This is a science classroom at AGHS, about 1956, courtesy of Mr. Spin, who donated some vintage photos to me.

No STEM yet. Notice the overwhelming number of males. My sister, Roberta, a proud graduate of Arroyo Grande (Union) High School, was a math major at Poly, and sometimes she was the only female in her class section. Maybe two more, but not more than that. And Poly hadn’t caught up with coeducation, even in 1960. It was about a three-day horseback ride to the nearest women’s restroom.

And in 1960, math was a serious business. All those fellows with the flattops and Madras shirts were someday going to be rapidly but noiselessly sliding their slide rules, calculating exactly how long it would take an Atlas missile with a 1.44 megaton nuclear warhead to land in the swimming pool of Nikita Khrushchev’s dacha on the Black Sea.

(Khrushchev was the Russian leader who said ”We will bury you!” Vice President Nixon countered by informing Khrushchev that we made better color TVs than the Soviets did. Touché!)

So I don’t think women were particularly welcome in Cal Poly math classes in 1960. Especially really bright ones. Roberta’s the fat puppy in the litter when it comes to smarts, and maybe that was resented by her classmates.

Roberta decided that she wanted to be a teacher anyway. So she became an education major, then a third-grade teacher, and a no-nonsense one. You can ask Miss Sandy. Her classes at Poly made for over thirty years of very lucky third-graders, busy little sailors on the ship my sister sailed.

I love my big sister.

The other, less serious observation: See those lights? Those light bulbs are BIG, somewhere between a grapefruit and a basketball. I had lights just like those in my Mission Prep classroom–the one with only one electrical outlet, because the Immaculate Heart Sisters thought electricity was a modern convenience, a crutch for softies, like socialists or Presbyterians.

And of course, at least one of the deceased Sisters is supposed to un-decease herself upstairs, where my classroom was, and where my former and much-admired and beloved student Julie Newton now teaches English (that makes me feel real happy, that she’s in that classroom). The late sister is, of course, a ghost. Or one of them.

I told the Mission kids that an I-beam fell on her while they were building their school and flattened her like a tortilla. That was both irreverent and made up.

(I’ll bet she’s looking for knuckles to rap with her steel protractor ruler. The sister, not Julie. English teachers don’t have much use for protractor rulers.)

But Elizabeth, my wife, did hear loud construction noises as she came back from coaching a basketball game late one night. Bang bang. Drill drill. As soon as she opened the double doors that lead to the school’s main hallway, there was complete silence. Complete and dark dark silence, all the lights being turned off. She did a u-turn and went home.

The next day, She asked Mike, the maintenance man, if he’d been working that night. Nope.

Anyway, there have been repeated Sister Sightings–some of ’em in flocks, if not quite whole convents–up there on the second floor over the years. A SLOHS girl, a guest at a school dance in the 1950s, took a look around between songs up on the second floor and came back to her friend, downstairs in the gym. She was thrilled, charmed by the cozy gathering around a warm stove that she’d seen upstairs.

“I didn’t know that the nuns lived here!” she told her friend.

They didn’t.

At another dance in the 1980s a teacher saw a shadowy figure dart around a corner, headed toward my classroom. He thought it might be a student up there messing around. When the teacher turned the corner, there was nothing but empty hallway..

In the 1990s, a French couple, tourists, were traveling through San Luis Obispo and they did what the French will do. They spread their sleeping bags on the Mission Prep front lawn, broke out a bottle of Bordeaux and some Camembert, and began talking about Proust. They were sleeping when the temperature suddenly dropped about thirty degrees. They woke up and it was pitch-black. Black black, and whatever the black was, it was hovering just above them. Then the black lifted, and then the black drifted, into the gym behind the lawn.

They found another place to sleep.

The school was built in 1926–it was sixty years old when I started, just as AGHS was sixty years old when I retired– over the site of the of Immaculate Heart of Mary Academy.

That earlier school was built in 1876. The sisters lived in a convent house behind the present Mission Prep, in what is now a parking lot.

There was a fire at Mission in the 1980s and it burned through the gym floor. There, underneath, was the foundation for the Academy. And a dead cat.

That was downstairs. I was upstairs.

So I was up there painting my room. At night. The biology teacher was around the corner and down the hall just a little ways, happy amid his labware and a year’s supply of dissectable frogs.

I finished up and decided my room looked pretty good. As I prepared to lock up, I called down to the biology teacher: “Barry, I don’t think this place is haunted at all.”

When I closed the door, one of those light bulbs exploded.

*BOOM!*

It was a good one. It was a detonation. It was a good emphatic detonation. My heart wasn’t the only thing that jumped.

I peeked back inside and decided it would wiser to sweep up all that broken glass the next day, in broad daylight. I bid the biology teacher farewell. It was a quick one.

I taught at Mission for eleven years. I never went upstairs at night by myself again.