A Wall Mural Leprechaun
Copyright © 2005, The Ladd School.com - Written by The Curator

The school's interior is immense. Like a carnival fun house, each of it's many rooms possess a unique atmosphere, hosting a modicum of curios.

First floor, basement level. We're in an immaculate hallway with greenish brick-tiled walls lined with doors. The floor is strewn with piles of dust and debris fallen from the crumbling ceilings above. The majority of rooms appear to have at one time served as classrooms, where chalkboards now bear the names and messages of other late night travelers who have been here before us. The floors are tiled, though so weathered and aged that the tiles curl at the edges, no longer attached to the floor. Here and there these tiles are scattered about the rooms in small deposits, presumably by the tracks of previous visitors. In one small room, the tiles, though unglued from the surface of the floor, lie completely undisturbed and in place, evidently untouched for all the years the room has been empty. In another room nearby, a neatly piled stack of these tiles can be found in a cupboard, for what strange reason we can only wonder.

In other rooms, the floors gather pools of water, and mounds of ceiling slush, empty beer cans, soda bottles, empty packs of cigarettes, and other signs of many past visitors.Among theobjects which otherwise belong, there are colorful bucket seat chairs, an old radio, and the scribbly artwork of former patients, still tacked to the walls; the walls themselves are grafittied, with tag names and menacing messages. 'Kill kill kill' chants an office cubicle wall, while 'Satan' is scrawled along a stairwell where unfired bullets lie scattered on the floor. Once painted or spackled over, the wall of one deep and narrow closet bears the words in faded pen ink, 'welcome to my home sweet home, my home away from home'; judging by it's paleness, it is an apparently old inscription. A more recent message on the same wall observes, 'this feels like jail'.

Just down the hall, another room, completely bare though with the floor more intact than in other chambers, a broken telephone sits in the center of the floor, still connected to a phone jack in the wall, a scene which seems to accentuate our remoteness here, beyond the reaches of the world outside of this mock nightmare. Around the corner, in another room as small as a closet, a wall mural leprechaun watches us from it's lofty position, as if to say "What are you doing here?"

Upstairs, in one classroom, a single, central cupboard among many blooms with all manner of funguses and mushrooms. Up here, there is also a woodshop, and home economics classrooms, which take on the appearance of abandoned kitchens. One large room looks something like a barn, where on seven or eight very privatized cubicle spaces, newspaper comic cutouts are taped to the walls alongside employee memorandums and office notes. Two four-leaf clovers are taped up in one of the cubicles, which at once bring to mind the painted leprechaun downstairs. Later, in an art room we come across two identical pages torn from coloring books and scribbled on with red crayon: two leprechauns and their colorless pots of gold.

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