The Haunted School is the fifty-ninth book in the original Goosebumps book series. It was first published in 1997.
The cover illustration shows a locker with black and white objects falling out and three pairs of eyes peering out of it. A skull that heavily resembles Curly the Skeleton can be seen on the blue poster attached to the locker door. This is the last book to feature the original Parachute Press logo.
Blurb[]
HE'S HEARING VOICES... FROM ANOTHER WORLD!
Tommy Frazer's dad just got married. Now Tommy's got a new mom. And he's going to a new school—Bell Valley Middle School. Tommy doesn't hate school. But it's hard making friends. And his new school is so big, it's easy to get lost. Which is exactly what happens. Tommy gets lost—lost in a maze of empty classrooms. And that's when he hears the voices. Kids' voices crying for help. Voices coming from behind the classroom walls...
Plot[]
When 12-year-old Tommy Frazer moves to a new town and begins attending a new school, he decides to help decorate for the upcoming school dance in order to meet people. Thalia Halpert-Rodis, a beautiful, kind, blonde-haired girl who always wears a lot of makeup and red lipstick who is also working on the dance, requests red paint and Tommy offers to get it for her. Along the way he hears a voice, but nobody is there. He meets a tall girl with eerie, gray eyes named Greta while on his way back to the gym. He also gets lost and stumbles across a room marked "The Class of 1947". Inside are statues of twenty-five children; the principal appears and explains that these statues are in memory of the twenty-five children of 1947 who mysteriously disappeared after getting their class picture taken.
On the night of the dance, Tommy and his friend Ben Jackson need to fix a banner. While searching for needed materials, they find an elevator. They start pressing buttons, but the elevator doesn't move. They look of a ‘Door Open’ button, but they can't find one. They see a button that they think might open the doors. Once they press it, nothing happens. Then they see a red button, which they push. But, instead of an alarm going off they see that the elevator is now going sideways. This transports them to a classroom in Grayworld, a place where everything is in black and white. Here they meet Seth Cortez and his friends, Eddie, Mona, Eloise, and Mary who became a few of the members of the Missing Class of 1947 and who have not aged even after all that time. Seth tells them the story of how a photographer named Mr. Chameleon sent them to this colorless world with his camera during the class photo. Everyone was transported to this world and gradually lost their color.
Tommy and Ben decide to investigate the world outside of the school, although Seth warns that his remaining classmates had gone crazy years ago and now roam the outside land as savages. Seth and his friends remain in the school, because it is the only place they consider safe from their former friends. Ben and Tommy leave through the classroom window into the town outside. There, they get attacked by the other members of the class of 1947, who perform strange rituals involving a pool of steaming black goo. Angry that Tommy and Ben still have color, they want to turn them into "one of them" by dumping them into the goo pool.
Seth and his friends save Tommy and Ben at the last minute, and Tommy manages to distract the kids with the light from a lighter his grandfather gave him. They return to the classroom, and as Tommy and Ben try to figure out how to escape, Seth informs them that only one girl has ever escaped and no one knows how. Tommy thinks that it must have been Greta, the girl with the gray eyes he saw at school. Tommy remembers how the lighter still had light and tries to use it to somehow escape, but the flame is now colorless as well. Suddenly the elevator opens and Thalia appears, surprising everyone. Seth and the others are excited to see her and already know her name. It turns out Thalia is the aforementioned girl who managed to escape the Grayworld.
Thalia explains to her friends how she opened her tube of lipstick one day and got excited after discovering that it still had color. She hadn't seen color in so long, so she tried to draw on the wall to make colorful pictures. But when her lipstick touched the wall, it made an exit into the real world. Thalia immediately went through it without thinking and the hole instantly closed, before she could go back for the others. She had tried to make another hole but the lipstick was only ordinary in the real world.
Though she was back in the real world, Thalia also discovered she was still without color, so she hid this condition by constantly putting on makeup. Not knowing what else to do, she had stayed around the school looking for a way back into Greyworld to save her friends. Now, after being in the real world for a while, she decides that both she and her friends are better off in Greyworld. Using her lipstick, she opens a doorway for Tommy and Ben to escape while she and her friends stay behind.
Tommy and Ben flee and return to the gymnasium. When Tommy and Ben come back, they see their classmates standing in a settled position and they run and join them. The principal tells Mr. Chameleon to take their picture. Tommy protests but the picture is taken.
Reprints and rereleases[]
This book is currently the final book in the original series to receive a physical reprint; the remaining books in the series would receive digital reprints. A reprint based on the original print was included in the Retro Fear Collection in September 2020. It drops the page count from 120 to 117 pages.
The 2015 ebook updates Mrs. Borden saying the Class of 1947 vanished 50 years ago, to 70 years ago. In addition, a reference to a boombox is removed. A kid pulling one out is changed to them just turning on some music. And finally, Polaroid is changed to simply a camera.
International releases[]
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| No: 59 Title: The Haunted School Country: United Kingdom Language: English Release date: July 17, 1998 Publisher: Scholastic |
No: 47 Title: L'école hantée / Terreur au Collège Translated title: The Haunted School / Terror at the Middle School Illustrator: Gérard Failly / Oriol Vidal Country: France Language: French Release date: June 15, 1999 Publisher: Bayard Poche |
No: 57 Title: La Escuela Embrujada Translated title: The Haunted School Country: Spain Language: Spanish Release date: May 15, 1999 Publisher: Ediciones B |
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| No: 59 Title: La scuola maledetta Translated title: The Cursed School Country: Italy Language: Italian Release date: August 1999 Publisher: Mondadori |
No: 34 Title: Die Geisterschule Translated title: The Ghost School Country: Germany Language: German Release date: August 1999 Publisher: Omnibus Verlag |
No: 59 Title: Spøkelseskolen Translated title: The Ghost School Country: Norway Language: Norwegian Release date: 2001 Publisher: Damm |
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| No: N/A Title: Klassfotot Translated title: Class Photograph Country: Sweden Language: Swedish Release date: August 1, 2001 Publisher: B Wahlströms |
No: 2 Title: Spøkelsesskolen Translated title: The Ghost School Country: Denmark Language: Danish Release date: December 21, 2014 Publisher: Egmont Publishing Kids AS |
No: 12 Title: Kummituskoulu Translated title: The Haunted School Country: Finland Language: Finnish Release date: 2003 Publisher: Sanoma Magazines |
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| No: 7 Title: Drauga-skólinn Translated title: Ghost School Country: Iceland Language: Icelandic Release date: November 2018 Publisher: Bokabeitan |
No: N/A Title: مدرسةالأشباح Translated title: The House of the Dead Country: Egypt Language: Arabic Release date: N/A Publisher: Nahdet Misr Publishing House |
No: N/A Title: مدرسه جن زده Translated title: School Elf Country: Iran Language: Persian Release date: June 1998 Publisher: Genesis |
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| No: N/A Title: 灵异学校 · 隐身魔镜 Translated title: Ghost School · Invisible Mirror Country: China Language: Chinese Release date: January 1, 2013 Publisher: Relay Press |
No: 27 Title: 我的新家是鬼屋 Translated title: Campus Ghost Country: China Language: Chinese Release date: May 28, 2016 Publisher: Shang Zhou Publishing |
No: N/A Title: Hantu Penunggu Sekolah Translated title: School Waiting Ghosts Country: Indonesia Language: Indodesian Release date: August 24, 2015 Publisher: Gramedia Pustaka Utama |
Audiobook[]
In 2022, a French edition of the story was adapted to an audiobook exclusively to Audible.
| Audiobook | Release date | Length | Narrated by | Published by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
December 2022 | TBA | Julien Masdoua | Bayard |
Gallery[]
Trivia[]
The cover.
- The cover art of The Haunted School is used for the DVD cover of "Perfect School".
- As stated on the tear-out trading card, R.L. Stine got the idea for this book when a group of children approached him in a bookstore, asking him if he could write a book about their school, which they said was haunted.
- Despite there being the word Haunted in the title, there are no ghosts in this book.
- According to an early pencil sketch by Tim Jacobus, Bell Valley Middle School was originally named Shady Rise School. [1]
- Instead of ghostly eyes staring through the locker, the original sketches and mockup depicted a strange, gray, reptilian creature in the walls and staring in the locker.
- This book references Mountain Dew, Coke, Polaroid and Ray Bradbury.
- Tommy mentions reading a story about "these kids who live on a planet where it never stops raining," most likely referring to his story "All Summer in a Day".
- The School Market edition of this book contains a preview of Goosebumps Triple Header Book 1.
- The Class of 1947 were probably born around 1935,given how most of the protagonists in the Goosebumps books are usually portrayed around the age of 12.
References in other Goosebumps media[]
- The book's cover was scripted to appear in the first Goosebumps film as part of the opening credits, as revealed in one of the script drafts for the film.
- Goosebumps HorrorTown has an event based on this book.
References[]
- ↑ The Art of Goosebumps Page 134