It’s dark outside, around 9 p.m. You stayed extra late after school to work on the set for the play again and are the last one in the building. Ready to return home, you are walking out the door when you realize you forgot an assignment in your locker. You sigh, and head back up to the first floor. As you walk down the deserted hallway, you feel a yank on your backpack— swinging you around.  You turn around, to see who it was, but no one is there.

This was the real experience of a Central theatre student years ago.

Maybe  at a different high school such an incident could be dismissed as a coincidence. Old buildings make weird sounds all the time, and people can get in their own heads when alone. However, it is harder to rule out the eerie when the entire school is over a hundred years old and looks like a gothic castle.

The sheer number of spooky incidents makes the supernatural at Central hard to dismiss. Not just the quantity, but the variety of people who report unexplainable events is unsettling. “There are rooms I won’t go in, day or night,” says Jermond Bonner, a Central security guard.

Students, psychology teachers, security guards, and coaches have witnessed the abnormal.

 Just the fact that Central has had a Ghost Hunting Club for decades is interesting enough in itself.  These students believe spirits live in the building and go after hours to explore the school using a variety of ghost hunting tools. One is an EMF meter, or electromagnetic field meter, which blinks when it detects electronic energy waves, a sign that something is there.

One specific story shared by Robert Tucker, psychology teacher and Ghost Hunting supervisor, was not of seeing a ghost, but smelling one.  Back in the 1920s, room 113 used to be the principal’s office. The principal at the time was known for smoking in this office. Janitors have said for years from time to time they smell a strong scent of tobacco smoke wafting from the room. The room also lit up the EMF readings.

Once, while exploring room 029 in the basement, Tucker began to get all kinds of EMF readings.  At this time, the reader was on an app that could translate the electrical signals to their word equivalent.  The only words that came up on his phone on that expedition seemed not to make sense— they were all doctor and medical related.  However, a former custodian who came along was spooked; he explained that the room had been leased out to Creighton dental students in the early 1900s to practice medicine.

 Outside of the direct search associated with Ghost Hunting Club, Tucker has experienced his own Central paranormal sightings. One night, while working late in the old fourth floor library alone, he heard a book fall from a shelf into a trash can.  When he went to see who else was there, he found no one.  To make matters worse, the book that had fallen was an old book titled, “Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts.”

Molly Mattison, the Ghost Hunting supervisor for the past six years, has had a couple odd experiences as well.  Multiple times while alone at the school on Saturdays, she has heard footsteps following her and turned around to find no one there.

Recently, the club conducted an activity in the basement to see if a spirit might respond better to a certain student.  They recorded nine students asking the question “Is anybody here?” thinking they would play it back and see if a spirit responded.  “But when you play it back you hear 10 voices, so I don’t know who—or what that was,” Mattison said.

Certain places are more prone to eeriness than others.  The auditorium is one of these places.  “We find we get a lot of EMF activity in the auditorium,” Mattison said.  In the space where the pit orchestra is, students have reported hearing disembodied voices.   The large stage light is also known for weirdness.  “When we have been down here, we have asked are there any spirits around and the light has flickered in response to that voice,” Tucker said.  Contractors doing the rewiring to update the auditorium have struggled with inserting wire into empty pipes, as if something, or someone, seemed to push it out.

The Ghost Hunters are not the only students to experience eeriness at Central.  Administrators staying late at the school alone have also been creeped out.  The divider between the main office and the athletic office has been known to swing open when no one is there to push it.

 In the courtyard, there is a photo from the 1980s of some Central students sitting at lunch.  Most kids are talking, but one dark haired girl is making direct eye contact with the camera, and once you have made eye contact with her you can’t lose it. No matter which direction you go from there, her eyes seem to follow you.

The most widely reported ghost at Central is not of a student, but a custodian.  Teachers, students, and security guards have all reported hearing rolling, such as from a mop bucket at times when no one should be in the building. Why the ghost of a custodian would return to Central, or any ghost for that matter, is unclear.  The case for ghosts existing to begin with is also unclear.  However, Tucker believes that scientifically we should not rule them out. “We have energy running through our bodies. Energy can either be made or destroyed, so when you die your energy is not destroyed, so what happens to it?” he asked.