Harriet Gets High Grades as School’s Ghost

The 58 children who live on isolated ranches and homes scattered around the mountain community of Gorman celebrated Halloween by showing up for class Tuesday dressed as monsters, ballerinas, pirates and devils.

Their costumes represented nearly everything, in fact, except ghosts.

Kids in Gorman do not have to pretend to be ghosts. That is because they say their school is haunted by a real one.

“I’ve heard it, and I’ve seen it,” sixth-grader Matt Hogan explained earnestly. “I saw it just a few weeks ago. It was a girl in a blue dress, and it was was standing on the school stage next to Ted Sandoval, a kid in my class.”

The apparition disappeared when 11-year-old Matt ran from the auditorium to summon teacher-principal Wesley Thomas. Ted, 13, never saw the ghost.

Thomas has never seen it, either. But he said he has heard it rattling through the 51-year-old schoolhouse that sits next to the Golden State Freeway about 65 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

“I’ve heard strange sounds. Doors closing, things knocking into other things, when nobody else is around,” said Thomas, who has taught at the small school for three years. “The community up here believes the ghost is here. Some of the things that happen here are awfully strange.”

Teacher Joanne Yolton-Pouder, who has 19 kindergartners and first- and second-graders in her classroom, said she was skeptical about stories of the Gorman Ghost when she first signed on as a faculty member two months ago.

“But a couple of Thursdays ago when I came to work, my classroom door was locked shut,” she said. “I had been the last one to leave the night before. And we don’t have keys for the old locks.

“And then I was sitting at my desk and looked up at the bulletin board where I had drawn a tree and pinned up 19 little paper apples, one for each of my kids. I counted them and there were 20 apples up there. When I went over to look, I found the extra one. It had the name ‘Harriet’ on it.”

“Harriet” is the legendary name of a girl who was purportedly run over and killed by a tractor in the 1920s near the present site of the school. Some Gorman residents contend that the child was buried beneath what is now the school auditorium. They claim it is Harriet that haunts the school--in a friendly sort of way.

Seventh-grader Lisa Graham, 12, said she and friend Stacey Hoosier, 13, spent more than an hour stacking books in the school’s book closet last year when the ghost struck.

“We closed the closet door and locked it. But a few minutes later we got the key and went back in to get a book and found that everything was dumped on the floor,” Lisa said. “Books were scattered everywhere.”

Stacey, who is an eighth-grader, said her late aunt--who worked for years as the Gorman School office manager--had a personal encounter with the ghost 10 years ago. It was a female voice, and it urged Marie Ralphs not to leave the schoolhouse that evening.

“My aunt ignored the voice and walked out and slipped and fell and broke her arm and right hip. She’d never believed in the ghost until then,” Stacey said.

Although some students dismiss the ghost stories, others at the school said they have had their own close encounters of the weird kind.

“I’ve heard footsteps on the stage and doors slam,” said Mary Jane Fuller, school maintenance supervisor for six years. “Three weeks ago, I was sure somebody was standing behind me, but when I turned around to say something, nobody was there.

“We had one employee who encountered the ghost as she walked out the front door. It scared her so she never came back.”

Judy Conant, who teaches grades 3, 4 and 5, said a heavy interior hallway door “opened 90 degrees and stayed open” when she approached it a few weeks ago.

“I’ve heard it knock on the bathroom walls,” said seventh-grader Alvin Anderson, 12. Alvin was dressed up as a gorilla as he munched yellow and black cupcakes at the school Halloween party.

Alvin said he planned to pass up trick-or-treating in the isolated canyon south of Gorman, where he lives on a ranch and his closest neighbors live in the next valley over.

“You knock on people’s doors up here dressed like this, and they’d probably get a shotgun and go KERPLOW at you,” he explained.