Whitey's Mansion

Didn't write for over a week, and now I am writing my second blog entry on the same day.  In the previous post, I spent the time worrying about the current state of education.  As I was writing it, I came to the realization that I allowed myself to forget my favorite Halloween story from my years of teaching.

It was in that first year of teaching the afternoon block.  These students were all college bound, so they were the exact opposite of the morning block. When there was a lesson that I taught with this group, I planned very hard so that they couldn't detect that I didn't know what I was doing.  To that point, I will now state what another teacher, Sue Boesch, and I have said that we needed to do:

I ask the forgiveness of any student who was in any of my classes in the first three years of my teaching career at North Side.  Had you been in my classes in the fourth year and any year thereafter, I can guarantee that you would have learned more and been impressed at what you had taught me in those first three years about how I should teach.  For my naive incompetence, I am truly sorry.

I feel so much better now!  Now, back to that Halloween.  The lesson that I had planned for that day showed how I had learned my lesson about relationship building.  I knew that the students would be in the holiday spirit, so I planned to teach The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe.  I had the recording ready, discussion points outlined, and the relationship piece built in.  And it went very well, until the discussion took me to ghosts.

Now the discussion wasn't the problem.  The problem developed from the field trip that was a direct result of where the discussion lead me.  I am sure that many teachers can relate to when students steer them to digression.  I developed the "steering" detection ability soon after this experience.  But on that day, they lead me astray, and I went with them without discerning what was happening.

I was asked if I knew any ghost stories.  That seemed innocuous enough.  So I related a few stories that I had heard, but they really latched onto the one that I had actually tracked down in my teenage years - Whitey's Mansion.  It wasn't really a mansion, but it was a pretty cool building that had been left to decay on the south side of town.

Relating the story would take a while, and I am not sure it is all that important anymore because the building has since been torn down.  What is important is that, to a student, they wanted to go and inspect the building.  Before I knew it, they had hatched a plan to all meet there at midnight and explore the grounds and rooms for themselves.  You would think that somewhere in my brain a warning would have gone off.  Nope.  I even volunteered to supervise.

I was working a basketball game at school that night when a parent came up to me and asked if I had really told my students to go and trespass on property that is supposed to be haunted.  The warning that didn't go off before sure did then.  I was committed to working at the game, but I really wanted to find a way to correct my stupidity.

The game ended.  All that I could come up with as a remedy was to get to the mansion before the students and tell them that this was a bad idea.  I got in my car and headed straight to the Mr. Wiggs parking lot.  Mr. Wiggs was a department store located in front of the location for Whitey's.  When I drove behind Mr. Wiggs, I saw that there were a few cars there.  It was only 10:30, so I didn't think anything of it.

An hour later, students began to arrive.  I advised them that I hadn't been thinking straight and that going onto the land where Whitey's stood could mean trespassing.  You can guess how that went over.  Not one of them turned back.  In groups of two, three, four, and more they trudged down the slight hill and up the other that the house was on.

I stayed just in case something went wrong.  That was when I found out why there had been cars already parked behind Mr. Wiggs when I arrived.  A few enterprising young men had arrived early to make sure that the rest of the students encountered "ghosts."

What happened next is a video that runs in my mind seamlessly today.  First were the ghostly noises in the darkness followed by screams of terror and masses of young people running for their lives back to the parking lot.  Some made it back cleanly; others were impeded by trees while others tumbled down the hill into the stream that encircled the home.  Within minutes the perpetrators surfaced, their laughter almost causing them to join the others who had fallen before them.

I could have been furious with them, but I didn't have time.  I noticed that the lights in the homes adjacent to Whitey's went on.  I went into crisis mode directing all of them to get out of there.  On this they listened.  When the last of them was gone, I waited to find out if the police were called so that I could explain and take my consequence.  No one came.

Strangely, no parent, staff member, or anyone else confronted me the next day.  I didn't need anyone to tell me that I hadn't used good judgement.  Just putting this into written form makes me cringe.  I learned a lot that night.