Please forgive any poor formatting or unintentional breach of etiquette; I've been reading nosleep for the better part of a year but this is my first time signing up and posting here.
I moved to China nine years ago during a down period for liberal arts educators in the US. After a year teaching oral English in a university in a small central Chinese city, I moved to the nearest metropolis and took up as a kindergarten teacher, teaching English at a high-end Montessori school. My newlywed wife (a longtime colleague) and I moved schools a year and a half ago due to philosophical differences with the new leadership, but I’ve been living and working as a kindergarten English teacher in the same Chinese city for the last eight years. Recently, I’ve experienced a couple minor creepy occurrences at school that I thought I’d share here.
The first one I’d like to share happened in June of this year. As a Montessori kindergarten we have four grade levels of students learning together in one classroom, so once it’s time for students to graduate, many of them have been at our school for four years. It might just be the Chinese culture of pomp and circumstance, but I think that longevity contributes to the elaborate graduation activities that we always put on.
Regardless of why we do these graduation ceremonies and performances, we were rehearsing for the graduation program at a local high school auditorium we had rented for the occasion. It was the first rehearsal and the teachers’ skit I was responsible for wasn’t ready to be rehearsed, so I was put on curtain duty.
The stage curtains were big velvety things, and my job was to stand behind one side of them and walk it open or closed between acts. I found pretty quickly that standing so closely behind the curtain, I could make out silhouettes of who and what was on the other side, kind’ve like if you pull a t-shirt over your head and look around. I would amuse myself between acts when the curtains were closed by looking at the silhouettes and guessing which teachers or students they belonged to.
About halfway through the rehearsal, I noticed the silhouette of a man standing straight down the center aisle. The double doors were open so the silhouette was perfectly clear, though I could see no colors or features. A moment later, I opened the curtains for the next act and scanned the room while half a dozen five year old girls danced in peacock costumes. There was no man standing there. I supposed he must have been a janitor for the school – they’d been walking by on their rounds from time to time – and he had moved on. However, when I closed the curtain again, he was there again. Since it was only the first rehearsal, I peeked around the curtain. Nobody was there. I checked a few more times, darting my head behind and then around the curtain and moving my head to different parts of the curtain; there was clearly a silhouette of a man standing in the doorway when I was behind the curtain, but there was just as clearly nobody standing there when the curtain wasn’t obscuring my vision. I have no experience with ghosts and no idea if they exist or if that silhouette was one, but I was more than a little creeped out by what I saw that day.
The second thing that happened was just as inexplicable and involved a game of hide and seek and my boss’s daughter, Mandy, who graduated during that June ceremony and now spends the evenings after school at our kindergarten. That day, she was playing hide and seek with Adam, Billy, Jessica, and Richard (all of our students have English names to develop the English environment at school, but I’m using pseudonyms to be safe). One kid would go into the office next door to my classroom and count to ten while the other four promptly hid in the same five or six hiding places they had been using all afternoon. Once found, a kid would join the seeker and they would continue searching together until all the kids had been found. Pretty basic hide-and-seek stuff for kids their age.
One of the hiding places in their repertoire was to hide behind a floor-length curtain in the corner of the room. While Adam was counting down to the fourth or fifth iteration of their game next door, I heard Mandy rush into my classroom, slide out the curtain in the corner, and crouch behind it. I looked back and saw the obvious bump of her crouched form behind the curtain and saw it shake as she giggled to herself. I turned back to my computer and continued writing lesson plans, glancing back every once in a while as Adam and eventually the other kids who had been found would rush into my room looking for Mandy but invariably fail to notice the bump behind the curtain. She giggled gleefully every time they left the room to search somewhere else.
Finally, after several run-throughs of this, I silently caught the seekers’ attention and pointed to the curtain. They giggled to themselves and made exaggerated sneaking motions over to the curtain, and once they were all surrounding it Adam opened it in one big motion, but there was nothing behind it! I played it off with the seekers, but I was freaked out, and I went with them to search for Mandy. We searched through every room in the school and all around the playground as well, and I was starting to get really worried – losing a kid is a terrible thing on its own and could have huge civil and maybe even criminal consequences besides – when we went through the office for a third time and found her sitting at a table drawing a picture of a princess with butterfly wings. She claimed to have no memory of playing hide-and-seek and couldn’t account for her presence for the last half hour except to claim she’d been sitting there drawing the whole time. Her manner was convincing and there was quite a bit of detail in her drawing to indicate that she’d been drawing for quite a while, but we’d been through the office several times already without seeing her, and even if she had been sitting there the whole time, who was it that ran behind the curtain and giggled for ten minutes?
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m currently trying to recall some stuff that happened in my first year at my former school; I remember getting creeped out there several times but it’s been several years so I’m still trying to separate what actually happened from the inevitable false memories and dreams. Thanks for reading!