girl too, but there was something wrong. Something in the way that Charlie's eyes glinted in the nearby streetlights, in the way her smile stretched just slightly too far across her face, in the way she kept quiet and just kinda looked at the camera, that grin plastered on her face. I couldn't help but wonder what she was doing. The two-floor brick building of Caron Hill High School was right behind her. What was she doing at the school? Kennedy cut back to her video and continued talking.
>Yeah, I don't know either. That's not the Charlie I know. That Charlie grins too much, and I knew something was off. I got the help of Ben Ewing, or, uh - a senior who was at Caron Hill because he hacked into the system and changed his grades. He showed me how to view the surveillance footage from my phone. Sorry, I don't mean to implicate anyone.
>I could definitely see Charlie wandering around campus that night, late. She was just looking down at her phone while recording live, probably made at least five or six circuits around the school just looking at her phone. But then she just, I don't know, went into the building. I don't know how the door got open.
>Through the cameras I saw her movements, and what I saw I can't believe. I recorded what I could.
Kennedy cut to a screen capture again. This time of grainy surveillance from WideAngel, a grid of different screens showing the full campus, inside and out. One box was picked, and a camera above the front door showed Charlie enter and turn right, down the steps into the basement. Kennedy picked another view to the camera at the end of the basement hallway, and you could hear the door out of view open and close. I thought Charlie would start walking the length of the hallway, but it seemed she stopped just beneath the camera, so I couldn’t see her.
The hallway was long, and I had seen it myself. It runs the entire length beneath the gym and beyond, with windowed double doors at the end. I could hear Kennedy say "Here, let me fast-forward," and the grainy footage sped up, the only movement the pixels, I don’t know, dancing, on the dark hallway and the slightly lighter windows at the end of the hall.
Then I saw it. Kennedy resumed normal playback. A silhouette of a man filled the windows at the end of the hall. Hands and face pressed against the frosty glass, but I couldn’t see nothing, but I couldn't tell if it was the glass or not.
Two hands shot up from beneath. Charlie was still there beneath the camera, but her hands raised to the ceiling into view. Kennedy cut back to herself and continued:
>I don't know. I really don't.
>This continues until the sun rises nearly six hours later, Charlie's hands still up in, I don’t know, worshiping form. The figure disappears in the sunlight and her arms go down. But here's the thing: she never goes back up the stairs or down the hall, and there are no other ways out. School just resumes like normal the next day. ISS happens down there, so you can see Mr. Telles escorting kids down to the room and some others wandering through for lunch, but nothing more of Charlie.
>I tried to show my family, but they claimed I was smoking too much and wouldn't give me the time of day. Even Peter and Maya laughed. What was I supposed to do? The police would never take it seriously, especially given me as trailer trash and also having a probation officer for possession.
>So I took matters into my own hands. I hid in the bathroom one night, when I knew the janitorial staff was off, with my vape for courage and a can of Monster to stay awake. I cracked the can, took some puffs, and waited in the stalls.
>I tried so hard to stay awake but I couldn't. When I woke up I was slumped over against the stall, but it was more about \*what\* woke me up that freaked me the fuck out. Chanting. I couldn't make out whether it was multiple voices or one very fucked up one, distorted. It was almost like that throat singing thing that I've seen like Mongols do or something. I just know I froze, because it was coming from right outside the door.
>But what freaked me out the most is that there was now a symbol etched into the door - on my side. Someone had entered the bathroom while I was passed out and etched that fucking symbol on the door facing me - without me having heard it or seen it at all. And it's not like I could have missed it. I mean, the etching sound would have been loud. I wasn't that high. I drew that symbol.
She held up the sticky note for the camera. It looked like a cross from a church, but tilted to the left and a long line stretching down from the left beam. Kennedy kept talking.
>I’m scared shitless. My curiosity got the better of me. I followed the sound, and sure enough, it led to that damn basement hallway. I waited at the end like Charlie had done, but nothing happened. I walked down the hall, looking into the ISS room and the weight room and then...
Kennedy looked down and froze; she was so still I had to check the file to see if it was still running. She looked spooked, more terrified than anyone I had ever seen. A tear ran down her face. When she talked again, her voice was shaking.
>I saw movement. A figure darted past the window, and I couldn't help but look into the ISS room. Then I fucking saw it.
>A face emerged from the darkness, and it was smiling. The chanting had stopped and the face looked back at me, its mouth agape as if the funniest joke had just been told and its eyes wider than anything I'd ever seen.
>It was Charlie. It was definitely Charlie Cruz, but a distorted, possessed version of Charlie. I said her name and she cocked her head like a dog, then she licked her lips. I asked her if she was okay, and I pleaded with her through the door that we were all missing her, but she didn't respond. I'll never forget the way she looked at me. Hungry. Cruel. Empty.
>It got worse. I couldn't stop looking, it was like a train wreck. But then another face emerged next to Charlie's. Same mouth agape, same eyes unnaturally wide, flickering horrifically in the red glow of the basement exit sign.
>It was \*me\* looking back. Me, Kennedy Rose Lavalle. I was looking at my own face, distorted and twisted and disgusting. But not like I felt about myself looking into the mirror on the day Charlie chose Michael instead of me. No, this was darker, so much darker. It was like looking into the pit of hell, like my father's angry fist in a look, like the bottom of mom's bottles as she reached for another. It was violent ambivalence and fatal apathy.
>I ran. I ran as fast as I could. My only consolation was that that was not Charlie, and maybe that wasn't me. But the other part of that is that if it wasn't me then I would disappear like Charlie. I’ve pleaded to whatever god is up there, but I can't help this feeling of all-consuming dread, like I’ve seen too much and there’s a price to pay. I'm doomed. Maybe I'll go to the same place as Charlie, and maybe we'll be together. I don't know.
>This all happened last night, and I need someone to know, so I’m hiding it here. Maybe they'll tear this goddamn building down and release whatever's here, or even better, kill it. So please, take this as a warning. Burn this building to the ground because whatever's here is wrong, so fucking wrong.
>My name is Kennedy Rose Lavalle. I'm seventeen years old and I'm a junior at Caron Hill High School. My vape for DNA if they find my body. The post-it note so you know what to look for. Signing off.
The video stopped on this girl’s sad smile.
I'm scared. I can’t find anything with Kennedy Lavalle or Charlie Cruz, maybe I didn’t look hard enough. What do I do? How serious is this, and does anyone know anything about it? How do I convince my boss to listen to a random video of a scared teenage girl? Where do I go from here? I’m beginning to see her face out the corner of my eye.
#entertainment
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