It started, like most bad ideas do, with a dare.
I was seventeen, and my friends Jesse, Drew, Tyler and I were sitting on a tailgate outside a gas station in eastern Kentucky, bored the way small town boys get bored in July. Tyler's older brother had told us about an abandoned building out past Hollis Creek. Some people called it a schoolhouse. Some people swore it had been a church. Everybody agreed on one thing, which was that nobody stayed there past dark.
"Bet you can't do a whole night," Tyler's brother said. He was grinning.
Four teenagers can't hear a sentence like that and walk away. We packed sleeping bags, flashlights and a bag of chips, and drove out at sunset with the windows down.
The building sat at the end of a gravel road, half swallowed by weeds. White paint had peeled off the boards in long gray curls, and the front steps were soft as bread. Inside was one big room with rows of bent wooden benches, a small side room, and a narrow hallway in the back where a stove might have stood. It smelled like wet paper and old dust.
At first there was nothing to be scared of. That's the honest truth. We joked around, ate our chips, and set our sleeping bags in the big room. But a few of the rooms had a feeling in them. The back hallway made the hair on my neck stand up. In the little side room I had the plain sense that I was being looked at, patiently, by someone who had all the time in the world. I stopped going in there after the first hour.
Then the sun went down.
We heard the voices around eight thirty. Low ones at first, mumbled talk, like a group of adults having a serious conversation behind a closed door. But every time we walked toward the sound it moved to a different room. Then came the laughing. Children, a lot of them, giggling and scuffling in rooms we weren't in. It sounded happy, which somehow made it worse.
Jesse laughed it off. "Somebody's got a radio out here."
Nobody answered him. We all knew there wasn't a radio.
By midnight we had gone quiet. Our flashlight was dimming, so I said I'd go out to the car for the spare batteries. Drew offered to come along, but I told him I was fine, mostly because I wanted to prove something. I stepped out the front door, and the night air hit me like cold water.
There was a man standing at the bottom of the steps.
He was tall and thin, in an old dark suit that hung wrong on his frame, his back to the road and his face toward the building. When he turned his head to look at me, I saw that dark tracks ran down from his eyes and out of his ears, like he had been crying something much heavier than tears. His mouth moved. He was trying to say something to me, and I could see him try, and nothing came out.
I don't know what sound I made. Drew told me later it was the loudest thing he had ever heard. I remember the gravel under my shoes and my lungs on fire and the car door handle slick in my palm. I remember getting in the back seat and pulling my knees up to my chin like I was six years old.
A few seconds later the front door of the schoolhouse banged open, and the other three came out at a dead run, tripping over each other, Jesse still holding the dying flashlight. They piled into the car and Drew fumbled the keys twice before the engine caught.
Nobody spoke until we hit pavement. Then everybody spoke at once.
Jesse and Tyler had been sitting in the big room when a shadow slid across the wall and stopped in front of them. It was small, about the size of a child, and it had spoken in a little girl's voice, so soft and ordinary that at first they thought I was playing a trick.
"Is it time to go home yet?" it had asked them. "He said we could go home when the snow stops."
It was July.
I didn't sleep that night. In the morning I walked into the kitchen and told my grandfather everything, because I had to tell somebody who wouldn't laugh. Pop was seventy nine years old and had lived his whole life within ten miles of that road. He set down his coffee, and his face changed.
"That's the old Hollis Creek school," he said. "Church on Sundays, school the rest of the week. Winter of 1918, the sickness came through the valley. A blizzard closed the roads, and there was a teacher there, a young fellow named Mr. Ellis, who had eleven children in his care. He wouldn't send them out into that storm, and he wouldn't leave them either. They say he sat up with them all night by the stove, telling stories, keeping them calm." Pop stopped for a moment. "None of them made it to spring."
I couldn't say anything.
"For years afterward," he went on, "folks used to set a lantern on those steps at night so they could find their way home. I don't believe anybody's done it in a long time."
The next Saturday the four of us went back out there in broad daylight. Pop came too, walking slowly with his cane. We spent the whole morning cutting weeds, hauling brush and straightening the little gray stones we found in the tall grass behind the building. There were eleven of them, worn nearly smooth. Pop said the names out loud, one by one, as we uncovered them.
Before we left, I set an old lantern on the top step, the one from Pop's barn. I didn't light it. It didn't seem like my place.
We never stayed the night again. But I go by there every summer now, and the lantern is still sitting on the step, and the grass around the stones is always cut short.
Someone keeps it that way. I have never once seen who.