Haunted Erwin High School (Asheville, NC)

This Native American statue stands outside Erwin High School in Asheville, NC.

He looks like if you peel off his gold paint, there might be chocolate inside.

There isn't.

After Erwin High School's football program endured separate losing streaks of twenty-two and thirty-three games, some wondered if their culturally insensitive mascot was to blame.

He wasn't.

Ghosts were.

As stated in Joshua P. Warren's Haunted Asheville, the Buncombe County School Board decided to build a new Erwin High School in 1973. One problem: the site they picked was Potter's Field, a paupers' cemetery of unmarked graves, final home to criminals, orphans, tuberculosis patients, homeless people, and others that had slipped through society's cracks. A Southern Pines contractor was hired to unearth the graves and move them. The school board had estimated as many as 200 people had been buried there, but by the time the process was completed, over a thousand bodies were found.

It gets worse. According to Warren,

"The grounds were a confusing mass of jumbled and nameless remains. Many anonymous observers claimed there was very little care taken in the excavation, and bodies were laid in rows in the open, despite potential health hazards to the teachers and students who were occasionally allowed to visit the site."

"Some bones were so carelessly strewn around that there were several incidents where students played practical jokes with the human remains. One morning, residents of the area awoke to find skulls mounted on various fence posts around the community."

The Mountain Xpress reports that this carelessness led to the school being haunted. Custodians and teachers have reported elevators changing floors by themselves late at night, items being moved, the sound of boots plodding through the hall, pictures falling off the wall, VCRs ejecting tapes, and more.

True, this isn't the stuff horror movies are made of, but it does demonstrate one thing: The dead do not like to have their final resting places disturbed. Don't move them, don't build over them, and don't spit on their graves.