SAN ANGELO, Texas (Concho Valley Homepage) — The thought of high school is enough to give anyone the chills, but this particular high school campus in San Angelo, Texas has a few skeletons hiding in the closet, or rather, underneath it.

The Central Oakes campus in San Angelo has stood for over 100 years, previously recognized as San Angelo High School. In the early 1900s, San Angelo was growing quickly as people were moving west and the Mayor saw the need for an official High School to accommodate the growing population.

While hunting for cheap centralized land to begin construction the Mayor’s eyes fell on San Angelo’s first cemetery where many of the victims from the Ben Ficklin flood had been laid to rest. Unfortunately, the souls buried here had their rest cut short in 1921 as men began piercing the graves with shovels. These men were offered a single dollar (worth about 17 dollars today) per grave dug and the remains were placed in small 1-foot boxes to be moved and placed in a mass grave in Fairmount Cemetery. Families were notified to remove their dead and construction then began on the high school campus.

Despite the whispered tale of ghosts between students all was well for several years, but not everything stays dead or buried. In 2006 San Angelo made headlines when human remains were discovered while workers from the water department were making repairs to a water main. A bone had been seen protruding from the ground and the site was shut down while an Archeologist investigated. Three more sets of bones were discovered in the immediate area which turned out to be a soldier and a woman holding a baby. These remains were removed and transferred to the Fairmount Cemetery.

According to Be Theater, students who have set foot on this campus have reported seeing ghostly faces in photos, smelling cigar smoke and hearing whispers. Others reported lights turning on by themselves and the lull of a piano is sometimes heard from a locked room.

Staff have claimed to hear childish voices, felt tugs on vacuum cleaner cords and one even saw a water fountain go off with no one near it.

Central High School students and staff may still be walking over the forgotten remains of the first residents of San Angelo, we can only hope the souls laid to rest there don’t have a bone to pick with those above.

CC Suzy Roberts, Caity Roberts and Carson Kent’s production of Ghost Talks with Be Theater

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