Drama! or, The Creation of Ghosts.

I attended several secondary schools and embracing the supernatural seemed to be high on everyone’s agenda.  

I was in the Drama Group at one school, and we were performing a version of ‘Animal Farm.’ I was one of the few human characters, so I didn’t have to wear one of the ‘smock and mask’ costumes that denoted the animals. It was winter, so by the time school finished for the day, it was already dark. Those who lived more than thirty minutes’ walk from school were allowed to stay on the premises until performance time. We often did much of the setting up, costume and scenery repairs, and so on while waiting for the cast and crew’s return. I was asked to collect the costumes from the needlework room and took three or four other pupils with me. It was a large cast, and the masks were bulky.  

There is something inherently unsettling about an empty school. The change between light and noise, with hundreds of people roaming around, to dark and quiet with echoing footfalls, made everyone feel uneasy. Even the teachers. I think this may be why janitors are treated with such suspicion, as they are immediately aligned with the school’s uncanny aspect, making them ‘other.’  

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the needlework room was located, and as we hit the last step, a car drove along the road outside the school. The sodium orange had thrown shadows of mannequins onto the frosted glass of the door, and the yellow car lamps made those shadows move.  

Within seconds, two of the team screamed, then turned and ran from what they thought was one or more ghosts. Within minutes, there was a gaggle of people charging up the stairs wanting to see this supernatural horror, eager to have the wits scared out of them. Within forty-eight hours, the school had acquired a history of death and dismemberment.  

Stories were circulated of teachers who went mad and hung themselves in the needlework room. Speculation of the school being built on a graveyard soon became ‘truth.’ Anything – the more gruesome the better – was the cause of these apparitions, except car headlights and shadows. The hysteria was so pronounced that the costumes and repair tools were brought down to the stage area during daylight hours for subsequent performances while it was still light. 

No one would have to walk along those uncanny corridors.  

What was particularly interesting was that this shared experience brought the cast and crew closer together. We became more protective of each other, more of a tribe. Modern humans reverted to primitive tribal status in the wake of an unquantifiable threat and myth became a kind of social glue.  

The ghost in the needlework room took on genuine mythic status, albeit temporary. I wondered how many people remembered an event over forty years ago in a long-demolished school. Suppose it is a story that only exists in my memory – and having asked people about it on the school’s Facebook page, it appears that it is – is it still a myth, or only a memory?  

As with the TV static in ‘The Magic TV,’ the brain does not take the absence of information well and tries to interpret what it sees in ways it can understand. Much like hallucinogenic experiences in sensory deprivation tanks, a lack of expected information leads to the brain attempting to fill in the gaps. Watching a TV receiving no broadcast results in an attempt to ‘make a picture’ in the snow. With the ‘after-hours’ school becoming unfamiliar, perhaps the brain tried to fill in the gaps with new people by giving shadows unexpected meaning – both apparitions manifesting as the supernatural.  

In recounting my experience of the supposed supernatural in ‘Drama!’ the story skirts between the weird and the eerie: weird because something is (apparently) there that shouldn’t be, and eerie because a school, although familiar, is a public space rather than a homely one and as eerie is found in a place ‘partially empty of the human,’ a school after hours is very much in its province. The sense of ‘wrongness’ is weird, the emptiness eerie, the sight of a ghost, an avatar of the threshold between life and death, liminal. 

My lack of surprise and inability to feel frightened at this apparently terrifying vision was treated with suspicion. I didn’t succumb to the hysteria. I wasn’t ‘one of us.’ I was quite used to seeing mannequins lit by car headlights on dark and foggy evenings as my mother worked in a clothes shop, and I’d sometimes help with changing the window displays after hours. Rational explanations, though, didn’t stop the myth from escalating out of control.