“Parents say the classroom is haunted,” Mr. Leeks, the custodian at Walter T. Melon Elementary, told us on the first day of school.
He leaned on his mop handle as if it were a crutch. He raised a bushy gray eyebrow and squinted an eye. His whiskers rasped like sand- paper as he stroked his narrow chin.
“Sometimes in the evening when I’m mopping the hallway, I hear sounds myself coming from that room—that room at the end of the hall,” he said. “Gives me the willies, it does.”