en-us Copyright 2008 - All Rights Reserved. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:43:25 GMT 15 By Matt Salwasser
In his 18 years of teaching at the school, business department chairman and law teacher Byron Lee has known about the story of the ghost from the beginning. He first learned of it when the principal of the time, Jim Warren, kept holding off a teacher observation meeting with Lee. Finally wondering why Warren would not meet with him, Lee asked for his real excuse, and Warren explained his fear of a ghost on the second floor of the A-Building. He said that a janitor in 1991 had been cleaning the floor late one night, when he left for a moment to get some more supplies. When he returned a few moments later, all of the lockers in the hallway had somehow been unlocked and opened. Terrified, the janitor left to get his supervisor and when the two returned, all of the lockers had been closed again. The janitor resigned later that year. “That’s trippy,” Lee said as he relayed the story. P.E. department chair and athletic director Paula Weismann has been working at the school for 32 years and said the story of the ghost seemed to become more prevalent after eight to ten years, in the late 1980’s. Like Lee, she also has a story involving former principal Warren. She said that Warren was at school one Saturday afternoon sometime in the late ‘80s. He was working in computer lab when he thought he heard someone running up and down the A-Building hall, which was peculiar because the doors leading outside were closed. He went outside to investigate, found no one there, and returned back inside. Again, Warren heard the running, and went out in the hall to begin checking rooms incase any students were hiding. When he turned around from checking a room at the west side of the building, Weismann said he felt a hand swipe his hair. As he turned to see who had touched him, he saw the door at the other end of the hall, leading to the B-Building, shut. Again, Warren went back into the computer lab, but now heard someone running back and fourth on the roof. Disturbed by the thought of students on the roof, he walked to the quad to see if he could catch anyone running on top of the building. When he found no such person, Warren then went to the custodians on campus and explained to them what was happening. The custodians, amused, told Warren that that is why none of them went in the upper A-Building alone. Weismann told another story which she believes to have involved former custodian Cesar Da Silva. She said that one night at about 1 a.m., the school’s Sonitrol security system was set off by some kind of activity from inside the second floor A-Building. Da Silva was notified of the alarm and arrived at the school to determine the cause of the inner activity. When he got to the second floor, he saw that a classroom door was open with all the lights on inside. He turned off the light, closed the door and walked back down the hall to leave the building and go home. However, when Da Silva turned around to lockup, the same classroom door had been reopened and the lights were turned on again. “It’s a mischievous, playful sort of thing,” said Weismann who added, “I really wanted to meet the ghost.” She said that she used to occasionally go up to the second floor hallway with the intent of making contact with the ghost. Additionally, she said that there have been numerous people who have had some kind of experience in the A-Building. For instance, some have reportedly walked down the hall and suddenly felt as if a chair or desk was being pushed past them. Custodian Arcie Adriano has his own stories to tell. In his 23 years of working at the school, he said he has spent about two working in the A-Building. Adriano first heard of the ghost from former coworker Cesar Da Silva, but thought the story was a joke meant to scare him. Da Silva bet Adriano between $50 and $100 to walk down the hallway around 11:30 p.m., supposedly when there is the most supernatural activity. Adriano did not believe anything would happen, and when nothing did, he said Da Silva refused to pay him. “If I see it, I’ll believe it,” said Adriano, who also said that every time he did work on the floor, the hair on his arms would stand up. He also joked that he would sometimes bring holy water with him. Despite his jokes of holy water, he said he had a close encounter two to three years ago when he was working late on the floor. As he was locking up the last doors for the night, he heard the lockers shudder one after the other as a source-less wind charged from the opposite end of the hall towards him. “I was closing the hallway and suddenly I felt the wind,” he said. While Adriano maintains that he will not believe in the ghost until he sees it, he said, “I’d really like to see the ghost, of course,” adding, “If there is a ghost.” Despite his position, Adriano still likes to scare the second floor teachers. He said he will sometimes see Lee standing in his room and will begin making strange humming noises from the hall. While he maintains that he is not convinced of a ghost’s existence, Lee said, “There have certainly been some interesting things happened that I’ve observed.” Personally, Lee has had two encounters with a possible force from the other side. He recalls the first being in the late ‘90s as his law class was studying a court case about a man and a haunted house he had just bought. At the time, the building had yet to be remodeled and there was a large wooden door in the ceiling leading to a crawl space. Suddenly, the door falls from the ceiling and lands on the one desk with an absent student. “The whole class started screaming, “It’s the ghost!” said Lee. Lee’s other encounter took place in the spring of 2000, still before the building was remodeled around 2001, when he was working with his FBLA team on a Saturday afternoon. Down the hall where A-209 would be now, another teacher had come in to do some work, and had brought his friend and his dog, a German Shepherd. Suddenly, Lee and his students heard loud, angry barking from the other room and went to go see what was going on. Lee walked into the room and saw the teacher standing in front of an open door, staring wide-eyed straight ahead and looking shocked. His dog was still growling and barking, holding himself up on the window still and thrusting his head out the window. Lee asked the teacher what happened and he said the dog had been very interested at something in the closet. He said that the dog began growling and barking at the door, so he opened it to see what the dog was so defensive against. As he opened the door, the teacher had immediately felt a blast of cold air shoot through his body and the dog became even more aggressive. It chased something across the room and to the window, at which point Lee entered the room. While the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Cupertino Division could not find any record of anyone dying on campus, Adriano thinks he heard otherwise. “Someone told me a principal died in the A-Building,” he said. He added that the event would have taken place before he started working at the school, and that he thought the man was Chinese and had suffered from a heart attack. However, Weismann would disagree. “It was supposed to be some kind of student tragedy,” she said. In the early 2000s, the building was remodeled as a school wide renovation process and Lee reported that no strange occurrences have happened since. When he used to hear strange noises at night, especially from his windows, he now hears nothing unusual. ]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:17:00 GMT