Advertisement
Please wait...

Flames of the Past



Estimated reading time — 8 minutes

At age 10, I wasn’t quite as developed as a lot of people were when it came to their sense of fantasy vs reality. I was all about fantasy, and I didn’t care about anything else. Every day, I would play Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! on the playground with my closest friends while the other kids played sports and ran around on the jungle gym. Bullies would always call me a baby, because I talked to my cards like they were real. I didn’t care who saw me do it, either. I was an average freak to them, and nothing more.

I heard dull stories every day while listening to the people who bullied me, seeing as they always managed to be seated around me. I would block out anything that didn’t seem like it was worth my time.

Near the end of my 5th grade year, I heard a story about something that the kids called “The Dungeon”. It was supposedly a place that was located near the old art room, and people said that if you opened the circular door in that room, you would be sucked down into a room with bright lights and construction equipment. Then, you would be gagged and blindfolded, and you would start to fall asleep. Upon awakening, you would find yourself in the nurse’s office, covered in dirt, and you would be told that you fell off of the jungle gym outside and hit your head. It had supposedly happened to 2 of my classmates/bullies, Kevin and Dustin, and they didn’t want to tell anyone besides their friends because of how scared they were.

I knew the exact room they were talking about, seeing as I was a very advanced art student, and my teacher’s secondary classroom for his honor students was right next to this room. I had always found the room odd, because it was plain concrete, the door to it was broken off of its hinges, and in the middle of the room was a circular shaft with a metal dome on top. The dome had a wheel on it, and the domed shaft as a whole reminded me of a submarine hull. I was curious, so during my after-school art class, I asked Mr. Basler if I could use the restroom. Of course he said yes, and as soon as I was out of the art room, I snuck into the dull room next to it.

I walked over to the shaft and twisted the wheel that was atop it. Sure enough, it was just like a submarine hull, and the door swung open on a hinge. I looked down into the hatch, and immediately saw the ladder that would allow me to climb down. I hadn’t been sucked in like those bullies had said, so I wasn’t scared at all. I climbed down the ladder quickly yet quietly, and soon I found myself standing in a well lit dirt room. The room had chunks of concrete and huge mounds of dirt littering it, and I soon saw the construction equipment that the two bullies had been talking about.

Jackhammers.
Shovels.
Spools of heavy wire.
Pick-axes.
Even a variety of saws.

I was starting to get scared. I asked myself why all of this stuff was here, and why this place looked nothing like a construction site. I soon found my answer as I crept over to one of the large holes that I saw in the ground. Down in the center of the hole was an ancient looking coffin, and the lid had been sawed off. I could see a bleach-white skeleton inside, and I started to cry. Why the hell was all of this here, and why were these dead people being dug up?

I decided that this was no time for questions, and I wanted to be out of the place ASAP. As I turned around to leave, I felt something hit me hard in the back of the head, and I collapsed. I guess that whoever hit me thought that I was unconscious, because they started to talk to themself.

I heard a man say “Damn kids, this is the 3rd one this month that made his way here. I need to have Todd buy a new door for the cover room…”.
I soon felt my body being lifted up, and the man placed me onto his back for the climb up the ladder. I could see the gray hair all over his face, and I came to realize that this man was Ray, the oldest of the school janitors. But why would he do this to me? I was one of his favorite kids in the school… I had talked to him since 1st grade! Why was he doing this all of a sudden?…

Advertisements

As Ray got to the top of the ladder, he threw my body upwards a little, and I fell into the dull concrete room. He climbed up afterwards, and I heard him say “Stupid little shit, didn’t even have the courtesy to close the hatch.” as he slammed the hatch shut. I was carried up the basement steps, and then halfway across the 1st floor of the school to the nurse’s office.
As we entered, Nurse Janet let out a whimper and said “Oh the poor guy, another one fell off of the jungle gym?.. What part did he fall off of?”

Ray replied “I’m not exactly sure, but he hit his head. Hard.”
He proceeded to throw me onto the patient’s bed gently, and he left the room without another word. When I opened my eyes fully about 15 minutes later, I thought that I deserved an award for portraying an unconcious child so well. Now, it was almost 3 o’clock, which would mean that my mom would be at the school soon to pick me up. I asked Nurse Janet what had happened, and she told me exactly what Ray had told her. Seemed as though she didn’t know about the underground, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I told her my Mom was probably waiting outside for me, and she told me that I could leave. So, I did just that.

Whenever I got out to my Mom’s car, I got in, and I immediately started crying. When I told her what I had seen and what had happened to me, she was furious. She threw out a huge amount of curse words, and then she did something that I rarely ever saw her do: she pulled out her cell phone, and she called Dad. She told him to get to the school, and make sure he had a firearm concealed on him, “just in case”.

This scared me a little, so I said “Mommy, Dad isn’t going to hurt anyone, is he?”

She smiled at me and said “Not unless they try to hurt one of us first”.

Advertisements

I trusted her when she said that, seeing as she was an amazingly nice woman, and my Dad was an ex-cop who anyone could trust. I knew she was telling me the truth, and so when she asked me to come into the school with her, I grabbed her hand and followed her.

Upon arriving at the principal’s office, she told me to wait outside, because she didn’t want me to hear her say any more curse words, and that she was about to throw everyone in the book at the principal. I waited outside of the door as she went in, and soon my Dad was there and he went into the room too. My parents came out about 25 minutes later, and as my Mom walked out, she turned around and said one last thing to the principal.

“I hope you enjoyed being principal here while you could, because the police are going to have a field day with this.”

A few months later, after Dustin, Kevin and I had given our statements to the police, over half of the teachers and staff at my school were having criminal charges filed against them. Turns out that over 30 members of the faculty had been in on this “underground” ordeal, and they had all lost their jobs, as well as their freedom in the end.

The reason for the secret room and the underground site was an interesting one. During a battle that happened in the area of the school directly before the Civil War, a rich family had killed all of their slaves (83 total) and set their own house aflame. Before burning their own house down, they buried all of thier riches with the dead slaves so that they could “Give them n***ers something nice that they didn’t have to steal.” ****PLEASE NOTE: I am not a racist, this is the exact quote that they gave to a neighbor that had come to see them before their house was burned down****

When these people were done with the burial of their slaves as well as their riches, they went into the kitchen of their house and ate dinner. As they were eating, the house went up in smoke and all of the people inside were burned to death. The rumor was that the family burned themselves alive on purpose so that they could atone for their sins. Why they killed their slaves was never known. But, the townsfolk took it upon themselves to unbury the dead slaves and re-bury them all properly. All 83 were buried in seperate coffins, and on top of all the coffins, the townsfolk had scattered the remains of the dead rich family. A tombstone was placed there that said “Here lies 83 people and 5 demons. The burn of Hell is stonger than that of a mere flame.”

When all of the people were re-buried, the riches of the dead white family were left in the 83 coffins as a sign of respect for the dead.
That was what the faculty was after.
Without knowing it, the school had been placed upon this burial site, and when the principal found out about this possibility, he took it upon himself to secretly excavate the area underneath the school. When teachers found out, they wanted in immediately. The principal had already collected a large amount of gold and silver jewelry from the two coffins that he had managed to dig up.

Advertisements

After that incident was over and done with, the city poured the hole in the secret room full of concrete, hoping to seal the hole for eternity.

My old elementary school is now an old burned out building. About a month after the burial chamber had been sealed, a fire had started in the cafeteria while the janitors were cleaning the school. Reports from all three of the janitors that were there say the same thing:

“A fire had started for some reason in the southeast corner of the room, closest to the basement. When me and my co-workers went to go get water in the kitchen so that we could stop the fire, we started to hear laughter coming from the cafeteria, and so we ran in there as fast as our legs would carry us because we thought a kid was in that burning room. When we ran in, we saw a group of people sitting at a burning table in the southeast corner, and when we yelled at them to get away, the woman at the head of the table looked at us all and smiled. Then, the table and everyone at it just went up in a huge pillar of fire. We all ran like hell, and as soon as we were outside, we used a payphone to call 911. We were all pretty shaken up about seeing 5 people go up in flames, and our workplace was on fire. None of us knew what else to do. So we just cried.”

No bodies were recovered from the scene, but when the table in the southeast corner was found, it had very old china and silverware sitting in perfect placement for a five person meal. There were places on some of the handles of the silverware that weren’t charred, almost as if someone was holding it while it was being burned.

***This story goes out to all of those people that always thought that something was creepy about their school. This story is 100% authentic, but I will not reveal where this event occured at, due to the fact that I do not want to tarnish the name of my home town any more than it already has been.***

Credit To: La’Mont

Please wait...

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.

54 thoughts on “Flames of the Past”

  1. If this actually happen it would have a been all over the news and i don’t remember even hearing about this

  2. Very, very good. This makes me wonder why the schools basement is only accessible via the elevators for handicapped people to go up stairs.
    When the elevator goes up, you have to climb into the fake elevator shaft, and then keep someone else up at the door to press the “up” button so you don’t get trapped. I only saw a quick peek when someone went into the elevator to go up, but I just saw a typical electricity and a lot of pipes and stuff.

  3. The last person that replied got the just of it. The story is told as a “true story” from the point of view of a person who has no true sense of reality.

    I was initially trying to drop hints by claiming it to have truth behind it, but the Anons kept ripping me apart without truly realizing my intent.

    Regardless, I’m glad that you all have read and commented on this piece, and I appreciate all the feedback, good or bad. I plan to start writing a fantasy series soon, and would love to have some of the readers on here follow it.

    As soon as it is complete, I’ll throw a post up somewhere on here, so keep an eye out.

    -La’Mont

  4. Why are people debating how true this is? It’s a Creepypasta writen by someone who says, in the very pasta, they have problems telling fantasy from reality. Even if it were, why would you think this is in anyway indicative of what actually happened? The helpless flailing to justify it as real is adorable and all but seriously, even the first Anon is just commenting that the ending (THIS IS ALL TRUE) is annoying because it clearly isn’t.

  5. This story put me right to sleep. Had potential, but when you mentioned you had trouble differentiating between fantasy/reality, I was hoping that your version of events would’ve been in your own mind and yadda yadda yadda. Like I said, had potential, but you spent too much time explaining the history (and why it was ‘scary’) after the fact rather than incorporating it into the action. Meh.

  6. LAst Anon is incorrect, or just Lame aunt trying to cover his tracks. This school in Fredericktown is a middle school that burned down two years ago. One, I doubt a twelve year old wrote that. Two, unless you started school really late, you wouldn’t even be in 6th grade, the middle-school starting point.

    Just say it’s bullshit, dude. I for one truly look for legitimate paranormal activity.

  7. Forgot to post how to find it. I cant post a link for some weird reason. Go to google and type in “small town school fire in missouri” … it should be on a kmov dot com website.

  8. Not sure if this is the school referenced, but there is an old, burnt out school house right up the road from my aunt and uncles, it’s way out of town, but the closest town is Trenton, MO.

  9. @L you son of a bitch, just put the school name here if you’re even telling the truth. Id rather hunt you with a spear than Google this story. Is L short for LaMont? Seriously? In the age of Pokemon and yugioh this can’t be found on the internet? Oh right because it’s a lie.

  10. yeah this was bland pasta. it had the makings of a good meal up until the fantasy obsessed kid was all ”hey mum there are coffins in a hole and the janitor smacked me upside the head”, and her response wasn’t ”not today i’m on my period soooo bad right now”. and why would 88 slaves have seperate coffins. that would cost an incredible amount. plus the actions of a bunch of teachers wouldn’t have any negative effect on a town, plus they couldn’t be arrested without trial which the news crew would have some access to whether a couple hick cops tried block it or not and i doubt the teachers . digging up gold probably has a smaller sentence that drug dealing so the teachers lawyer would push that angle for sure. this is so full of holes and if there was any truth this would be totally googleable despite any impossible cover ups by a some random back water police .

    1. If I told my mom that a janitor hit me across the head in the 5th grade and knocked me out you better bet her and my dad would be up there ready to whoop some ass regardless of the rest of my story.

  11. This was some really odd pasta, but it was actually very believable, especially the reactions of the people involved in the story..

  12. after hours of searching through countless sites i finally found out where this took place and what was reported that happened after uncovering the name of the school i found the local legend that was just what he said it was this man is telling the truth, for the most part so children lay off him/her it is a good story backed by incredibly hard to find facts which makes its all the more fun but for those who are curious i shall give you a hint start with small town school fire in a search engine then refine and profect your search from there have fun and happy hunting ;)

  13. For God’s sake people leave the poor guy alone (Or Girl I don’t know Sorry) Stop trying to tear him apart for Information because you wont get it out of them.

  14. Don the Bassman

    This was a fun read, reminded me of the campfire tales that I would hear on occasion. I don’t care whether it’s a true story or not, I think that the style is rather conversational and I enjoy that. The holes do add a bit of character to the entire tale, making me think that the narrator doesn’t know or remember everything exactly and gives the piece an organic feel. Good work.

  15. letskeepitasecret

    an okay story. but Anon here ripped it apart. Not that im complaining. Wish the author would just spill the beans already.

  16. Okay so you insist this is true. But no one knew the real story, by what You commented. It was covered up as something drug related. then how the hell do you know the details? If you were a kid they surely wouldn’t have told it to you. Unless Your parents or siblings if you had any wanted to scare the shit out of You and you just took it too far. There are so many reasons why this couldn’t have been true… It’s just illogical in a bunch of ways.

  17. La’Mont is a variation of my actual name. And yes, while posting this is foolish, I figured sharing my story would be kind of a fun change. You can believe it or not, but I’m not going to be a fool and argue it even farther, and the town name will still remain a secret. Though, whoever said Missouri is correct. So, if you think you can find the story, be my guest.

  18. Why would the rich folk bury their riches with the dead people? Why go to the trouble of murdering a load of people and then burying your money with them? Plus, why wasn’t the money/riches taken by the authorities if not the first but the second time? It’s pretty good otherwise.

  19. Out of everything I’d remember, the number one thing would be exactly what the skeleton looked like. But hey, that’s just me. Apparently, you remember the exact neighbor quote though, the janitor’s statements well enough to, at least paraphrase rather than sum up, etc.

    The 100 people on Creepypasta are not capable of “further ruining your town’s reputation” – unless that was a cover-up since you didn’t want to let everyone know you were in the WPP, which you so readily revealed anyway. 

    If you were in the Witness Protection Program over this, that’d be awfully foolish to post this at all. And then also directly say you’re in it. 
    Way to mention the region is in St. Louis, by the way. So what’s “La’Mont”? Your new name, your old name, a “pseudonym” or what? Lol.

  20. @La’Mont

    Where did this happen? The other anon makes a very good point, this pasta has a lot of holes, so stop taking it so personally. Paranormal stuff fascinates me, and the fact you said a news team from St. Louis came in indicates it is probably somewhere in Missouri. Feel free to tell it on here, or if not, send it to my e-mail which I can provide.

    1. I agree. Not to mention, if a news team from outside the town knew about it, then it must not have been a well kept secret like he said. That contradiction alone says that it’s fake.

  21. @La’Mont

    Cut the bullshit and just tell us where this happened, otherwise we’re all going to continue thinking this is nothing but a second-rate, cold crappy pasta. Your story is full of holes, stop taking the criticism so personally. If you can give the name of the town or school at the very least, it’ll clear up a lot of confusion.

  22. @Anonymous

    First of all, I lived in a very backwoods kind of town. The school nurse was a position that usually rotated every 2 years or so, due to parents complaining of the nurses not having the proper training. So, me being unconscious for that long, while extremely dangerous, was in fact the case. The nurse was untrained, and was hired on due to the fact that she was the sister-in-law of the vice principal.

    Second, do you think I really remember the color of the skeleton? I was young, and scared out of my wits. I said bleach-white so that there could at least be a description of the skeleton. That piece was for story telling purposes.

    Third, the names of all of the people I said are their actual names, or at least were. Me and 3 other boys were put into the witness protection program due to us being “in danger” and the names “Dustin” and “Kevin” have since changed. Leaving the last names out was enough in my opinion.

    And finally, the google-able part? This story was very well kept, and the people that move into that town are unaware of its past. Most of the people involved are now locked away or in different states, and the parents and students were told that the problem was actually drug related. Even the janitors that witnessed the school fire were never informed of the story behind this. A news team from the St. Louis area actually tried coming in because they caught wind of a massive drug scandal in this town, but local authorities stopped them.

    The last thing I heard of the situation was that the school had been rebuilt, and that some of the gold and jewelry from the coffins that managed to be passed around has since been destroyed.

    This is not a tale. This is the truth. The other stories that I tell on here are that of fiction, but not this one. I’ve been mentally traumatized ever since this, and the fact that you are calling me a liar? That is beyond insulting.

  23. I liked it a lot, it was a pretty good story. I even called my friend to read it to him, he was kinda freaked out, but he’s kinda a baby

  24. Any responsible nurse would’ve told the parents what happened, if not also called for an ambulance. Concussions are dangerous. Being unconscious for over 15 minutes is ridiculous.

    The skeleton would not be bleach-white. No way in Hell after all those years.

    And even if he didn’t give the town and school names, this would still be “Google-able” with the right key words.

    Why do authors think they need to ruin a story by insisting it’s true? Just tell the damn story and make no reference to “Don’t believe me, but it’s true…” or “Oh, I swear this is true but I’m not going to tell where!” Skip that completely. EVERYONE does it, it doesn’t make you MORE credible.
    Also, why name the bullies, janitors, teachers, etc., if you’re so private? I know people give fake names but they usually, actually let us know they’re fake when they’re being private. You didn’t. And sometimes you named them without needing to name them at all (Kevin and Dustin). You could’ve just left it at “bullies.” So for someone giving out tons of unnecessary details that could hint at finding the story, you suddenly stop at the location. This is why you’re full of shit.
    This wouldn’t have just been on local news, had it really happened. It would’ve spread.
    Why is everyone so gullible?

  25. Really good story, I wouldn’t say the story was all that creepy but it was sure a hell of a story. Nicely done, good joy!

  26. The only part that felt odd to me was a mum immediately believing a story about an underground room full of sawed coffins from her son, as well as the nurse not telling her what happened directly, otherwise, not too shabby of a story.

  27. Very well done. I went back in the story hoping to find some loop holes, but you tightened it up pretty good.

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top