The Classroom Shook Every Morning, and the Attic Was Empty

At the secondary school in Sempach, in Switzerland, you needed good marks to get in, and the reward was altitude: a classroom on the top floor of the old school building, under the roof.

Then, in that first autumn, the floor began to shake.

Not much. Enough. Desks rattled. Inkwells chattered. A ruler walked itself to the edge of a desk and dropped off. Then it stopped. Then it started again. It came from above, from the attic, which was reached by a hatch and a ladder.

People went up. They found beams, dust and nothing.

They went up again and found nothing again, which is worse than finding nothing the first time.

The shaking never came in the afternoon. It never came during singing. It came in the mornings, during quiet work, which suggests a ghost with strong views on arithmetic. Long division needs a steady floor.

The children adjusted. They learned to lift their pens off the paper when the shaking began and put them down when it stopped, like waiting for a tram to pass. Nobody said “ghost” in class. Everyone said it on the stairs.

Then one morning somebody was in the attic when the floor started. The ghost was a person: the caretaker’s grown-up son, who had been going up there before lessons. The former pupil who told the story to the Sempach museum never learned exactly what he had been doing up there, and neither, sadly, will we.

The ghost was found, and the floor fell still. That was the hard part. Everyone had got used to the noise. The quiet was more difficult to work in.

I have lived with the same phenomenon, though our ghost is downstairs. In our Copenhagen flat, the floor shook every evening at exactly seven. We blamed the trams, then the building’s heating, then, briefly, a curse. My husband took the skirting board off. The middle one consulted a website about poltergeists, which recommended salt.

Then, one evening, I went down to complain, and the neighbour opened the door in a leotard. It was her Zumba class. Online. Seven to eight, Monday to Friday, at full volume, with jumping.

She was mortified, and moved the laptop to a rug. The shaking stopped.

The middle one was devastated. She had spent three weeks on the poltergeist and had been planning a school presentation. She did it anyway, about the neighbour, with diagrams, and got a merit.