| willpower | 01-22-2002 04:48 AM |
hahahahah!!! I remember!! Okay.. here goes:
Queen Mary Elementary school was built in West Point Grey at the turn of the century. The building looks like the typical turn-of-the-century schoolhouse, built with red bricks and a big white bell tower on top. Legend goes that during the Great Depression, on March 3rd, 1931, a grade 6 student named Amelia MacGregor was sent to the bell tower for detention. That afternoon, the teacher who sent that student up there, named Mr. Stuart Thompson, received a telegram notifying him that a relative had just committed suicide. The distraught teacher dropped everything at once and immediately went home to make preparations for departure, thus completely forgetting about the student. Now remember, this was an era when students would be punished for disobedience with whippings, so Amelia, despite being hungry and cold, forced herself to stay.
At the exact same time, the acting principal carried out a memo from a building inspector to close up the belltower, due to rat infestation. Vancouver Police detectives believed that when the custodian had knocked on the belltower's door, Amelia had been too scared to answer back, or had been napping. The door was nailed shut by the custodian. It was 2 weeks later when Mr. Thompson returned to the school after all the funeral ceremonies. When he returned, he was surprised at the commotion regarding a missing student of Queen Mary school. 3 days later, he finally confessed to being the last to see Amelia, and sending her to the belltower for detention. Immediately, VPD and the custodians removed the planks of wood from the doorway and rushed inside the belltower, expecting the worst. To their surprise, Amelia's remains were not found. Not a single thing was out of place in the entire belltower, except for some rat droppings and a larger-than-usual rathole carved into the rotting wood.
Since then, students at Queen Mary have over the years reported strange scratching and thumping noises coming from the ceiling, including my entire grade 7 class. Some students have also witnessed an arm sticking out the wide slats of the belltower shutters, and some have also claimed to have heard the singing of a small girl coming from the belltower. When I was in school there, the teachers and office staff would never acknowledge our claims of a "School Ghost", yet some of the older teachers' eyes would well up and their hands start to shake whenever we talked of these sights and sounds.
I remember one episode in Grade 7 when some classmates decided to climb the fixed wooden ladder that was located behind the school stage just for kicks. I was the 6th person who climbed up. As I entered the dark wooden tunnel, I heard Brendan (the classmate who went in first) say, "Fine, fine.... we're leaving." and then "Turn around guys!" When we asked him why he had asked us to turn around, he said he reached a boarded-up door and was trying the knob when he heard a girl from the other side of the door say, "You're not allowed to be in here. Leave or I'll tell Mr. Thompson, and you'll be in big trouble!" Coincidentally, the Gym Director's name was Mr. Thompson as well, so at first we assumed it was him. Only now, after knowing more about poor Amelia, do I realize that perhaps the little girl had meant Stuart Thompson. | 