POINT
PLACE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
Location:
Point Place Elementary is located at 1200 Indian Lake Road, five miles off East
Main Street within fenced-in private property located at the end of Indian Lake
Road in Point Place, a suburb of Kenosha, Wisconsin at the intersection of
Highway 142 and 174 north of town..
Description
of Place:
It’s a deserted, partially charred, round two-story structure around a
circular gymnasium and upstairs balcony and stadium. There are four downstairs
entrances to the gym and six upstairs entrances to the bleacher seats under a
large domed ceiling supported by steel beams. The round gym even acts like a
giant loudspeaker – amplifying all ambient noise in the gym. The staff
and guidance offices are at the front entrances with the cafeteria in back of
the school between the back entrances and an upstairs library in front. There
are two wings with classrooms; the newer section once comprising a garage
for night school automobile classes and a second library. Opened for the first
time in 1949, the structure was built with a considerable amount of steel, which
might be responsible for the nature of the hauntings occurring there.
Ghostly Manifestations: The concept of a haunted school is not an unusual concept. The United States is full of numerous schools and colleges that are considered haunted by ghosts, but the majority of these locations are old buildings which have fallen into disuse and have been fenced off to prevent the idly curious and the bored vandal from getting hurt on weak floors and unstable stairways. However, the majority of these so-called schools are infested by unlikely local urban legends: the young boy killed by a cruel teacher or the innocent young lady who was locked inside after dark. There are several college dorms haunted by suicidal teens before the night of a major exam. The former Point Place Elementary School has been sitting deserted since the 1960s when a fire claimed much of the structure. Regardless of charred walls, lost staircases and missing walls, the partially intact building with its abandoned desks, forgotten files and decor left to the elements now attracts a new type of element consisting of vandals, stray cats and dogs, vagrants and undesirables using and selling drugs and restricted substances.
Long
before the school was claimed by fire, it was reported the school was haunted.
When it was built, inexplicable human remains were supposedly uncovered on
the property and a small fence was unearthed buried in thick brush. The land was
once part of the much larger Bradford Family estate, one of the town's founding families,
and the land where the school was built was once an old slave cemetery, but
whether this is accurate or the product of over hyped imagination passed down as
fact is unrevealed.
Since
the school was originally built in 1949, unusual and unexplained noises have
been heard at night. The resident caretakers, Christopher and Grace Ash, who
once lived in the basement, retired Principal James Masterson, former
Coach Michael Kutcher and retired guidance counselor Melissa Kunis and
others have witnessed a number of strange occurrences of the supernatural kind
within the school. It seems as if the noises only occurred when someone was
alone and always occurred on the second floor when the lights went out.
Coaches
Michael Kutcher and Curtis Wood spent more time in the odd hours of the school than anyone
else, and apparently, had more experiences than anyone else. Having worked for
the school for ten years before the 1969 fire, Kutcher describes but one of the myriad experiences he
has had there: “I have heard things of a morning at 4AM or thereabouts of
running upstairs, dragging a chair over a floor, footsteps walking behind... I
don’t know what it was.
“One
night I heard the trash cans being thrown around on the floor of the men’s
room. I thought someone was in there, you know, a vandal or something. I figured
I’d catch whoever it was. I opened the door, the crashing stopped and there
wasn’t anyone. There was only one exit to the room, and I was standing in it.
There was no other way to get out of there.”
Another
time, he had gone to close a window that wasn’t supposed to be left open. As
he stood before the closed door of a classroom, he heard an unmistakable sound
of a chair being dragged across the inside of the room. Quickly, he opened the
door, fully expecting to find someone, and again, he found the room deserted and
abandoned.
“It
leaves you to wonder.” Kutcher continues. “There was just a door between me and
that dragging. I never did find out what it was, but I heard it. I knew there
was something.
“Nearest
I ever came to seeing it was one night I was outside the school and I glanced
up. It looked like someone had walked across the window in front of the light. I
had seen a figure. I went rushing up there, but there was nobody in the
building. “
On
one occasion, he had glimpsed a person’s shadow. At first, he thought it might
be his own shadow at a distorted angle, but as he experimented to see if it was
his, he noticed that his shadow was actually hitting the floor at quite a
different angle.
The
thing Kutcher heard most was footsteps. He would be walking the upstairs hall, and
realize that other steps had fallen in alongside his, or were rushing up loudly
ahead of him. The frantic steps would continue until the lights went on, and
like Masterson before him, he would hear someone, or something, running upstairs
while he was on the first floor.
Melissa
Kunis
also spoke of the footsteps and rushing in the hall. She recalled once
sitting in the office and then hearing an enormous noise upstairs. It got louder
and louder with tremendous roaring, enough to force her to think that “an
airplane had crashed into the roof” and had caused the windows in the library
to shake loose. When she traveled upstairs to make sure everything was all right,
she discovered not a single thing out of place or disturbed. Everything was still
very much intact, but yet, the sound had seemed very real, enough to have him
springing to his feet.
"From then on..." She confesses. "If I knew I had to be there after hours, I tried to have someone there with me. I didn't have to be up there, but that second floor spooked me when I was alone. I kept having feeling someone was at the top of the stairs waiting for me to come up to them."
Kutcher
also recalled one night going down the back stairs near the cafeteria. To his
surprise, the double doors to the cafeteria were locked. In front of his eyes,
the doors suddenly flung wide open and just as quickly snapped back closed and
locked once more. He’s never been able to explain it. As part of the fire
prevention system, the doors will slam shut all over the school to contain any
fire, but they have to be open to begin with. They cannot spring open from a
locked position and then back to lock once more.
Former
football coach Bob Kurtwood also had encountered the mysterious footsteps for
himself. It was around ten o’clock at night, and he had returned to claim his
own property. While he was upstairs, he heard someone walking toward him so he
called out to see who it was. He figured it was Jim Masterson patrolling the
residence, but he didn’t
get a response to his query.
“I
didn’t want to surprise him, and I didn’t want him to surprise me either.”
Kurtwood told a newspaper reporter writing a Halloween article about the ghosts. “It wasn’t a echo, I’m sure of
that. I definitely recognized footsteps. They didn’t have anything to do with
my footwork. It seems like I wasn’t even walking when I heard them coming. It
wasn’t very dark in there (since) the exit lights were on. It was just light
enough to see a person coming toward you. I didn’t see anyone… just the
footsteps, so I exited in a hurry!”
Thereafter,
if Coach Kurtwood had any reason to be in the school late at night, he rounded up
Principal Masterson, Coach Kutcher among others to accompany him and watch his back.
Both men are six feet and two inches tall, more or less, and are intimidating
structures to deal with if one is a high school student with a long and
continuous discipline problem. However, even the school brings out something to
fear and respect out of the massive figures.
“I
definitely heard footsteps.” Masterson recalls. “It was 1972, and we had
recorded grades on a Saturday. I was in college so I had to go in on a Sunday.
No one else was there. I went in that front door in the side (where the offices
are). The light switch is on the other wall, so it was dark. I heard heavy
footsteps – like heavy leather boots in the room. I thought it was someone who
had broken in. I was next to the exit, so they couldn’t get out without
passing me. I turned on the lights, but there was nobody there.”
Several students have also claimed to see spirits standing in the windows of the second floor library over the front offices when the school is supposed to be closed. In fact, for a few years, some student, usually a boy, used to race down to the front office to describe a strange man in the boy’s bathroom. The descriptions that Masterson received during this time have been oddly diverse ranging from an old man with a great black bushy beard dressed in a long coat to a white-skinned young girl in a dark dress.
Ronald
Stark
was the manager of the Point Place Recreational Center during this period of
the school history. He wrote sport stories and after one football game on the
field behind the school, necessity and a sense of urgency required him to enter
the empty and dark school for a forgotten notebook.
“I’d
left the statistics in Coach Kutcher’s office.” Stark tells the story. “The
coaches just gave me the key and told me to go get it. I knew exactly where it
was, so I didn’t bother turning on the lights.
I walked across the gym and was just coming out the exit when I heard
these footsteps coming (down the hall outside the gym). I figured it was Kutcher
trying to scare me so I sneaked over behind the door. I was going
to jump out and get him before he could jump out and get me. I heard the
footsteps coming, and I heard them pass right by me, but there wasn’t anybody
there. I don’t know if the gym door was locked or not, but I got out of there.
“They
were loud. It sounded like a man, not a woman. Slow and methodic, one… two…
that’s the reason I thought it was Mike. He’s the only one big enough
to make that noise walking so slow like that.”
“It
was 4:30 or so.” Melissa Kunis continues. “There
was nobody else in the building that I know of – maybe a janitor or something,
and I heard the typewriter in the other room. I wondered who was using the
typewriter. I looked out and nobody was there, so I went back to my office.
Within five or ten minutes, I heard it again. I distinctly heard it so I packed
up my things and went home!”
On April 11, 1969, the local fire department was called to attend to a fire in one of the unused downstairs rooms, but by time they arrived, the fire and smoke had extended through the gym to the top floor like a chimney. Nobody was hurt but baseless rumors of arson have continued for years. It has been suggested that volatile cleaning chemicals in close proximity to a power box may have started the fire, but this has yet to been confirmed.
"I
think it was one of the ghosts who did it." Coach
Kutcher claimed off the record some years later. "Either purposely or
accidentally, or it could have been that idiot Kelso kid. Someone had told him
that the school had real skeleton in the science closet nearby and I was
constantly chasing him out. He was always knocking things over."
For several years afterward, the property stood abandoned. The school year was finished at the local Episcopalian church and extra rooms at the high school. The new grammar school was built on the location of the football field. At the old elementary school, it was being discovered that the school was being used as a refuge for vandals, vagrants, drug-users and other undesirables. Several former students, now in their teens or adulthood, returned to investigate the ghostly claims and discover shadowy figures racing ahead of them.
"I'm convinced the school is haunted." Writer Tina Pinciotti once attended the old grammar school. She later attended college in California where she was joined by her mother and youngest sister. Her other sister, Donna, is a Chicago area radio personality. "There's an old fishing trail running behind the property that crisscrosses the area and connects the two neighborhoods. I often go jogging along that path and get a good glimpse of the school through the brush and trees.
"In 1987, I was approaching the school and just happened to look up and see a small girl in the second floor window." Tina continues. "At first it didn't register in my mind, but then when I realized she shouldn't be there and I looked back. She was gone, but I later learned there's no floor left in that part of the school, so she couldn't possibly have been real now, could she?"
History: Point Place Elementary sits on land that was once the plantation of Colonel Erich Bradford, once a prominent Civil War hero of the Late Eighteenth Century. It was passed through the Burkhart family, descendants of the Bradfords, but the large property was distant from their other holdings and it was donated to the town. According to legend, Elizabeth Burkhart was against the idea of a school being built on her grandfather's property because the construction of the school required the destruction of the Bradford house and outlying structures. Since fallen into disuse, the old house, a stable, barn and servants quarters was razed in place of the round school. Rumors are that a forgotten old Negro cemetery was buried under the parking lot. Coach Kutcher's own great-grandfather once worked as a caretaker for the Bradford family.
The grammar school opened in 1949 with night school classes established in part of the structure for a time, but those classes ended after five months. In 1998, the producers of the Family Cable network television program, “Scariest Places on Earth,” were considering the prospect of doing a story upon the school’s ghosts, but the Kenosha County Board of Education turned them down on allegations that the show producers would likely sensationalize and exaggerate the location.
In 1991, the town council was mulling over the prospect of the property being restored and rebuilt into a recreation center. Former principal James Masterson, Tonya Prepone from the town council and police officer Michael Kelso, another former student, were investigating the structure to examine how much work it needed when they discovered evidence of someone having been living in the basement of the school. An old cot, recent periodicals, personal possessions such as a battery-powered TV and non-perishables were discovered in Ash's former living quarters. No evidence as to the identity of the squatter has ever been revealed, but whether this person was accountable for the ghosts, or if they were scared off by the ghosts has yet to be answered.
Identity of Ghosts: No one is exactly sure just how many ghosts lurk in the old school. Coach Kutcher long believed it was Elizabeth Burkhart furious for the location of the school on her family property. Sightings and sounds of multiple figures suggest that the school is plagued by place memories of the Bradford family and servants among the returning spirits of former students.
Source/Comments: "That 70s Show" (1998 - 2005) - Hauntings based on Ellis Middle School, Hendersonville, Tennessee, Caldwell High School in Caldwell, Texas, Lake Highlands Elementary near Dallas, Texas and Old Juniata County Girl's School in Academia, Pennsylvania.
"Is The Old Main Haunted?" Article by Tina Pinciotti, Point Place Gazette, October 26, 1983