Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wha thank you LavaLove. ^^

Here's a little something I found laying around. I wrote it a little while ago and didn't know what to do with it. After reading it again I thought it was a good base for some sort of story, but I still don't know how I should embellish it and continue. Horror/Mystery is a genre I've never tried before and I want to make some sort of attempt to see how it goes and improve my writing. So, please have a look and feel free to shoot ideas at me! ^^

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Clyde A. Erwin high school was built over the former residence of hundreds of people. There was a large controversy over the construction of this institution because those hundreds of people were dead. The plot of land was a county owned cemetery, a “pauper cemetery.” Its age was unknown, but it was undoubtedly old. The removal of the bodies and placement of them in a new cemetery elsewhere took a great amount of time, greater than anticipated. The county had a hard time keeping people employed. Most quit without having worked long. The job wasn’t just as simple as removing caskets and shipping them to a new location. Most, if not all of the caskets were wooden and had rotted over the years, collapsing or spitting their resident into the soil. Workers often had to remove bodies piece by piece. There were rumors and stories about how workers would try to excavate a body and it would fall in half, or how a grave would be opened and left untended because the workers had quit. It was a tough job for a bunch of normal guys. Nobody wanted to be cursed with having to disturb the dead.

The second controversy came when it was let out that a single grave site could be home to several bodies. Instead of having a grave to themselves, many of the deceased were buried on top of one another. The reason why was a detail that was left untold, but people could let their imaginations do the work. Excavating the cemetery was a spectacle for kids of many ages, including my father and his friends. One of them had even snuck into the construction site in the middle of the night and stolen the thigh-bone of a poor disturbed soul. The next day he put the femur in his school locker where he and my dad would let kids look at it for fifty cents. They soon returned the bone, though, either under pressure of an authority who had found out or a student who had the right mind to threaten snitching on them.

As soon as the cemetery residents were re-located and the land was bulldozed, the school was built. It was relatively modern for its day, making students eager to attend the new facility. It was my father’s high school, a place where he had caused a good amount of trouble. But the land’s previous inhabitant’s were certainly not too keen on leaving just yet. This school was an eerie place, for lack of a better description. Staff, especially janitorial employees, wouldn’t stay alone at the school for too long. Janitors found out rather quickly that being alone and cleaning the various school rooms was not what they wanted to be doing. When night rolled around, school grounds were the last place you wanted to be. Without students to fill the halls with the typical school clamor, all the natural sounds of the building could be heard. As well as the unnatural ones.

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The majority of this, if not all of it, is true. My father grew up in Ashevill, North Carolina (or some county close to it) and attended Clyde A. Erwin high school. The county built it over a plot of land they used as a cemetery for unclaimed bodies and the like. Yeah, my dad's friend actually stole some poor guy's femur and the two of them charged kids to see it. I don't know whether to laugh or be appalled.

I've heard countless stories about the times dad would sneak in at night with a buddy or his brother to hear the screams in the hallways, or the times he'd be in class and their windows would open themselves, or doors would slam violently shut. Truth be told I've always been interested in supernatural phenomenon. The mystery just gets my curiosity going.

Anywho, it's just a small start but I hope to turn it into a writing project I can learn from. So, any ideas?

Woah, Noelle! That was great! Short and sweet. It really set the motion to a writing project.

If I understood correctly from what I read, it's a first person narrative about a person reminiscing about stories her father use to tell her. It would be a cool idea if this person grew up and became a journalist and decided to investigate this very story for a column in the paper. However, what she didn't know, the school had be shut down and abandoned due to mysterious phenomenons (like doors and windows slamming shut and strange noises at night). So now this person needs to investigate what had happened since her father had been at the school and unravel the mystery of Clyde A Erwin High School and determine whether or not the haunting stories are true or myth by questioning locals and perhaps even taking nightly tours of the school... alone (muhahaha).

Yay! Awesome! I can't wait to read it! ...after purchasing it off one of the shelves at a local Vroman's Bookstore. biggrin

GIMME THAT HAT *tackles James to the ground*

I just need to say... that hat... it made me have to look at it for like... a whole minute to figure out if it was a drawing or photo. The shading is so amazingly well done and realistic I thought it was a model WIP of an actual hat on a table or something. Wow.

I was boooooored, and I was like, "Hey, Atlantica is coming up, and Noelle's going to be a mermaid, SO--"



I used my colored pencils just to fill in the important parts. YEAH, WHO NEEDS PHOTOSHOP?! *sulks because she doesn't have it*

Anybody else want to be a mermaid? I could try. ;D
No guarantees though, this took me a while. XDD

Kyle could use a mer-form. I was thinking just golden scales, due to his scalemail on his torso, but I'll leave it up to you!

Very pretty Noelle. Thanks for the offer for the drawing. But I'll have to pass you on that one ._.;