The "Unofficial" Spooky Places News Page

Fourth Ward School

The following news and information is from the Virginia City, NV trip. June 7th-14th 2002

Fourth Ward School

Built in 1876 Article about this visit by Janice Oberding (article)

The school is 3 stories high with a basement. The city was a boom town and the children of the families who lived there needed a good school. You will find some interesting woodwork in this school as well as many museum artifacts that were there when the school was open for business and other things that have been donated later.

If someone knows of a website dedicated to the Fourth Ward School please let me know so I can put a link on this page back to it.

Thanks again to everyone who helped us on this production and especially those who allowed us access to their wonderful historical buildings. God bless all of you and the work you do to keep and restore these places so that others can come and see them. Special thanks to Janice Oberding for coming to work with us on the Fourth Ward School production and investigation and for telling a bit of her stories for us on video. Please visit her website for Haunted Nevada and if you are interested in books about haunted locations you won't want to miss her book Haunted Nevada.

	Somewhere around here I have a more distant shot of the front of the school house. Soon as I get time to find it and get it out here then I'll make a few more changes. ...Bryon
	Like the other places we visited in Virginia City the director and manager of the school were very friendly with us and allowed us the run of the building. We were able to go into the upper floors of the old school in search of our ghost orbs. Here you see a orb just to the left and slightly above our production camera.
	This is another picture of a child size orb on the upper floor of the building that is now being used as a storage room.
	This is a really bright orb up in the rafters of the building.
	For some reason the orbs appeared to like this room and that wall.
	These three small orbs moved around the wall and near the windows frequently while we were shooting in this room. I tell my team when working with the digital still shot camera if they take one picture of a place during an investigation take at least two or three. I have them do this to verify real orbs from other things that might create illusions. In this picture and the next you will see how the orbs move from this picture to a new location in the next picture taken only moments after this one was taken.
	I believe this is the larger of the three orbs from the previous picture as it moves toward the West wall.
	The lady you see in this picture is Mrs. Janice Oberding. The author of "Haunted Nevada." The Spooky Places team would like to thank her and her son and daughter in-law for taking time to come visit with us on this day while we investigated the ghosts of the Fourth Ward School. That man you see in the distance near the window is me and the girl standing near me is Kristy of our Spooky Places team.
	See the "black board" in the picture above? It's not a slate board. They could not use slate in this school because of all the blasting the slate would break. They used a black material they glued to the wall and that's what they used as a black board.
	See the really bright spot that looks like it might be a ghost orb ? I pointed it out because it might be an orb. I have seen them in motion flash like that but I'm going to tell you why I don't think this one is a real ghost orb. I think it's a reflection of sunlight coming from a vehicle passing by on the road out in front of the building then reflecting onto the wall in this upstairs room. Notice the direction of the brightness on the boards runs with the direction of the boards themselves. I have seen others point out every little flash of light and speck of dust and even bugs that fly across their camera view and say they are ghost orbs. Yes and I have seen ghost orbs that looked and acted a lot like bugs to so I try to do my best to analyze the situation to find the real ghost orbs.
	The orbs the arrows are pointing to were marked while still full size on my computer screen. When I make them smaller for the webpage here they are harder to see. The round thing on the jacket is actually some kind of patch sewn to the jacket.

	In these animated GIF's shot around 3pm about the time school would be letting out you will see many ghost orbs flying about the room. In this animated GIF you will see many little things flying around in the shot but one of them is up very close. You will also notice it is not a bug. It appears to be two objects actually but believe me it is only one single object but for some reason in the translation from video to single frames the single object became two objects. The same with the one below.
	Despite the fact the single object in this shot also appears as two objects you can stop the animation and see the shape of the object itself. You can see it is translucent. You can see the two shapes are identical perhaps indicating it is a single object with the same shape. You can also see it is not a bug. Please notice the orbs moving in the background of the shots. There was no draft inside the building. These orbs are invisible to the human eye and only visible to the IR cameras. We believed these were ghost orbs. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they are dust being propelled by photons from the sunlight through the window behind me. You don't believe it? Download the AVI file and watch it in real time.