Crackling static filled the dark room.
It was around 2012, in the early fall, after midnight. Dean Jacobs stood inside the old Valentine schoolhouse. As a kid, he climbed the worn wooden stairs to high school. As an adult, he bought a house on the street facing the brick building.
Supposedly, a spirit haunted this schoolhouse. Teachers swore they heard footsteps after hours.
Jacobs was ambivalent. But when a pair of ghost hunters came to town, he was assigned to tag along as the head of the county’s tourism board.
The crew heard rhythmic knocks in the walls from an unseen hand. They saw lights flicker on command. Now a radio swept through frequencies, supposedly to create an invitation for spectral transmissions.
“Dean,” the device said.
Jacobs looked at the ghost hunters.
“Dean,” it repeated.
His scalp tingled.
“Dean.”
“Dean.”
“Dean.”
Jacobs rushed outside. The ghost hunters chased after him.
“Someone is trying to communicate with you,” they said. But Jacobs wasn’t interested.
“That was it for me,” he said. “They knew too much.”
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
The amber prairie rushed past our car windows as we sped toward town. Lines of telephone poles and fence posts, splintered from years in the sun, stood like toothpicks in the vast Nebraska Sandhills.
A roadside hotel ad told us to “keep it simple in Valentine,” a ranching community of 2,600 people known for Wild West roots and natural beauty.
But something else brought us here.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Pierce asked Chris as Halloween drew near.
Tales of an old schoolhouse circulate around Valentine, stories about unexplained sights, sounds and shadows. In 1944, a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Lila May Benham died of “heart trouble” in Valentine, newspaper clips confirm.
What can’t be corroborated is the rumored cause: a clarinet reed poisoned during music class at the schoolhouse.
Built in 1897, the two-story, red-brick structure sits atop 20-inch thick foundation walls cut from local white stone. Area press declared Valentine had built a school that “fire, wind, water or even time will be unable to destroy.”
The building functioned as a school until 1981, and today operates as a thrift store and museum listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the oldest standing schoolhouse in Nebraska.
It can be creepy. The basement is dank. Rooms are set up to resemble an old schoolhouse or chapel. Others contain novelties such as a collection of over 1,700 bells. A glass case displays handmade dolls of America’s first ladies. Mannequins model military uniforms and ball gowns.
Pierce’s idea was simple: spend the night and see if anything happens.
“I love it,” Chris responded. “Yeah, sure, let’s do it.”
Valentine: Oct. 21, 2026. 1:30 p.m.
The wind blew through the streets of Valentine, rustling autumn leaves and carrying the smell of a distant stockyard.
At first glance, the old schoolhouse is a beautifully preserved example of turn-of-the-century architecture. But the sign outside is chipping. Fire escapes are rusting and missing steps.
The building has imposing windows — dozens of them with thin, white lace curtains that keep the contents of their rooms a mystery.
Phyllis Ohlmann, a red-haired woman in a zip-up Nebraska Cornhuskers fleece, met us at the front door.
Ohlmann is the treasurer for the nonprofit that maintains Centennial Hall and a proud skeptic.
“I’ve never seen or heard anything,” Ohlmann said. “The only ghost I believe in is the Holy Ghost.”
Past leaders had mixed feelings about their museum’s status as a vessel for the undead when the ghost stories supposedly began spreading in the 1970s.
They took pride in Centennial Hall, raising $8,500 in 1982 through bake sales and coin drives to save the building. They wrote their names on a poster still hanging in the old school’s entrance.
But most of those people have died or moved away, local historians said. Community events once held in the space have largely stopped. It’s been years since a ghost hunter came to town or the building hosted a haunted house. Some we talked to had never even heard its spectral story.
Most days now it sits empty, outlasting generations of students who walked its halls.
“I bet you less than half the people remember that building,” said Greg Gass, a former student of the building and vice president of the Valentine Community Schools board.
‘I’m goosed’
The sun began to set, painting downtown Valentine in a deep orange glow while casting tall shadows over streets and alleyways. We walked into the Draw Bar, a popular downtown watering hole, and scanned the room for potential subjects. But the thought of interrupting someone’s dinner to discuss ghouls felt gauche.
We told the bartender our assignment. His eyes widened.
“That place is haunted,” Preston Stoeger said. He described people hearing screams, footsteps and doors slamming with no explanation. He stuck his tattooed forearm in front of us. His hair was standing straight up. “I’m goosed,” he said.
His story deviated some. Stoeger said the gym, an auxiliary structure next to the old schoolhouse, was the real haunted building. But the basics — Lila and her poisoned clarinet reed — had endured in his telling.
We asked Stoeger if this is something people around town care about.
“I don’t know of any kid that doesn’t know the story,” he said of Lila May Benham.
Stoeger asks when we’re staying at Centennial Hall.
“Tonight,” we told him.
“That’s gonna be good,” he said, flashing a grin.
A surprise encounter
A nearly full moon hung in the cloudless prairie sky as we returned to Centennial Hall.
Outside, a wailing filled the air, a bellowing that sounded to two city boys like an orchestra of cellos droning on one note.
At our first stop of the night — the next-door gym — we realized the sound was cows, possibly the sound of separated mothers and calves bawling as they search for each other in the dark.
Once inside, we climbed a central staircase surrounded by classrooms and lockers toward the dark second floor gym. Our shoes squeaked on the polished wood floors as we listened for the slightest noise.
A commotion stirred downstairs.
“Hey, who’s there?” Chris called.
“Hello?”
A 12-year-old boy with a black bicycle stood there. He said he was waiting on a friend before a nighttime hang.
“Don’t you have school tomorrow?” Chris asked.
The boy shrugged.
Our compatriot had his own stories to tell. He felt bad energy here; people came to play basketball but got into fights. He heard there were two poisonings here a long time ago.
The boy tagged along with us in our exploration, but we didn’t hear anything. Someone else walked in to play basketball, and we parted ways.
We walked to Centennial Hall and stood waiting for the school’s caretaker.
As we stood staring up at the old schoolhouse, the windows seemed to stare back at us. The ghost stories we heard earlier from locals replayed in our minds: the blood-curdling screams, doors slamming and distant music carrying through the night.
Ohlmann appeared minutes later. We were relieved to see another person.
“Well, good luck,” she said as she unlocked the double doors. “I’m interested to see what kind of experience you two have.”
Alone in the schoolhouse
We set up our base camp on the second floor. From our sleeping bags, we could see two supposedly haunted rooms and a model of the town’s old mortuary, which earlier hadn’t felt that out of place but now peered out at us like a bad omen.
Immediately, we noticed the silence. There were no creaks and groans we expected from this building settling under the weight of its age.
We unpacked our borrowed ghost-hunting equipment. They included: a radio like the kind that spoke Jacobs’ name; a bell that supposedly dings when spirits are nearby; a thermal sensor to detect abnormal temperatures; and a small device that says random words or phrases. Neither of us had ever used them before.
We set the bell near the mortuary model.
It began to ring.
“Hello?” Chris asked.
“Is there anyone here right now?”
Ding.
“Are you mad we’re here?”
Ding. Ding.
Unsure if this was really a sign from beyond, we took the devices into a room that honors the area’s athletic history — the place reputed to be the music room where Lila’s reed was poisoned.
“Is anyone in here?”
“Do you want us to stay in this room?”
No response.
“Oh, no,” Pierce said.
As we looked out the window, we saw six school-age boys walking under a streetlight toward the school.
“Can we join your ghost hunt?” the kids called as they banged on the front door.
After no response, they climbed the fire escape and rapped on the glass. We — two grown men and professional journalists — cowered behind trophies and letterman jackets. Eventually, Chris walked downstairs and opened the front door.
“Hey, how’s it going?” he asked the boy we met in the gym.
“We were wondering if, maybe,” the boy hedged, “we could stay the night, too?”
We signed contracts and made promises, we told them. Our hands were tied.
“OK,” he said. “Can I add you on Snapchat?”
Chris didn’t know how to explain longform local journalism had not found a market there.
“But you can read it online,” he told him.
The boy and his friends accepted that and receded into the night.
We make contact
We inched through the building in darkness, Pierce manning the flashlight while Chris recorded video. We moved from room to room, the only sounds coming from our breath and the floorboards squeaking beneath our feet.
The flashlight caught a mannequin’s awkward pose at the end of the long hallway. Old portraits of railroad workers stared out at us with sunken eyes. Massive collages of antique baby photos lining the stairs seemed to watch our every step.
The first and second floors yielded nothing. Our stomachs knotted as we began our descent into the basement, each step creaking underfoot.
Against a far wall stood a simple sign on a white door: “Furnace room.”
Some claim to have seen the ghost of a little girl here.
Chris unfastened the lock and released the clasp.
“Oh, God,” Chris said as he put his shoulder against the door.
With a heavy push, the door creaked open. The beam of our flashlight swept the room, revealing rickety shelves against a brick wall. Exposed pipes hung overhead.
We took our first step.
Something streaked across the room.
Chris gasped. Pierce screamed.
“Close it!” Chris said. “We gotta make sure it’s closed!”
‘Weird dreams’
We woke the next morning to the dolls, mannequins and mortuary model, which greeted us like familiar friends.
The night passed without incident.
The furnace room did not have a ghost. The furnace room had a bat.
“Have any weird dreams?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, actually.”
Pierce dreamt we were awoken by a commotion downstairs. We sprang from our cots and crept down the steps to investigate.
As we rounded the corner, we spotted a middle-aged man in a sportcoat and freshly shined shoes. He looked lost.
“Who are you?” we shouted.
The man silently turned and walked into an old classroom. When we followed him into the room, he was gone.
That morning, friends, family and locals began asking us the same question:
“Did you see anything?”
It was hard to answer.
A final development
A few days later, Pierce returned to Centennial Hall to take pictures.
While the cows were silent, the building still carried a heavy presence.
Pierce snapped his photos and headed home. While developing the film, he noticed something peculiar.
There, above the room where Lila May Benham was allegedly poisoned, was an object.
“Is that a floating orb?” Chris asked, like a ghost hunter would.
“I’m telling myself that’s a reflection on the lens,” Pierce said.
Could it be a sign from beyond? A camera trick? A hoax orchestrated by two enterprising journalists who want to tell a good story?
“Makes you think,” Chris said.
“Is that a floating orb?”
Correction: A previous version of this story stated Dean Jacobs went to kindergarten and grade school in the old schoolhouse, and that he bought two homes facing the building. He went to high school there and bought one house facing the building.
