S15E16 - "Classroom Echoes" - Horror Hill

**Erik Peabody** (0:02)
Chilling Tales for Dark Nights.
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Hello, listeners, and welcome back to Horror Hill. As always, I'm the face peering at you from the vents, Erik Peabody. Tonight I've got a great story for you from Sorin Narnia, the creator of Knifepoint Horror. It's a tale chronicling the odd events that occurred at Seacrist Elementary, and it's titled School. Cy Wistrom is our narrator, and he was a student at Seacrist until its closure in 1978 Now, almost 20 years later, Cy regains his memories of his school days following an unexplained coma, and we bear witness to it all. And I've got a surprise for you. If you finish each episode of Horror Hill and find yourself in a deep existential dread waiting for the next episode, then you're in luck. I've started a new podcast along with Jeff Sturtevant, Paul J. McSorley, and Drew Blood. It's called Degenerated, a horror fiction podcast. And every week, you'll get a new episode from me and the guys. These stories are hand-picked by us, so you know they're all top shelf. And even better, there is no generative AI in the show. That's right. All the stories, the authors, the narration, the artwork, the music, even the episode thumbnails are all 100% human-made and always will be. So when you're done with this episode tonight, maybe head over and give Degenerated a listen. I'll see you there.
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And now, from author Soren Narnia, I give you School.
My name is Cy Wistrom. On December 19, 1977, a mental patient named Timothy Shaw walked into Seacrist Elementary School in Seacrist, Pennsylvania, and murdered a second-grade teacher with a chopping axe. The Shaw murder was the last in a string of unexplained incidents that occurred at Seacrist in the fall and winter of 1977, and earned the school the nickname Horror High. Here, I will tell you the whole story.
In September of 1971, Joseph Tormey died. Tormey had been the head janitor at Seacrist since 1958, and he died of liver cancer. In early 1977, a younger brother of Tormey's won some money in a state lottery, and it was decided amongst the family that some of the money would go towards the construction of a family crip in Evanston, 10 miles north of Seacrist. Three members of the Tormey family were disinterred during the summer, and Joseph Tormey's body was removed from his grave in Seacrist Hill on September 10th, five days after the school year began.
On Wednesday the 14th, a city patrol car driving past Seacrist Elementary at a little past midnight reported that a light was on in room 21, which fronted the southeast side of the school and looked out on Hightown Road. The officer in the car called the school principal at his home and asked if any staff might be inside Seacrist. That night, there had been a Girl Scouts meeting from 6 o'clock to 7.3 in room 25, just two doors down from room 21 But of course, that had long since disbanded. The principal agreed to drive three blocks to the school and check on the light as he had a skeleton key. When he got to room 21, he discovered the body of Joseph Tormey propped up in a chair facing the blackboard. Tormey's body was entirely rotted and could only be identified through the fact that it was missing from the county morgue, where it was being stored overnight until it could be placed inside the family crypt the next day. The principal, Ellis Xavier, called the police back and Tormey's body was removed. There were no signs of a break-in anywhere in the school, and the police didn't find any fingerprints in their casual dusting. But there were signs of foul play inside the county morgue, though. The body had been sealed inside a steel drawer, whose lock had been jimmied sometime after the morgue closed at 8 o'clock. Tormey had been taken from the morgue and placed inside Seacrist Elementary sometime between 9.3 and midnight. Police thought the vandals may have gotten the body into the school through a second-story window that had been left open to aerate a newly painted room, but it seemed incredibly bizarre that someone would go to such strange lengths to play such a demented joke.