Seven

Seven is a scary story about a group of teenagers who explore an abandoned school that is rumored to be haunted.

The following story was told to me by a Japanese friend of mine who said she had read it in a newspaper. I haven’t actually seen the newspaper so I don’t know whether it actually happened or not. Please read the account and decide for yourself…

There was a group of teenage friends, 4 boys and 4 girls, who went to the same high school. One night, they were having a small party in the house of one of the boys. It was after midnight and the talk soon turned to scary stories. The friends wanted to test their courage by going to a haunted location. They thought it would be fun to scare themselves by exploring a creepy place in the dark.

For years, they had heard stories about an old abandoned school that lay on the outskirts of town. Everyone said it was haunted. None of the teenagers actually believed in ghosts, but they wanted to scare themselves and it seemed like the old abandoned school was the easiest place to explore.

One of the girls had a car, so they drove out to the old schoolhouse and parked outside the grounds. The 8 friends decided that they would explore the school in pairs. The plan was for each pair to walk around the school anti-clockwise. It would take about 10 minutes to circumnavigate the school. The first pair would start off and, When they returned, they would tell the others what they had seen. Then, it would be the turn of the second pair to walk around the school.

The first pair, a boy and a girl, set off as the remaining 6 teenagers waited by the car. After a while, they began to grow impatient. It had been more than 20 minutes, and their friends had still not returned. After 30 minutes had passed since the first pair left, the others got tired of waiting. The next boy and girl decided to walk around the school and look for their friends.

The others waited and waited, but the second pair failed to come back. The remaining teenagers couldn’t understand what was happening. They began to wonder if their friends were playing a joke on them.

It had been almost an hour since the first pair had left. The third boy and girl pair nervously set off to try and find their missing friends. They never returned.

The boy and girl who remained behind were very nervous. The girl began to cry and the boy tried to comfort her.

Eventually, the boy said, “I’m going to look for the others. If I don’t come back after 30 minutes, go straight to the police.”

After he left, the girl stood alone in the cold and the dark, weeping silently. She waited an hour, but nobody came back. She got into the car, turned the keys in the ignition and drove to the nearest police station.

Four police officers accompanied the girl back to the school and, as dawn began to break, they launched a search for the seven missing teenagers. At first, they couldn’t find any sign of them on the school grounds but then they discovered that the side door of the old, disused school gym was standing open.

The police went inside, but it was empty. There was an eerie silence in the air. It was when they looked inside the toilet in the gym that they finally found the missing seven.

They were all hanging from the ceiling by their necks.

The police questioned the surviving girl and she swore that she had been telling the truth. The seven teenagers had gone to the abandoned school to test their courage. They had no reason to commit suicide.

However, after spending weeks trying to solve the mystery, the police finally closed the case, saying they could not find any evidence that the teenagers had been murdered. In the end, the incident was explained away as a case of mass hysteria. The police claimed that the seven teenagers must have been involved in some sort of suicide pact.

To this day, nobody in that town will dare to venture out to the old abandoned school after nightfall.