The Pool
Copyright © 2005, The Ladd School.com - Written by The Curator

The theraputic pools were constructed in 1970 with funds culled from years of charitable donations to the institution. In an addition to the northern side of the Recreation building (what is now the Exeter Job Corps building), the room in which the pools were located once had a wall and ceiling made almost entirely of framed glass.. By the time of our arrival at Ladd, nearly all of the glass had been completely shattered and layed on the concrete floor in thousands of glittering shards, a patchwork of plywood boards serving as a wall in their stead.

The pools marked the transition from the Education building, to the Recreation building, the two forming a single structure built into a low hillside and so situated on two levels. On the lower level were the classrooms, and administrative offices for the psychiatric and educational departments; on the upper level were the gymnasium and locker rooms, game room, auditorium and a closet-like bowling alley. It was this level of the building that seemed to be the most ... disturbed.

What I mean to suggest is that - as concerns the derelict structures at Ladd - certain qualities of a building's aspect were remarkable for that the buildings each seemed to have a personality their own; and so each was possessed by its own unique phenomena. For instance, the temperature was remarkably cooler and approaching cold the closer one approached the locker rooms, at the school. In one instance, three of us fled the grounds one night after having heard voices at the entrance to the pools, and again while exploring the gymnasium. Only two of us compelled to return again another night.

On our subsquent visit to the school several months later, in the company of others whom were completely different and unrelated to our previous companions, we again approached the theraputic pools. About an hour after midnight, there we stood outside the door for many long minutes, wide-eyed and alert, our breath quick and shallow, and our voices still, simply listening to the sounds that came from the darkness. The noises were low, and lacked any certain definition; they were not voices, but rather they came as soft, shuffling echoes, sometimes as low as a whisper, and at other times growing louder, but consistant, and without pause. It seemed for us nearly certain that we were about to, for the first time, encounter other people inside a building - an encounter we had long been anxious about, given our precarious location.

Finally, our patience wearing thin, we came to that inevitable conclusion to which one will come; that either we must turn back, or face our unlikely company; and so, we entered the room that held a roof above the pools, and the mysterious noises stopped. We were alone.

The event is easily dismissed, of course. On every of our late night entries at Ladd we were plagued by moving shadows and half-seen things about the grounds between the buildings, and by noises from inside, down dark corridors or from a floor just above or below us. Dismissable as hallucinations of a sort, perhaps; the artifacts of our very own imagining, out there all alone, and late at night.

Perhaps most intruiging of all, however, is what happened during our final entry in December of 2001. That night we happened upon, for the first and only time, an encounter with others while just outside of the hospital Fogarty, in a frightening episode whence we thought surely our arrest for tresspassing was imminent. Fortunately our meeting that night turned out instead to be with a band of young thrillseekers who were likely as startled as we, as I and my friends emerged from the shadows where we crouched in wait.

Our encounter was brief, but there was time enough to exchange words, and so it was asked of them what buildings they had so far been inside, to which one of these six urban youth replied. They had only been inside the hospital and the school, he said, but only so far inside the school so as to never approach the far end, not as far as the pools. But how come?

"We hear kiddie voices there," he said.

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