Scareforce (11 page)

When a person enters the military, he is told time and time again that you have to be flexible to get ahead. But it’s the
kids who really learn the lesson. And they have to learn to be flexible not just to get ahead but to survive.

This is not to say that military people treat their kids poorly. Quite the contrary. The military family goes out of its way
to provide for its children.

When it comes to education, the military is in the forefront of involvement and innovation. The modern military has discovered
the importance of education. And as the mothers and fathers in the military come to understand how important education is
for themselves, they can easily deduce how important it is for their children.

They demand only the best for their kids, and in most cases the military is happy to oblige. When kindergarten classes were
not mandatory, they were available on military bases. Now that preschool education is considered optimum but not mandatory,
military bases go out of their way to provide preschool for military kids.

Minot Air Force Base in upper North Dakota was such a base. It was isolated by both distance and extremes of weather. It was
not regarded as a dream assignment. And it gave the Air Force a real chance to shine. If the brass could make Minot a comfortable
base for its working families, they would have really accomplished something. And they did. It became a good place to live.
When it came to schools, the base excelled. North Dakota was proud of its high rating in the education of its young people.
The air base schools continued the tradition.

When the best minds in education stressed the need for an early start in school, the base was right there to establish a well-equipped
and modern preschool.

Base schools benefit from a resource that is often overlooked by outsiders. Husbands and wives of well-educated professional
military personnel tend to be likewise well educated and professional. Many are teachers with a wealth of experience to draw
on. They become the core of teachers for the base schools. Such was the case for the new preschool.

A dedicated and knowledgeable staff was chosen and presented with the task of turning a former office building into a four-star
preschool. The task was not too difficult. The building was large with several spacious rooms. It had been used for many purposes
in the past and had amenities that preschools didn’t usually offer. The base provided as much support as it could squeeze
from the budget and the dedicated teachers and their spouses provided even more.

In no time the preschool became a reality. One class grew to two classes that split to four classes that led to morning and
afternoon classes and on to a waiting list and an obvious need to enlarge the drawings of the proposed permanent facility.

The teachers worked hard to make the school the best in the area and it became a magnet for base parents. And as the hardworking
teachers found out, the building became a magnet for something else.

Preschool teaching looks like an easy job. An outsider would look in and see what appears to be an adult playing with the
kids. The classroom is a cheery place to work and the classes usually only last two to three hours a day. Nothing but fun
and games.

But nothing could be farther from the truth. Ask the husband or wife of a preschool teacher. They’ll tell you how much hard
work and time goes into teaching the little ones.

The teachers of the Minot Air Base preschool worked long and hard to make their program the best. It was not unusual to drive
past the school early in the morning or late at night and see the lights on. The janitor would invariably find one or more
teachers still hard at work when he got there in the evening. And more times than not they would still be there when he left
at night.

The first hint that the school might house more than the registered students came one night while a teacher worked in her
room to change a bulletin board. She had found some brilliant prints from a publication about exotic fish and was anxious
to share them with her class. The janitor had said good-night over an hour ago and she was alone in the building. Or so she
thought.

As she worked, she became aware of a feeling that had slowly intensified. She couldn’t put her finger on it but it was an
uneasy kind of feeling that made her lose her concentration. Slowly, bit by bit, she realized what it was. Someone was watching
her. She couldn’t see anyone and she couldn’t hear anyone, but the feeling persisted. Someone was watching her. It was that
prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck when you know someone is staring at you from behind. She caught herself several
times, jerking her head around to catch the voyeur. But of course there was never anyone there.

It was silly, she knew. Must have worked too hard, she told herself. Silly. But the feeling kept getting stronger and stronger
until she finally found herself just watching and no longer working.

She resolved to do something about it. She would tour the building. If she could convince herself that there was no one else
on the premises, maybe the feeling would go away.

She went from one end of the building to the other, checking each classroom and every closet and storeroom. Just as she had
known before she started, there was no one here but her. All she found was a light that the janitor had left on in the office.
She turned the light out and locked the office door while she puzzled over the strange feeling. Where had it come from?

She felt better until she reentered her classroom. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by an even stronger feeling of being watched.
It was overpowering and suffocating. She couldn’t handle it. She grabbed her coat and rushed from her room. The minute the
door was shut, the feeling went away. Her pounding heart stopped racing and her breathing slowed. And, of course, she felt
silly again. But she didn’t feel like going back in the room. Not that night.

As she walked to the front of the building she noticed that the office room light was on. She thought she had turned it off
but she must have been mistaken. How funny. She had locked the door but left the light burning. Must be more tired than she
thought. She turned the light out and relocked the door.

She locked the outside door of the school and started for her car. As she turned from the building she heard a sound. It was
indistinct but still recognizable because she heard it so often during the day. It was the sound of a child giggling. She
wanted to turn back to the building and search it once again, but she kept walking resolutely to her car. She resisted every
impulse to turn and look at the building, afraid of what she might see. She started the car and put it in gear, then, without
thinking, glanced in the mirror at the building. She saw nothing—nothing but the light in the office.

Several days later, the secretary arrived early to unlock the building. She was as dedicated as the teachers, handling many
jobs that were not normally part of the job description for a secretary. As she opened the door she heard a sound that can
send chills through a school worker. It was the sound of running water. Somewhere in the building a tap had been left on full
blast. She raced through the building, with thoughts of flooding and damage haunting her mind. As she opened each door she
just knew that the water would be on behind it. But she couldn’t find the source of the sound.

Several times, as she made her panicked inspection of the building, she heard faint laughter. It was as if someone, someone
young, was amused by her distress. She searched the building from top to bottom but was unable to find the expected waterfall.
Finally she stood in the office, listening to the water cascade, somewhere. She was about to call the civil engineering office,
when the front door opened. The morning teacher walked in.

She ran to her.

“You hear that? You hear the water? Where do you think that’s coming from?” she blurted out.

“Hear what? I don’t hear anything.”

The secretary stopped. She listened hard. There was absolutely nothing to hear. The phantom water leak had stopped abruptly
with the entrance of the teacher.

In spite of a lack of evidence, she did call CE. They went over the building and under the building and checked all the pipes
and valves and finally left muttering about hysterical women. They had found nothing.

As the days passed, and the year waned into winter, each teacher and worker in the preschool found something unusual about
the building. The classrooms, so filled with light and sound and joy by day, became strange, uneasy places at night.

One teacher became accustomed to the sound of running and skipping feet in the hallways as she worked in her room. Several
investigations had yielded no human origins of the sounds.

Another teacher learned to look for small items from her desk and tables in the most unlikely places. She found that if she
thought first where her pencil or key ring shouldn’t be, it was usually there. It was as if someone was playing a nonstop
game of hide-and-seek.

The secretary learned to disregard the sound of rushing water so well that when a hydrant broke outside the building she didn’t
investigate until an excited parent rushed in to tell her to call the fire department. The parking lot was being flooded.
As she dialed the number, she heard childish laughter that might have come from one of the classrooms, but didn’t.

Even the security police were the victims of the unknown agency. They reported the lights on in the building so many times
that finally they stopped notifying anyone. They must have assumed it was normal for a preschool.

But the strange occurrences had one striking feature in common. They always happened when only one person was in the building.
They never took place when there was more than one witness to verify the hauntings. So, because they weren’t the kinds of
things that people would admit to without verification, each person thought that only she was suffering from a bad case of
ghosts. And nobody wants to admit to her friends that she’s that far around the bend. It came out quite by accident.

One of the overworked and underpaid teachers was gathering up her homework to leave for the day when she suddenly realized
that tomorrow was a new month. A new month meant new bulletin boards and new pictures and new calendar symbols. A new month
meant a whole lot of work.

As she settled back in for a long night of work, she said to the empty room, “Okay, ghosts, hope you brought a lunch. Looks
like we’re in for a long one.”

A passing teacher heard her and stuck her head in.

“What did you say, about the ghosts?”

“Nothing… nothing at all.” She was embarrassed. “I was just talking to myself out loud.”

“No you weren’t. You were talking to the ghosts. You know about them too. Thank God, I thought I was going crazy.”

They finally sat down and compared notes. They couldn’t contain themselves. It was like a dam had burst and all the solitary
haunting experiences spilled out. They became more and more eager to relate their ordeals to each other and their voices became
louder. Before they realized it, the room was filled with all the teachers and workers. And they were all relating similar
nightmares that had plagued them. And as they talked about the hauntings and frights, the experiences became less frightening
and less shocking. The night seemed to lose some of its power. They proved once again that shared adversity is much easier
to take.

And as they talked of the ghosts that haunted their beloved school, they slowly came to the conclusion that the entity or
entities that haunted the preschool were not evil spirits. Far from it. Each and everyone of the school workers had been frightened
and startled by the happenings but had never felt physically threatened by the presence. In a way they each subconsciously
knew that the hauntings were caused by someone who wanted to scare but not hurt. These experts all knew in their hearts that
the culprit, whatever else he might be, was also a child. And they were experts at dealing with children.

So the teachers went on being teachers to the best of their ability. And if they knew that their classes had a few more pupils
than showed in the enrollment records, well, they were used to the load.

And they hoped that their ghostly charges were learning right along with their more ordinary schoolmates.

After all, everyone loves to scare the teacher.

M
Y first job in the Air Force was that of air traffic controller. It was a hectic, fast-paced life but there were moments,
usually in the early morning hours, when we had time to sit back and look around. Pilots have those quiet times to look around
and reflect. Sometimes controllers and pilots see things. But you never hear about it. It’s just like in the movie, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. Nobody wants to go on record. But something is out there in spite of the record.

Senior Master Sergeant David L. Korta peered through the glass wall of the control tower. The lights of the cab were turned
down low to keep them from reflecting off the glass and obscuring the view, but it still took practice to look around the
reflections and see what lay beyond. The early seventies was a time of rapid advancement in the technology used to control
air traffic, but the tower controllers’ main instrument was still a keen set of eyes alertly scanning the horizon. “Brite”
radar displays, a combination of radar and computer technology, were being introduced into the tower environment, but few
old-head controllers trusted them. You had to really see the traffic to know how to separate it.

Davey Korta had just turned forty and although parts of his body were noticing the march of time, his eyes were just as sharp
as ever. Just now he was using them to survey a dimly lit spectacle that never failed to draw his attention. Most military
bases have limited numbers of aircraft. A base might be home to fifteen or twenty tankers or bombers or maybe thirty or forty
fighters. Add to that a couple of utility birds and maybe a dozen or so helicopters, depending on the mission of the base,
and you had the usual total.