The Bellevue School

Note: Story contains allusions to sexual violence, abuse, and drug use.

Decades had passed since Nancy last set foot in the Bellevue School. From the driver side window it appeared just as imposing as it had when she was 12 years old. Perhaps it was all in her mind, for now the crumbling building could only be described as dilapidated. By the looks of it, no one had moved within its walls in many years. The once brick-red Victorian mansion had faded to a moldy brown, the wooden frame flimsy, nearly collapsing in on itself. Where the front porch had been all those years ago sat a gaping hole, effectively preventing anyone from entering the house— or leaving it, Nancy thought. 

The roof was bare, stripped of its shingles so that even the slightest breeze could knock it down, as if it were a house of cards. It wasn’t a house anymore, thought the aging woman; it was a skeleton, dead and gone, and with it went the horrors she and so many other children experienced living there. Its history was a disease, festering within the many chambers of the old house, permeating the land until everything surrounding it died. It had once been a grand house, but nobody who’d lived there would have called it home.

She remained in her car for an eternity. Watching, waiting. Something was still there and she knew it. Something still wandered the dilapidated halls; how else could a dream be so clear and utterly terrifying? It encapsulated her years spent in anguish perfectly, almost too perfectly. In the 50 years since she’d left, even in the aftermath, Nancy hadn’t seen it like that in any nightmare. It was almost as if a siren call had roused her from any bit of restful sleep she could get and thrust her back into her old room. She’d “awoken” in her cot, unable to move, the room bathed in darkness. A fly buzzed as it streaked past her ear and soon it was joined by four more, all buzzing incessantly around her head. Louder and more incessant the buzzing became, almost blocking out all other sounds, save one. Footsteps paced the carpeted floor above her, making their way to the stairs, a steady muffled gwuf, gwuf, gwuf. With each step down the stairs, her heartbeat quickened, already racing. Close your eyes, she heard herself say, almost as if on command. If you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you, right? Gwuf, gwuf, gwuf the steps got closer. Beads of sweat raced down her forehead, mingling with the tears falling from her closed eyes. Out in the hallway the footsteps approached her door at a torturously slow pace. The flies’ buzzing grew louder as the footsteps got closer and no matter how overwhelmed by fear she was, curiosity got the best of her and she opened her eyes to a dark mass in her doorway. It trudged forward, swaying slightly from side to side as it stalked closer. She could see it. The figure became clear and she screamed in utter horror. A tall, gaunt man stood over her, his skinny face obstructed by a tangled mass of hair. His pale arm reached out to grab her neck, his sweaty hands stifling any sound she tried to make, letting out a throaty wail loud enough to wake the dead. But it was Nancy who awoke. 

The mere contents of the dream itself weren’t what nauseated her; it was the familiarity that scared her. It felt like a memory, though she couldn’t place it, or the man in the dream. She hadn’t given that house a thought in years. What, she thought to herself, could possibly be the reason she felt the need to go back now?

After sitting in her car for nearly an hour, she bucked up the courage to get out and face the house. It was just a house, after all. A house couldn’t hurt her. The gravel of the driveway crunched underfoot as she stepped onto the property, seriously doubting herself and at the same time convincing herself to hasten her steps. The stairs creaked and bent under her weight making her worry she’d fall through before she even reached the hole in the porch. Sidestepping the void, she neared the heavy oak door, stopping directly in front of it. Reaching out, she traced the words on the sturdy metal plaque: “Bellevue School for Children est. 1897.” They called it a school, but the truth was far from it. That plaque was probably the only part of the house that hadn’t aged. It looked the same as it had the first time she’d ever seen it, and it was just as daunting to walk into the house again now. Nancy walked carefully through the doorway, afraid that something would jump out at her and hold her there.

Suddenly, she knew where to go. It was as if someone had tied a string to her ribs and began tugging it, affording them control of her direction. In a daze, she made her way down the hall to the main washroom, where all the children bathed, a particularly menacing place. For as long as she was there, she’d heard rumors of the Red Woman. The kids all told her story like she was Bloody Mary, but no one turned it into a game. There was no switching off the lights and saying her name in the mirror, hoping to catch even the slightest glimpse of her bloody apparition. She was feared by all who knew her story, and by those who simply heard whisperings. According to the other children, the Red Woman had lived in the house with her husband and children before it became the Bellevue School. One day, the story went, her husband found her cheating on him with a neighbor, so he did what he thought would hurt her the most; he took his shotgun to their children’s rooms and took away each source of her happiness one by one, leaving her alone in the world. Soon, depression overwhelmed her and she couldn’t bear to live without her family, so she took a razor to her wrists in the bathtub to reunite herself with her children. 

Her ghost was said to haunt the house as she searched the afterlife endlessly for her children. It was even said that she would claim living children as her own. Some of the kids claimed they’d seen her, but Nancy never had. She always believed them, though once Bellevue was shut down she started to believe that everything she’d heard or seen was just a result of the medication they were fed for years. The headmistress, Ms. Crane, ran the whole operation. Under her reign, the school became a pariahville for “troubled” kids who were sent by their foster parents under the guise they’d be reformed into model children. The real trouble was that they were completely normal kids whose guardians were largely unwilling to deal with children in general, so they sent them away, absolving themselves of any responsibility. Old Ms. Crane pumped them full of drugs that would cause intense hallucinations so severe that many kids died of fright. The more kids she could house the more she was paid, and taking in “mentally disturbed” children allowed her scheme to flourish. People didn’t think twice when kids at Bellevue died because the common persuasion of the time was that they were already sick and dying. The drugs simply made them appear more ill to outsiders and facilitated their untimely deaths. As she got older, Nancy blamed her horror stories on the drugs she was force-fed and left it at that, but being back in that house irked her. Something was there, something she knew she hadn’t conjured up in her mind.

Nancy made her way further into the house and a heavy feeling settled over her, pushing her deeper into a trance-like state. In the middle of the washroom, there remained a single bathtub. The invisible string pulled her towards it and peering into the tub she saw it was filled to the brim with crimson tinted water, a young girl laying inside staring up to the ceiling with tears rolling down her cheeks. All of a sudden, the girl was dragged underwater and began violently thrashing, unable to breathe. Desperate to help but unable to do anything Nancy continued to watch, praying the girl would once again breach the surface of the water and breathe. Arms reaching into the water appeared so slowly that she almost didn’t notice them. A woman’s body manifested immediately after as her arms pulled the young girl from the water. Gasping and sputtering, the girl did not see the woman fade away. Then the girl, too, vanished, shaking Nancy from her reverie. The Red Woman was still there searching for her children, she thought, starting to welcome the idea that it wasn’t solely the drugs that gave children the impression that they weren’t the only ones living there. 

Again she felt the familiar tug, leading her this time to her old dormitory. Suddenly, she was stricken by a primal fear, every bone in her body beseeching her to stop and yet her feet kept moving, almost rhythmically. Something happened there, a haunting thing long since passed but the essence of which had never quite dissipated from her memory of the house. As she neared the room, an intense melancholy washed over her, coaxing a tear down her cheek as she walked. The white door was just as she’d left it, the paint chipped and fading around the edges, the brass door knob worn down from nearly a century of wear and tear. Opening it, she was hit by a strong musty odor that must have been pent up in the closed room, ruminating for fifty years. Unlike the rest of the house, everything there was perfect, nothing in disarray. The cot hugged the wall nearest the window, with the desk set against the adjacent wall and the rug positioned in the center of the room just as it always had been. The only difference was the layer of dust that accumulated over the years. 

Walking over to the desk, she recognized her old class notebooks, her name written neatly in the top right corners below the subjects. A faint smile crossed her features; she was struck by the innocence of this discovery. Sitting on the edge of the dusty cot, she surveyed the room and quickly began to feel more at ease. The second she took a moment to acknowledge her change in mood, though, she was thrown into another panic. She felt herself being pushed backwards onto the bed so that she was lying flat on her back with hands holding her shoulders down. She felt as if someone was laid directly on top of her, their full body weight preventing her from moving. An invisible hand moved to her neck, tightly grabbing onto her throat and stopping any noise from escaping her lips as she heard a voice whisper into her ear:

“Shhhhh. Close your eyes. Just go back to sleep.”

“It has to end soon.” she remembered thinking to herself.

Just like that the weight was gone and she bolted upright. She remembered what happened to her there. Around her, the walls suddenly began to liquify into a deep black tar-like substance, flowing down to the floor around her. Utterly verklempt, Nancy dropped to the floor amidst the rising tar, not caring what might happen to her. Sobs wracked her body as she fully absorbed what she just experienced. All of those suppressed memories pooled around her and she could find no escape. Trapped in her own subconscious, she continued to sink further and further into her memories until she could barely breathe or keep her eyes open. Nancy let the tar cover her body.

Absolutely overwhelmed by the memories and acute feelings of sorrow, Nancy let the black substance take her away. She joined the Red Woman and the spirits of all the children that died over the years at Bellevue. It wasn’t a house anymore, she thought to herself, as she drifted off. Something was still there. She would still be there.