I Quit Teaching Because Of This Terrifying Incident. I’ve Never Told Anyone About It Until Now.

I ran as fast as I could back to my class. Both of my students were huddled together in the middle of the room, staring at the windows. They were not small boys, quite athletic, in fact. But there they were, almost in tears.

It took some time to calm them down, but they relayed the strangest story in a week already full of strange stories: They claimed to have seen a girl staring in through the window. We were on the third floor so that was impossible, yet here were these two 16-year-old young men in a cradle of pure fright, spewing gibberish. They described the girl as thin, pale, with long, straight black hair and large, penetrating black eyes. Of course, they had described Amy’s sister since stories of her were all over the school.

It was clear to me that the gossip about Amy’s family had infected their imaginations and senses. I had suspected they had smoked up before coming to my room after school. Mix that with the present goings on, and you have a cocktail for a floating girl.

The next day was a nightmare. Every student wanted to know what happened in my room the day before. The students whispered stories to each other but it was like the Telephone Game so that the story grew increasingly macabre. By the end of the day, it was awful. The ninth-grade English class was the worst: “Is it true there was a girl hanging from your tree by her hair last night?” “Is it true her eyes were totally white and wide open and she was smiling the whole time?” “Was she really holding a bible while grinning, swinging by her hair?” The students gleefully relished these stories as much as they were repelled by them. And for each group of students, I had to remind them that we were talking about real people who suffered real pain and loss and we were turning that into entertainment. They, of course, nodded in agreement, their heads heavy with concern, until minutes later when I could hear them theorizing about the stories again.

That evening was parent-teacher night so I went to the gymnasium where the conferences were held and found a desk with my name on it. We were arranged alphabetically so I was sandwiched in between the art teacher and gym teacher. I taught mostly senior English, so my schedule was packed. For 90 minutes, I had a nonstop procession of 10-minute meetings with various parents, encouraging the father of a borderline failing student, advising a woman on how to restrict her daughter’s social media usage, filling up the egos of the proud parents of an A-grade student, and so on. It seemed never ending.

Then, a student-volunteer finally ushered a parent away to his next meeting and he whispered to me, “You’ve had a cancellation, sir.” Which was music to my ears.

I was leaning back to stretch when I heard someone ask, “We’d like to talk about our daughter, Amy.”

I was shocked out of my fleeting moment of rest. There, standing before me, were Mr. and Mrs. Waller. (They had name tags.) The first thing that hit me was that they looked like nice people. To this day, I don’t know why of everything I could have noticed, that that was the most salient thing about them. Perhaps it had to do with my empathy for them leading up to our meeting. Regardless, I had to break the news to them.