BVSD Haunted Story: Spirited students haunt the halls of Casey Middle School

Casey Middle School math teacher Lori Miller says students love her classroom.

“It's very warm and colorful,” Miller explained. “It is a kid magnet.” 

She has long wondered if her classroom environment, with all of its fun and silly decorations, has attracted more than just Casey’s current students. Eleven years ago, when she first came to Casey, some special, otherworldly guests that had gotten quite a reputation at the school started to visit her.

“From what I understand, there is a little girl and a teenage boy,” Miller said. “When I first came to the school, I heard stories.”

One early morning, when only she and the custodian were in the building, she had her first encounter.

“This is going to sound a little unusual, but I was using the restroom downstairs in our sixth grade hallway and the stalls are very, very tall. I had a ponytail with a little twist in the front held by a bobby pin. All of a sudden I felt a small hand tousle my hair. My heart stopped,” Miller shared. “I jumped up as fast as I could. I looked in the mirror, and my little twist was all messed up, so I ran out of that bathroom and went into my classroom and locked my door.”

While frightened, Miller says she didn’t feel threatened.

“It wasn't mean, it wasn't vindictive,” Miller said. “It was like a little kid saying ‘Hi!,’ you know?”

Soon after, she started noticing other strange occurrences.

“Every time my daughter Aspen came into the room, the Goofy potato head, located on the top of my cabinets, would fall on its face. It would not fall off the cabinet, but it would just topple forward on its face, and that happened every time she entered my room,” Miller said. “It became a bit of a joke. ‘Aspen, come in! Let's see if it happens.’ When she came into the room, Goofy would fall forward.”

Additionally, many mornings she would find certain items out of place in her classroom. 

“I have these little clay animals that I kept on my back shelf behind my desk. Every morning when I came in, they would be on my desk,” Miller said. “Eventually, little pieces started breaking off of them. I would say, to what I assumed was our resident ghost,  ‘Listen, honey, I don't care if you play with my clay animals, but if you break them again, you are not allowed to touch them.’ Come morning, I found the clay animals had been played with, and more pieces were broken.  I expressed out loud that the animals may not be played with again’ and they were never touched or found on my desk again. So that was that.”

Perhaps the most memorable situation happened when Miller was chaperoning an overnight team-building event at the building. 

“Kids and teachers were assigned classrooms to sleep in.   The teachers slept in front of the door – in case the kid had to use the restroom or they didn't sneak out. We had the doors locked so no one could enter from the hallway,” Miller explained.

That put her in the perfect place to witness what happened in the middle of the night.

“Well, at approximately two o'clock in the morning, I was woken up by music,” Miller said. 

“Everyone was sleeping, and it was coming in from above me,  from the seventh grade hallway,” Miller added. “It wasn't any music I had heard before. It sounded like something being played from a Victrola [an early version of the record player].” 

While the music was playing, suddenly she could hear children playing.

“I heard tiny footsteps, like a young child running from one end of the hallway to the other. Then, you could hear a little girl giggling. And then, from behind her, larger footprints would chase her. Then it would go right across our heads again,” Miller said. “I remember the little girl – giggle, giggle, giggle. We don't have kids that young in our building.”

She says that it went on for about five minutes, and then it was over. I was too scared to venture into the hallway to the restroom!  I waited until daylight! 

It wasn’t until morning, when everyone got up, that she found out that she wasn’t alone in hearing the middle of the night commotion.

“Another teacher said to me, ‘Did you hear that last night?’ I was so freaked out,” Miller recalled. “That was the most bone-chilling experience.”

Miller isn’t expecting any special visitors this Halloween.

“It's been quiet for many years since Miller has experienced anything unusual in Casey, although students will sometimes mention hearing giggling in the stairwell,” Miller said when we spoke in October 2025.

The last encounter she had with the spirits was actually at her home, during the pandemic.

When her fever was at its worst, her daughter reported hearing a little girl crying at her door. Later, while she was recovering from COVID-19, her daughter said that something had rubbed her feet ( like I had done just an hour before to improve her circulation)  but when she woke up, she expected to see her mom, but no one was there.

“I wonder if that little girl came back with me while schools were shut down,” Miller said.  “I guess I will never know, but I don’t think I want to!”

Additional spooky BVSD stories, in honor of Halloween

• Ghostly neighbors remembered at Boulder school
• Haunted Manhattan - Staff says 58 year old building is home to multiple spirits
• Overnight New Vista High School is filled with fright 
• Frights not limited to the haunted house at Boulder High School
• Things sometimes go bump in the night (at Mapleton) in BVSD