School Folklore: Ghosts, Black Dogs, and Cautionary Tales

Think back to the schools you’ve attended. Did they have a Grey Lady in a disused corridor? A hell hound in a supply cupboard? A secret tunnel to a neighbouring building? The ghost of a former pupil, forever roaming the halls?

Many schools end up with urban legends and folklore attached to them. In many ways, the legend of the Charterhouse Plague Pit is an example of school folklore. The boys swapped tales of the screams heard beneath the cobbles of the Charterhouse School. It’s also not the only place to have plague pit tales. Apparently, the Oratory in Woodcote also boasted a legend of a plague pit beneath the school.

Yet both students and staff can spread these stories. They can be cautionary tales, or simply made up to frighten the younger children.

And it’s fascinating how many of the stories I collected for this post involved similar points. That included hazy details, a ghost in the building, or stories that changed over time. So let’s explore some of the school-based folklore I collected!

How This Post Will Work

I’ve taken a slightly different approach than usual for this post. Normally, I comb through books and journals for examples of folklore. This time, I did some primary research…and asked people what urban legends and folklore they remembered about their schools. So I posted on Twitter and Facebook to see what came up.

As a content warning, many tales involve suicide, death, or violence in some way. If this will be difficult for you, feel free to skip this week’s instalment. Take whatever care of yourself that you need. I have filtered out some truly shocking stories since this is a folklore blog and it’s not my aim to be sensational.

At our school, a phantom student apparently wandered the halls of North Block at my secondary school. The details are hazy thanks to the passage of time. But I dimly remember hearing he toppled over a handrail on a second-floor landing and fell to his death. It was totally made up, and the entire school was redeveloped ten years ago, so the building no longer exists.

Who knows if the ghost still wanders on the site though…

Female Ghosts

Victoria reported a school ghost named Mabel who patrolled the attic corridor beside the music, art and TV rooms. Thanks to her diligence, “nobody lingered there on their own”. This school was originally a Victorian house, so the corridor would have been the servants’ quarters, perhaps explaining Mabel’s presence.

Quite a few people reported a Grey Lady or White Lady at their school, particularly those built in the late Victorian or Edwardian periods. Dan noted that the White Lady in his school would follow you home if you saw her.

A Grey Lady supposedly haunted a school in Shieldfield, Newcastle upon Tyne. As Ailsa explained, “nobody wanted to climb a particular staircase to the roof” thanks to the story. We could perhaps consider this legend a form of cautionary tale, in which the ghost functions to keep children away from dangerous places.

Yet one story involved a Red Lady, which is a lot more unusual. The school in question is Hatherop Castle School in Cirencester, once a stately home but now a preparatory school. While the legends involved a Grey Lady, among other ghosts, it seems the Red Lady was the most notorious. The largest dorm for girls had a shower but no toilet. If the girls needed the toilet during the night, they had to walk along the hall and past the library. The Red Lady frightened the girls so much that they peed in the bath instead. Celeste didn’t see the Red Lady, but didn’t know if anyone else had.

Many of the ghosts may have simply suited their historical environment. But they also served a function in keeping people out of particular areas.

Nuns

White Ladies lead us on to discussions of nuns and Elizabeth told me about her school experiences in Liverpool. Her secondary school was Notre Dame High School, Mount Pleasant. Builders knocked two 1830s merchant’s houses together to form the school.

She was there in the 1960s, though later, the school moved out of the building to a suburb. A teacher training college took over the building. As she explained, “No money was spent on it after the war, so there was a lot of old-fashioned school furniture, including green glass chalkboards, and it was very poorly lit. The turret led to the convent, so you would often see nuns floating about in old-fashioned habits. Very spooky!”

The legend spoke of a “white nun, inadvertently bricked up during building work.” She lurked in the turret. Elizabeth explained, “Clearly the 6th form made up the story to terrorise the newbies, but we believed it.” And it would be easy to believe if you already had nuns clad in white walking around the building!

Meanwhile, a nun named Sister Beads apparently haunted St. John’s high school in Newfoundland, Canada. According to the legend, she was having an affair with a Brother from the nearby boys’ school, which became a junior high school. When he ended their relationship, she took her own life in the auditorium. Crucially for the story, “You were supposed to hear her beads rattling as she walked the halls.” Katie told me that as far as she knew, the urban legend was only told from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

The students also spoke of a rumoured tunnel between the two schools. Interestingly, Kelly went to the same school in the 1980s. She said the story originally featured a hallway that led to the Convent. As she never had classes in that part of the school, it was always dark and quiet. This made it extra eerie when a nun appeared out of nowhere. The hallway was closed by the time Katie attended the school, which could explain why the legend featured a tunnel instead.

Creatures

Liz described the ghost of a huge dog with eyes the size of dinner plates. Apparently, it was so large it was the height of a giraffe. The legend held that it haunted the school library, although no one knew why. Some believed the demon to be a punishment, with children fed to it.

Sarah remembered a Black Dog/hell hound with red eyes in the PE cupboard of a school in Hornchurch. The same school also had a spectral teacher and the ghosts of World War II children!

Elizabeth remembered “Foxy Fowler, a sort of male Jinny Green teeth” from her primary school. This one had different origins: “I think the kids cooked it up from half-heard stories about a notorious murder in the papers, and a local suicide, with tales of a haunted house.”

Most impressively, Gemma remembered the ghost of a stag in the toilets, though the school’s insignia was a stag, which explains the choice of animal.

While Gemma’s has an explanation, the others are more imaginative. Elizabeth makes a good point about “half-heard stories”. All it takes is one child mishearing several elements, mashing them together, and then telling their friends. Indeed, James admitted making up his own local legends based on the horror films of the 1980s!

Word of Mouth: The Stories Spread Fast

Mary told a story to show how fast rumours spread, particularly among schoolchildren. As she explained;

“In 1960 in order to support JFK’s campaign, the then 10-year-old Roger Stone started a rumor on the east coast that Nixon wanted to end summer vacations and free Saturdays for kids. It spread so fast that within months, maybe weeks, I was told the rumor on my playground, 3,500 miles away on the west coast.”

Being able to spread a rumour that quickly, across such a vast distance, in the days before social media and text messaging truly is impressive. It just goes to show that schoolchildren can often seem to have their own ways of communicating that defy what adults believe to be possible. This often falls under “children’s folklore“.

And stories don’t even have to spread quickly – sometimes they just need to be believable. Lindsay told me about her school’s legend, that a dinner lady named Mrs Armstrong haunted it. According to the legend, she’d been run over outside the school… Except none of the story was true, being entirely made up.

This story has a named character and a plausible fate for her. Both of these factors make the story more ‘sticky’, and thus easier to circulate.

Cautionary Tales

Many of these school folklore tales function as cautionary tales, keeping students away from parts of the building. Although adults might not start all cautionary tales. Others act as a warning from students to other students.

Karen told me about a legend from her elementary school, about “the kid who got sucked under the ancient wood and steel merry-go-round and squished to death. [It] never stopped any of us from using it with wild abandon, just made sure not to let a foot stray underneath.” While it’s unclear who started this story, it sounds more like the kind of story kids would tell each other.

Kristin’s junior school featured tales of ghosts or “a creature” living in the basement. It’s a good way to ensure children stay away (or go exploring, depending on the child).

Harbinger County Primary School featured a Green Lady who lived in the storage spaces, such as the attic. She would scratch children who entered these spaces alone. Heather thought the upper years passed the story to the lower years.

But perhaps the most extensive of these tales came from rural Northumberland, in the Seahouses area. I should note that this tale includes the word “tramp”, since this was the word used by the children in the 1980s. Peter also noted that using the term so casually was “callous”, and disrespectful towards the unhoused. Yet in the late 1970s and 1980s in the rural north east, children didn’t encounter the unhoused, meaning that those called tramps “had a slightly ‘mythic’ air about them.”

I preserve the term “tramp” as part of the legend as it was told to me.

A Knife for a Finger

Peter explained that a long, wooded lane known as “The Lonnen” ran behind the school. A dense clump of trees grew near one of the back gates. The tramp of the story apparently lived among these trees. He held a mythic status because he had a knife for a finger. Anyone who walked past and made too much noise, or annoyed him, became his victim. He would,

“LEAP OUT AND GRAB YOU! And then (the story went) The real horror began, because he’d use his knife finger to carve the word TRAMP into your forehead!! It was a monster of the mind, no one ever saw him. But it didn’t stop us walking past the copse on nights in the dark half of the year when you left school, and someone would shout ‘TRAMP’ there’d be a rustle in the brambles and kids would scramble screaming off into the dark!”

Peter explained that the story originally featured a tramp with a knife. Yet in 1984, Nightmare on Elm Street came out. The electrician’s shop in the village had a video section; “I can remember all us kids going in to rent stuff, and there being a massive poster of Freddy from the films up on one wall, and when we got back to school (I think after the summer holidays) The Tramp now had the knife finger!”

This is a fascinating example of an urban legend taking elements from popular culture. In this case, the imagery mapped across because of the similarity between a person with a knife, and Freddy’s glove. Anyway, let us continue…

Peter explained that he finished at the school in the 1980s. At the end of the 1990s, he found himself talking to locals in the village. It seemed “someone said they’d heard from the kids at school that there was a tramp living in the bushes… yep same thing (but now he had smashed bottles that he would lunge out of the bushes to try and stab / cut you with)”. Clearly, Freddy Kreuger had lost his appeal by the end of the twentieth century.

Yet this particular story hasn’t actually gone away. Peter went on to say that an old classmate now has a child at the school. According to the child, the kids still say the tramp lives in the bushes: “But now he had syringes, full of poison, tramp blood or tramp piss (you get the idea) and he would run out grab a kid and jab him full of “liquid tramp”.”

The story has survived into its fifth decade (at least) without anyone ever seeing him. The respondent added that he thought “the mythic tramp is being passed down from school year to school year, each year adding their own “thing” to him.” It certainly seems this story has grabbed the attention of the children, who keep the ‘monster’ alive. It’s unlikely that teachers are fanning the flames of the legend, but the way in which the figure evolves to suit the era in which he lives is an example of the fluidity of wider folklore.

School Folklore Started by Teachers

The final collection of stories are those started or spread by teachers, rather than students.

Ashley told me a story from Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital, boys school in Bristol, involving a Green Lady who stalked its corridors. According to the legend, she was engulfed by fury that her son either fell or jumped to his death. In the 1970s, there was apparently a tile in the yard that said ‘RIP Charlie Peace”; people held this to be the spot on which the boy died. Builders removed the tile during building work.

What was really interesting about this one is that Alex replied to the thread who had also heard the legend. In his experience, the older teachers kept the legend alive, rather than pupils, especially since no one admitted to having seen her. It seems the school renovated the corridor favoured by the Green Lady. Once it lost “some of its eerie mystique”, the myth seemed to fade. There was also a possibility that the phasing out of the school’s status as a boarding school may have affected the strength of the myth.

Yet there’s also no obvious reason for the story’s existence, other than it being a point of interest. Perhaps it merely grew out of an eerie part of the school, and teachers passed it on as a tradition.

The Sadistic Schoolteachers

Meanwhile, Darren told me about his first primary school, Walnut Tree Walk in Lambeth. In the 1980s, the staff followed a Halloween tradition to tell a story at assembly involving the Victorian building itself. As he explained, the story was “about a teacher that got stuck in the attic […] and used a bell to break an unopenable window up there and cut themselves on the glass.”

As the story went, the school reopened and staff finally found the teacher dead in the attic. Furthermore, “on the anniversary of their death you could hear a bell ringing from the attic.”

The story is harsh enough to tell primary school-aged children, but the school went one step further. As Darren explained, “as they finished telling that story to the assembly someone rang a bell behind everyone at the back of the hall.”

Darren admitted that he didn’t know if the story was true. That said, the attics were difficult to reach. In theory, if someone moved the ladder, someone could get stuck there. Even more, he remembered, “looking up at the very high ceiling in one of the classrooms and seeing a hatch in the room’s roof after being told that story, and needless to say, it cemented that memory for me.”

This story is unlikely to be a cautionary tale since the likelihood of students accessing the attics was low. Yet the tradition of telling the story seems to have come from the architectural features of the building itself. I did find a news article about the death of a former headmistress of the school in 1913. That said, it sounds like she left the school some years earlier.

Perhaps the story merely came from a need for a Halloween story that then became a tradition.

Keep Off the Roof

Finally, Philip noted the primary school tale about “the lad who fell through the roof and broke both his legs”. He suspected teachers started the tale to put kids off climbing on the roof although he noted older kids always passed it down. Philip originally thought the story related only to his primary school. Yet he discovered “the same tale did the rounds of at least a dozen primary schools in Bolton.”

You won’t be surprised to learn there was “[a]bsolutely zero supporting evidence, mind you…” I find this one interesting because it features horrific injury, but not death. It’s plausible, without being too traumatising. That plausibility makes you more likely to believe it.

What do we make of school folklore?

There are common points to this school folklore. First, many reported being unsure if the story was true. Enough doubt existed to keep the story ambiguous.

Second, no one wanted to be the one to check if there was a Grey Lady in the corridor. Yet some of the tales could almost come from mis-seeing something. For example, the ghostly nuns come from schools with actual nuns. It’s easy to imagine the story growing out of a figure glimpsed out of the corner of your eye.

Third, older kids told younger kids the stories to scare them, turning the tales into a rite of passage. The stories never seem to start with the younger kids and spread to older year groups. The younger children looking up to the older ones gives their stories an air of authority.

Fourth, many of the stories feel like cautionary tales. Some are begun by adults to dissuade dangerous behaviour among students. Others pass among students as a peer group warning. Some of the tales feel a little ‘gossipy’, like the stories of nuns and monks. These even become a form of cautionary tale about the perils of illicit affairs.

The stories spread quickly, and also appear in similar forms in schools with no obvious connection to one another. Are kids tapping into a form of school-age collective unconscious? Or do they simply have the same preoccupations, with the stories evolving to meet the needs of the time?

Let me know! Do you know any school folklore or urban legends? Post in the comments below!