Whoooooo are you? Who, who? Who, who?

I bought a refurbished Nikon camera on Amazon a couple of weeks ago to replace my Fuji, which bit the dust.  While I was at it, I went on ebay and bought a couple of older, cheaper Nikons to have as back-ups the next time my "main" camera bit the dust.

And let me tell ya, ebay has some GREAT deals on little point-and-shoot cameras.  I picked up TWO Nikon Coolpix 5600s, one for seven bucks and one for fifteen bucks, including shipping.  Both of them came with memory cards, and one came with all the accessories, including the original box!  AND they both work fine!  GOD, I love ebay.

ANYhoo, the memory cards.  I tried out one camera and it worked fine, so I set it aside and grabbed the other one, and as I started snapping test photos, I noticed that the photo count was up to, like, 196.  The heck?

I hooked the camera up to the PC, accessed the card, and viewed ... someone else's life.

I contacted the seller and asked if he wanted the memory card back.  Of course, I have no idea if it was his own camera he had sold me, or one he picked up at a thrift store or an estate sale, or one he found in a drawer he was cleaning out.   He said to go ahead and delete the photos, but I looked through them first.  Because I'm nosy.

There were lots of selfies:

and an adorable little girl:

And what I'm guessing were vacation photos:

All of the photos were taken in late 2008 or 2009.  And now I'm thinking about how old the kids are today, and where they are, and how they're doing.

You can buy the darndest things on ebay!

The schoolhouse story

Here we go, guys!

As I mentioned yesterday, I was chatting with the door guy, and Ingraham Hill Road came up.

"Do you know the cemetery there?," he asked.

"Sure!," I said.  "I was just there a few weeks ago, checking out the headstones!"

"You know the story about the cemetery, right?  About how it's there for the schoolhouse?," he asked.

"Ermmm, no," I admitted.  "What schoolhouse?"

"That building right up the road from the cemetery," he said.  "The one that's boarded up?"

"Ohhhhhhh!," I said, the light dawning.  That was an old schoolhouse?"

"Yeah, and something awful happened there."  He lowered his voice.  "A long time ago, the schoolteacher locked the doors and set the building on fire.  He killed all of the pupils and himself.  The cemetery was created to bury the bodies."

Whoa.

"Whaaaat?!  How long ago was this?," I asked.  "I've never heard anything about it!"

"Oh, a long time ago," he said.  "Like ... back in the early 1900s.  That's a really spooky neck of the woods," he continued.  "My friends and I used to go up there at night and there was definitely something ... strange.  They say you can see the ghosts of the students in the cemetery.  And one time I heard the school bell ringing in the night."

Sadly, like most good ghost stories, this one did not hold up to scrutiny.

I remembered that there were headstones in the cemetery dating from the 1860s, long before the cemetery was supposedly created for the victims of the fire.  And I didn't remember seeing a large number of headstones of school-aged children, circa early-1900s, at the cemetery.  And I've lived in this town for most of my life - it seemed odd that I'd never heard of this incident before, even if it did take place a century ago.

Time to do some research.

Googling "Ingraham Hill Schoolhouse Tragedy" or "Ingraham Hill School Fire" didn't cough up any info.  I did find a couple of old photos.  This one is dated 1920, and it looks like the building was still in use.

I found some photos of newspaper clippings.  This one says the building hadn't been used for two decades, but there's no date on it:

This photo shows the same distinctive woodwork that I saw the day of my visit:

But there's no mention of a tragedy.  In a local town historical society newsletter, I did find the reminiscences of a woman named Eleanor Maxian Haines of her time at the school:


"As a small child, I lived on Town of Binghamton family farms.  At age 5, in 1930, I started Grove School on the corner of Hawleyton and Maxian Roads.  I walked (really) two miles to school.  With no kindergarten, everyone started in first grade.   One teacher taught 8 grades to 20 students in that one room schoolhouse.  When I was 8, we moved to Ingraham Hill.  There were only 13 students in Ingraham School. My mother, and both her parents, also attended this school.  Usually we went home at noon, but in winter we ate lunch at school. Sometimes a mother would make scalloped potatoes or a kettle of soup. One day a small child brought a mustard sandwich. (Remember, it was the ‘30’s...)

Abandoned

A little ways past the cemetery on Ingraham Hill, there's an abandoned building.

I'm not sure what it was.  At first I assumed "barn", but it looks more like some kind of former residence, especially since there's a big concrete raised porch area on the front of the building, and the last I knew, cows weren't particularly keen on climbing stairs.  And there's no barn door per se; just regular people-sized doors on the front and back.  Then I thought "church", but there's no steeple on top.

I tried to peek in through the cracks, but it was a bright sunny day and the building was boarded up, so all I could see was this:

So then I got the brilliant idea of sticking my camera in and hitting the flash (durrrrrr ... I'm a little slow on the uptake):

I dunno guys, what do you think?  The woodwork and the ceiling (the parts that hadn't collapsed, at least) look a little fancy for a barn ... and it IS just up the road from the cemetery ... was it a church?  Something else?  I'd love to find out.