Antioch Community High School opened its doors to the public in 1915, leaving many generations of students to have walked the halls. In 2014, ACHS was ranked No.4 on a list of the most haunted schools in Illinois. The past and present student body have mixed emotions about what to believe. So, what do you believe? Is ACHS haunted?

“I have heard many stories that there are basements throughout the school and that is where the hauntings are but personally, I do not believe that ACHS is haunted,” senior Jade Nguyen said. 

Many rumors have flown around the school, claiming that not only is the basement haunted but also the auditorium. Previous classes have told stories that before the auditorium was remodeled, a student passed away in it, which led many to believe that the student haunts the halls to this day. 

On a YouTube channel titled “Scott Marcus Ghost Stories,” an episode claimed that multiple situations had happened at ACHS, especially in the 90s, that made people believe that the school was haunted. One of those stories is that the art hallway is haunted. As ACHS was under remodeling, the teachers all met up to talk about the new layout. There was one particular hallway they kept coming back to, which is now known as the art hallway. These select teachers wanted their classrooms to be in that hallway because they all claimed to have an “uneasy” feeling walking through it. 

The classrooms in that hallway ended up being given to the art teachers. A former art teacher told Scott Marcus, the interviewer, that while he was walking down the hallway, all of the dials and the locks on the lockers started spinning on their own and eventually, the doors started opening on their own. Another student told the same source that as she walked down the hallway, she began to feel uneasy and quickly turned to the sound of music behind her. She believed that the music was coming from her Walkman, but as she thought about it more, she realized that her Walkman had been broken for weeks, meaning there were no batteries in it.

Though there is no visual evidence for these incidents, multiple people from previous years, including teachers, do believe and claim that ACHS is haunted; many students believe that the rumor is only an old tale passed down from previous classes.