When I was a kindergartener contemplating first grade, older kids used scare my buddies and me sockless by warning that Real School teachers were mean ol’ ladies who, if we talked or smiled or even breathed wrong, would whip us with an Electric Paddle. That was enough to strike fear and trembling in the heart of a six year old.
As an elementary school-er, dread of the jump to Junior High was more intense: They’ve got three floors and a block-long building. How will I manage to change classes in five minutes? Will they really make us take showers after PE? Does the principal have an electric paddle?
Even more ominous was the whispered rumor, “You know that school’s haunted, don’t you?” I remember the first time I heard the story of the Junior High ghost. The version passed along to me by a friend on my grandmother’s front porch went like this [cue ghostly voice]:
Before the school was built, there was an old lady who lived in a run-down house on that block. She loved to read. At night she would stay up late reading, and people passing would see a light in her window.
After she died they tore down her house and built the school. Now she roams the halls of the Junior High. Every night, she gets a book from the library, turns on a light in one of the rooms, and spends the night reading. If you pass by the school late at night, you’ll always see a light somewhere in the building. That’s the ghost reading.
I freely admit that the notion of a ghost who passes her night curled up with a good book instead of rattling chains and spinning her head is pretty tame (and perhaps a little lame), but it was true that random lights did burn all night in the Junior High. There was always a light somewhere in that building, and those days were long before high-stakes testing kept the midnight oil burning on the desks of data-disaggregating teachers.
Since a rainy October evening is a good time to contemplate the nether world (and since the ghostly beyond is more pleasant fodder for thought than either electric paddles or communal showers after PE), I decided to do a little research. Just where might that ghost have lived while she was still corporeal? This is what I found:
A 1906 map of Henderson shows the location of a high school at the corner of North High and Van Sickle. That would be the northwest corner of the current campus. Judging from the building’s footprint, it is clearly not the Junior High/Admin Building we know and love today. That’s not surprising, since the big red building was constructed in (I believe) at least two parts in the 20s and 30s.
Source: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Another map from the same year shows a slightly different angle. The high school is there, but it’s not labeled. I flipped the snippet to make it fit on this page, so the directions are a little askew. The view here is as if we were standing in front of the contemporary building, making ghost-warding novenas to the back of the Methodist Church (or to the back of Henderson Savings, for those who put their trust in Mammon) across the street. East Main would be about a block to our left.
Source: Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin
Unfortunately for Tracy-the-Ghost-Hunter, most of the school block was apparently vacant in 1906. This is not what I wanted to find. I wanted to see a map with a great big red X saying “This is a run-down house inhabited by an elderly woman who is famous for reading far, far into the night.” No such luck. Research can be frustrating.
So for now the trail of the Junior High ghost goes cold. Without the hard evidence of X marking the spot over her earthly dwelling, we must assume that her spirit is still as urban-legendary as an electric paddle. Although I’ve spent most of my life in various schoolhouses, I’ve never seen an electric paddle. I’ve never seen a ghost, either, but I have often seen those lights gleaming late into the night in the deserted school on North High Street.
Rounding the Square 
Tracy my grandmother boarded in a house on east main ( actually the same lot that she lived her last days. She bought the new house that was built on the lot). Any way. Back to my point. She boarded in a house and walked across the street to what is now the HISD administration to go to finishing school. She graduated there and went on to SFA. She often spoke of stories of a ghost in the old school building. It was not the building that is there now