School spirits

From grey ladies and ghostly gardeners to more malign entities, public schools are a rich repository of unnatural phenomena

- Ettie Neil-Gallacher

AS A HORRIBLY homesick 11-year-old, I used to walk around the grounds of my convent boarding school, weeping and praying that by some miracle my parents would appear. My dusk perambulations took me past the nuns’ graveyard and, having been inculcated with a love of ghost stories from a young age by my father, I both feared and hoped that some spectral sister would rise up and admonish me for my tears.

But no such vision appeared. There were rumours of a ghost in the school library but nobody I knew ever saw anything. Teenage girls are a suggestible lot, so that didn’t stop the gleeful terror we felt. Gabriel Stone, contributor to The Field, concurs. At St Mary’s Ascot, she remembers “a distinct correlation between ghost reports and the more (melo)dramatic pupils”. Though, somewhat suspiciously, these reports tended to occur most frequently when the girls were bored.

“Homesickness and the extreme tedium of boarding school weekends may have been contributing factors,” she says. “I recall our chaplain being regularly called in to perform dormitory exorcisms. In my rather straightlaced way, I was surprised the school indulged them. I’m pretty sure we never watched a full-throttle exorcism, though. It tended to be more a case of his arriving, almost inevitably with a reassuring tin of Haribo, saying a few prayers backed by a vigorous sprinkling of holy water around the offending dormitory.”

Stone herself was “rather wary of the infamous ‘Grey Nun’, armed with knitting needles, who was said to stalk the notoriously steep ‘Chicken Stairs’ at night.” However, she wasn’t as terrifying as the real nun “who would appear in undeniably solid form to march you back to your bedroom.”