The Ghost of Metric Academy

-About 3 decades ago, a man named Mr. Silas Powell lived with his wife and 2 kids in Salem. The kids were 2 years apart.

-Mr. Powell was obsessed with Metric Academy, he never got in but strived for his children to be able to attend. His wife was Mrs. Anna Powell.

-His children each applied when they were 12 to enroll as freshman in the high school but were rejected. They tried applying all throughout their high school years, but neither had a talent worth honing at the school. Household became very emotionally abusive but no one knew because the family looked fine from the outside.

-When the oldest boy was a senior in high school the father snapped after they got their last rejection letter in October of 1984, and he kidnapped one of the teachers at the academy involved in admissions, Mr. Isaac Tesslow. No one knew what happened to the teacher until his decapitated head was delivered to the headmaster’s front doorstep with a note. No one knows what was on it but the old headmaster, who is long dead now.

-Mr. Powell went crazy and killed his family, and the bodies were never found. That night, he snuck into the campus and hung himself right inside the gates, on the giant tree to the left of the main pathway and right in front of the admissions office. The body was discovered the next day when students were heading to their Monday classes and saw the corpse hanging from the tree. The police were called and the body was removed, and classes were canceled for the week.

-An infiltration of Mr. Powell’s house revealed that the man stole a lot of things from the academy, like awards and even created an imitation degree. In the basement of the home the remains of Mr. Tesslow, whose head was delivered to the headmaster’s doorstep were found. His body was cut up in several pieces. The bedrooms in the house were covered in blood that tested as perfect matches for his wife and children.

-There were no clues to the bodies of the family. With the only person who knew where they were buried dead, the authorities had no idea where they could be buried. They tore up the grounds around Mr. Powell’s property, and tried to look on Metric’s grounds but the Academy refused, saying there was no way he could have buried three bodies on campus.

-The Academy paid off the news stations to keep this case from making national news, not wanting the name of Metric to be tarnished. However, if one were to do a little research into police reports and old newspaper clippings from Salem (though the newspapers omit any correlation of the attacks with Metric Academy), they would find that it is a completely true story, even to the point of Metric refusing for police to comb through the academy grounds.

-After the man’s body was discovered the headmaster of Metric started going crazy. He resigned. Most assumed it was because of the trauma and guilt for not having pulled strings to accept the man’s children into the academy. He died within the year in a car accident.

-A new headmaster joined the school, Dean Schmidt (the headmaster before the current one). After this event the Academy’s tests seemed to become a bit more lenient than they had been in years past.

-The student body of Metric at this time was completely shaken by the murders, though the students weren’t told about the correlation of the school and the man, the fact that his suicide was on school grounds could not be hidden. Though consolers were made available to the students, that didn’t help the sense of unnerve most students felt. In 1985, a little less than half the students in the school dropped out due to trauma and the overall GPA of Metric’s student body went down a few pegs.

-As the years went on and the suicide became less fresh, students began to grow more interested than scared of the story. Some curious students with connections did their digging… and so in 1989, someone discovered that the man who had hung himself on school grounds was connected to the murders that took place in town. Not only that, but they could see he was connected to the disappearance of Mr. Tesslow, who students had records of being the old teacher in charge of admissions at Metric.

-Rumors spread around the campus. The rumors detailed Mr. Powell’s obsession with the academy, and claimed that the bodies of his wife and two children were buried somewhere on campus. As the rumors spread more students became curious about the origins of it and thus that meant the student body began digging into old records stored in the library and found out more about Mr. Powell.

-Eventually his old house—only one street away from Metric—was found by students. Occasionally (around Halloween especially) is used as a place for the fearless to go to… though everyone who’s gone in there has never quite been the same… supposedly. Within a year of entering the house, every student has dropped out. Typically, it was because of family troubles, or financial troubles, or they just dropped out for no reason. Is it a coincidence? Maybe.

-As the rumors started to spread around campus, the Academy began to become stricter in their admissions policies. At the same time, Mr. Schmidt seemed to grow greyer and wearier. Though this could only be because he was growing older, but the spark the students loved seemed to disappear from his eyes and he eventually resigned in 1993. Students blamed his resignation on being haunted by the ghost of Mr. Powell.

-There’s a rumor that Mr. Schmidt hung himself just like Mr. Powell did shortly after retirement. This can be neither confirmed nor denied, all anyone knows is that Mr. Schmidt is dead. His wife informed the Academy shortly after it happened but did not want to go into detail, she just wanted them to know he had passed on. The obituary says he died in his sleep, but not all students believe that…

-The current headmaster, Mr. Jean Audet, was a teacher in the Academy before he was promoted to headmaster. He was on the admissions board when Mr. Tesslow was alive. Mr. Audet refuses to answer any questions about Mr. Tesslow or the rumors.

-When wandering near the main academic wings of the school at night, it seems unusually cool for California no matter how warm it is, supposedly. When walking around the campus late at night, sometimes students claim to see nooses hanging from the ceiling. Then again, that could only be the shadows of the trees that the moonlight creates.

-The rumors always pick up momentum around Halloween.