Haunted school

Police in Redland, Calif., are installing video cameras in an elementary school in an attempt to either capture a ghost's image or put an end to the rumors the school is haunted. Neighbors are tired of ghost-hunting trespassers. From The Press-Enterprise (with annoying, but free registration):

Internet apocrypha claim Billy died in the school nurse's office as long as 50 years ago, though the campus is only 41 years old. In some versions of the story, Billy was run over by a school bus. Others have the boy cracking his head on the school playground's blacktop while playing on the swings. Whatever the cause of his demise, the stories claim that Billy loved the school so much that he stayed. Believers say that if a visitor knocks on the school's office door three times at night, Billy will knock back. People who claim to have experienced a ghost describe hearing voices and seeing an unoccupied playground swing suddenly begin to move. snip Both Dewees and Ken Tolar, 56, a business-support-services coordinator for Redlands schools, link the legend to an accident that occurred outside the school more than 30 years ago. Tolar, who taught sixth-graders at Mariposa in the early 1970s, said the accident happened in 1972, and unlike in the legend, the victim didn't die on school grounds, wasn't a Mariposa student and probably wasn't even named Billy. What happened, Tolar said, was a boy between 8 and 11 years old came screaming down Puesta del Sol on a bicycle. The hilly road dead-ends at the elementary school, and the boy ran the stop sign and was hit by a truck. "We didn't bring him into the office," Tolar said. "We never brought him on campus because he was so critical. The Fire Department just scooped him up." But the legend began, fueled by noises made by a mechanical clock in the school office. Even though the mechanical clock has been replaced by a digital one, the desire to visit Billy's ghost hasn't diminished. Police records show that officers went to Mariposa at least 143 times in 2003 -- responding to three times as many calls generated by any of the district's other eight elementary schools in Redlands. In the first nine months of 2004, Mariposa was the source of 40 percent of all police calls to Redlands elementary schools.