This article is part of a new turn to go back to an old way. Long before the podcast was started, this site was created to document THE HOW behind looking into haunted legends. These posts will be an example of how I take a haunted legend from whisper to a visit and beyond. Expect mistakes to come up. Enjoy the mistakes that come up and get in touch with us to correct them. The getting it wrong is part of our story. That’s why it’s called Tripping on Legends.

It starts with a simple statement posted online and sent to me by a friend. A place has a deep haunted history and people in the area all know about it and spread the story. This is what I dine on, and in the best moments it begins a search down rabbit holes and old newspaper clippings trying to find out the history of the haunting. Has it been reported before? Can facts mentioned in the article be backed up or do they at least details that align? Usually, research means crossing into another story, one with the same fundamental factors but existing somewhere else (or many other places) where people confuse names and element reminds them of a story they heard, so they connect two unrelated places.

The basic logic applies. If it is on site which really just consists of lists of ghost sightings, put it in Column A. If it appears on a site like Backpackerverse, carefully place it in Column B and understand the ghosts are probably there but the story is most likely fiction. If it is a news story, coming from an actual news source, shoot it to the head of the line. More and more sites are sponsored by radio stations and blur the line a bit, but at the very least these push forth the urban legend narrative of the story, which is just as interesting and useful in most cases.

They say the old ruins of the Oviedo School are haunted. It seems like a simple and straightforward statement published online in an article in republished from another site featuring local Florida news. Everything appears to be legitimate. But these are modern times and veneers are not always what they seem to be. The more you look into the ghosts and the closer you look the details, something feels not quite right.

The biggest flaw in the story is the easiest thread to pull if the reader does not just take what is said at face value. Does the school even exist?

When you look at a ghost story in Central Florida, not too far from the fingers of the Ocala, no thread is easy to pull.

According to the article, the Oviedo School was built in 1926 to services the local farmers and growers of the area. It was part of the Seminole County School System with over 200 students learning in six classrooms. If you’re doing the math, that’s about 34 kids in a class for a rural school which probably had about 1,000 people at the time. Just keep that number in your head. Not many details are given about the school’s life through the next four decades, but it does establish the school was closed by 1969 and then abandoned some time later. The causes were given as low enrollment and the new laws which integrated schools, although it does not say what exactly that means. It is worth noting that Florida schools did not really desegregate until 1970 when the “Supreme Court set a firm deadline and Governor Claude Kirk’s motion to stay the Court’s desegregation order was rejected.”

The article does not state where the school was physically located or if it had undergone any name changes over the years. This may have been to prevent reader from heading out to explore the building. It also never mentioned the kind of school it was or the ages of the kids who went there. My initial thought, given its establishment before the Oviedo Boom, was that it may have served all the students in the area, maybe two grades per room.

The history hinted in the rest of the story fills in the gaps. At some point in the 1940s, there was a fire that killed several teachers and students. Also during its run as a school, a janitor killed a young girl and concealed the body in basement of the building. These are two events that should be able to be verified to some degree. Central Florida loves its fire stories and publishes the details of them like reporting on sporting events. Now imagine multiple people died. Nothing. Nor was there any story about a murder inside of the school. For those that do not know, Oviedo is a still a fairly rural community, but its distance to Orlando means things get reported there in several larger papers.

We’ll just glance right over the detail about her being buried in a basement in Florida for now.

There are several ghosts said to still be living at the school. They are heard screaming and crying by those brave enough to enter it after dark. The living hear whispers and footsteps in the hall, including hearing their name being called back to them. Children are seen running in the corridors and disappearing and adults take dark forms and hide behind corners when spotted. Items still left in the building (the article features a common school wish list like books and desks) are thrown around, some even with blood and blood handprints on them afterwards.

Cults are said to have taken over the school as some point. This may have even started before the school was closed and may have even led to its closing. They may have been drawn to the land by the desecrated Native American burial ground that was disrupted to build the school. Many of the ghosts are thought to be those who died in the fire or the young girl who has murdered. She is said to be looking for revenge for her death.

As a side note, Oviedo High School has a parallel legend about a young girl at their school with long brown hair who is covered in blood. Both are said to have been murdered by people working in the school in the bathroom. In the high school version, she has been known to follow people home and get angry at them when they will not listen to her story (the legend never says the nature of the story, but it can be assumed it’s of her death). She refuses to leave you alone until you listen.

It all sounds a bit like too much paint thrown on the canvas to be real. It’s as if the author took a look at a creepy building or heard a rumor of a ghost story and decided if readers didn’t like one part, they could grab on to another more to their tastes. Just keep hitting the clichés and one will stick. However, too often the backstory is for the living and is simply used to help us make sense of the unexplained. Other times, the community is the one throwing the paint and the reporter just does not know which version is the truth.

But that’s why they make rabbit hole. It is not for me to say something is fake just because it is familiar. Even if no ghosts are at the school, if the neighborhood is telling the story, then there is still a story to tell.

And it would make for an interesting legend trip that would allow us to revisit the Oviedo Lights and a few other local ghost stories.

But I, for one, soon came to feel the school itself never even existed.

Stay tuned for part 2 where the number of suspects in the haunting goes down, but the number of suspects for the actual school goes up…

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