Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty in 2024. Photograph courtesy of Erik Hamilton.
The Jacksonville space teems with ghost tales and concrete legends, from areas stated to be haunted like Kingsley Plantation, the TacoLu constructing and Evergreen Cemetery to tales of unusual happenings just like the Orange Park Humanzee and the mysterious Betz sphere of Fort George Island. However nowhere stands out within the annals of First Coast folklore just like the foreboding Classical Revival schoolhouse situated beside the I-95 interchange within the Brooklyn neighborhood. Often known as Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty and, because the inscription above the doorway has it, Public Faculty Quantity 4, the constructing has lain vacant for the reason that Seventies.
The varsity’s lengthy afterlife has attracted all method of legends. Guests have claimed the voices of kids lengthy since departed nonetheless echo within the ruins, and quite a few wildly variant tales flow into about it, every extra outlandish than the final. The most typical variant tells of schoolchildren killed by a boiler explosion, whereas different tales attribute the youngsters’s dying to a psychotic janitor who went on a killing spree. Much more absurdly, a 3rd model blames a cannibal principal who devoured delinquents despatched to the workplace. Within the Eighties and ’90s, the age of heavy steel and ethical panics about satanic cults, the constructing gained a status as a haven of diabolical exercise, growing its legend-tripping cachet and incomes it the nickname “The Satan’s Faculty.”
The previous boiler earlier than cleanup in 2009, suitably spooky-looking however distinctly not exploded.
As with most city legends, there’s no reality to those tales. They largely perform as an impetus for a typical teenage exercise: legend-tripping, the best of passage by which younger adults courageous places related to scary legends for functions of initiation, revolt, or easy leisure. Annie Lytle Elementary is Jacksonville’s premier location for legend-tripping, surpassing related places just like the erstwhile Ghost Gentle of Greenbriar Street and Fernandina’s Wiccademous grave.
This affiliation has led the varsity to be featured in numerous articles, web sites and books about haunted locations over time. However how did an deserted elementary faculty turn into such an endemic a part of the folks lifetime of town? The place do these loopy tales come from? To reply that, we have to take a look at the historical past of the constructing and what has led to its lengthy abandonment.
1900 map displaying the situation of the unique wood Riverside Grammar Faculty on the nook of Gilmore and Charles St. (merchandise 43). I-95 and the Fuller Warren Bridge had been constructed over Gilmore St. and Riverside Park within the Nineteen Fifties.
The varsity’s origins date to 1891, when Riverside had emerged as a fast-growing neighborhood of Jacksonville. Town constructed a small wood schoolhouse for white youngsters, initially named Riverside Grammar Faculty or just Faculty 4, on the southeast nook of Gilmore and Charles Streets (now Peninsular Place and Chelsea Avenue). On the time, it was throughout the road from Riverside Park, which then prolonged all the way in which to Gilmore Avenue.
The present constructing dates to 1917, a time when town thought of public schooling such a lofty crucial as to demand monumental structure. In 1915, Duval County voters handed a $1 million bond problem to construct 12 new sturdy brick faculties; Riverside Grammar Faculty, having already outgrown its constructing, was one of many first constructed. By 1927, Riverside Grammar was the county’s second-biggest faculty with 775 college students.
The present brick Public Faculty Quantity 4 in 1927.
The brand new constructing’s architect was Rutledge Holmes, who relocated from Charleston to Jacksonville to assist rebuild town within the aftermath of the Nice Fireplace of 1901, designing iconic native buildings together with the Holmes Block and the Seminole Membership, now Candy Pete’s Sweet. Holmes’s final years had been tragic. His spouse died in 1925 and he later underwent therapy at Florida State Hospital, the state psychological hospital. Subsequently he moved to the Panhandle and arrange an workplace in Quincy. On Could 2, 1929, he dedicated suicide in his workplace after consuming closely, forsaking a observe studying:
“Don’t notify anyone. I’ve some pains within the area of my coronary heart. Ought to I die I want to be wrapped in one in all my tenting blankets and buried beneath some fairly timber within the nation in an unmarked grave. Take what I’ve in Quincy for the difficulty.”
The varsity shortly emerged as a neighborhood landmark. “I’ve cherished that college since I used to be a baby,” says Patsy Bryant, an skilled on the varsity and a member of the Annie Lytle Preservation Group. “We might trip by there on the way in which to my aunt and uncle’s home, and it simply fascinated me. Many people are like that.”
View of the varsity from Riverside Park, which then prolonged all the way in which to Gilmore St. earlier than the development of I-95.
As we speak, I-95 cuts by means of what was as soon as the west finish of Riverside Park and proper in entrance of the varsity. Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
Educator Annie Lytle, later Annie Lytle Housh, served the varsity as instructor and principal for many of its existence. A local of Yellow Springs, Ohio, Lytle moved to Jacksonville together with her household in 1883 and began educating at Riverside Grammar when she was simply 18. She was named principal in 1914, earlier than the development of the brand new constructing. “She lived proper there on Park Avenue,” says Bryant. “She might watch that constructing being constructed, and I’m certain she was over there giving her enter, ensuring they did it proper.”
“Miss Annie” was remembered as a stern disciplinarian who had the scholars line up and march into faculty every day with John Phillip Sousa marches enjoying on a Victrola. Bryant says her strictness was legendary among the many youngsters. One former pupil, Susan, advised Bryant Lytle was “actual brief they usually known as her ‘Previous Pruny Face.’” Lytle retired in 1949 after 35 years as principal, and the subsequent 12 months, Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty was renamed in her honor. She died in 1957 and is buried at Evergreen Cemetery.
A seventh-grade class at Annie Lytle Elementary round 1954. Courtesy of Annie Lytle Preservation Group.
The varsity’s finish was hastened by the development of what grew to become Interstate 95. Beginning in 1954, Jacksonville started work on the Fuller Warren Bridge, a part of the burgeoning expressway community that marked a brand new epoch of car-centered improvement. In a notable instance of Jacksonville’s Godzilla technique of city improvement, expressway routes had been partly chosen to facilitate the demolition of supposed blighted areas and to function bodily boundaries between Black and white neighborhoods; in Annie Lytle Elementary’s case, the bridge separated white Riverside from largely Black Brooklyn. The expressway additionally took out a part of Riverside Park and minimize the varsity off from the neighborhood it served, and simply months after the Fuller Warren absolutely opened in March 1960, Annie Lytle Elementary’s classroom bells rang for the ultimate time.
Annie Lytle Elementary earlier than the sale in 1980. Photograph courtesy of The Florida Occasions-Union.
Annie Lytle Elementary in 1986. Photograph by Frank Smith; courtesy of The Florida Occasions-Union.
For the subsequent decade, the constructing served as workplaces and storage for the varsity district till it was shuttered in 1971. The district offered the property to Central Christian Faculty in 1975, however had to purchase it again simply 5 months later when the personal non secular faculty did not obey federal desegregation necessities. After a number of extra unsuccessful gross sales bids, the Ida Stevens Basis bought the varsity to transform it right into a senior dwelling middle in 1980. This challenge too failed, and Annie Lytle Elementary entered into an extended purgatory of dereliction and redevelopment plans deferred. Regardless of its good bones and fame, the development prices, additional widening of I-95 and plain dangerous fortune thwarted makes an attempt to show it into residences and condos within the 2000s and 2010s, and the constructing has sat vacant for greater than 4 a long time.
Annie Lytle Elementary right now. Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
I-95 runs proper previous Annie Lytle Elementary’s entrance, making the constructing seen to hundreds of individuals day by day.
*Annie Lytle Elementary within the shadow of I-95. *
If the incursion of I-95 introduced on Annie Lytle Elementary’s closure, it’s additionally in a single key method accountable for its lengthy afterlife: proximity to the freeway ensures the varsity’s ruins are seen by hundreds day by day. For younger Jaxsons, the formidable edifice is perennially foreboding but extremely seen, firing many a youthful creativeness and making certain that well-placed graffiti will draw numerous eyes. As such the previous schoolhouse emerged as Jacksonville’s legend-tripping spot par excellence.
Folklorists have more and more studied legend-tripping for the reason that Seventies, and shortly famous that the apply tends to comply with a selected three-part sample. In his e-book If You Ought to Go At Midnight: Legends and Legend Tripping in America, sociologist Jeffrey S. Debies-Carl calls these the “preliminal,” “liminal” and “postliminal stage.” Within the preliminal stage, trippers start their journey by recounting legends concerning the vacation spot. As Annie Lytle Elementary’s wild tales of lethal fires and murderous faculty employees present, these legends require no foundation in actuality or consistency from one telling to the subsequent. Their true perform is to put out a compelling cause for trippers to analyze the area for themselves and to set the suitable temper for a voyage into the tenebrous unknown.
View of the collapsed roof over the auditorium. Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
View into the auditorium. Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
Subsequent comes the liminal stage, the place trippers enter their vacation spot and cross into the realm of unedifying uncertainty. Trippers enact rituals or actions designated to convey contact with the mysteries of the area, giving them proof as as to whether the legends are true, or not less than melting their resolve sufficient that they flee the area in a frenzy of adrenaline. As almost any photograph of Annie Lytle Faculty during the last a long time present, enactment there typically includes graffiti tagging. Lastly, departing trippers enter the post-liminal part as they return to the quotidian realm. The uncanniness of the expertise lingering even within the security of dwelling, they craft their private narrative of what they only confronted, participating in a “telling of the story” that weaves their names into the material of the legend and retains it alive for trippers to return.
Many Jaxsons have such tales for the telling about Annie Lytle Elementary. James Shannon snuck in round 2003 in his early 20s. “It’s one scary place and the one time (to today) I’ve ever had a mystical expertise,” he says. “We had been on the stage within the auditorium and will hear dozens of children’ voices… unmistakable and clear as night time. Now, thoughts you, we had already explored elsewhere and had been the one people within the constructing. It was completely wild.”
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Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
“I really like Annie!” says native writer Melanie S. Pronia. “My husband and I are each native horror writers and bought married in entrance of it on October 31, 2014. The varsity is definitely what introduced us collectively… it’s an incredible constructing!” Thomas Crowder snuck into the constructing a number of occasions between 1996 and 2019. “The basement or cellar space is the actual creepy half, darkish ominous vibes down there… the entire constructing offers you the sensation of eyes on you the whole time. I’ve heard tall tales of satan worshipping cults and the entire above. Solely the constructing is aware of the reality…”
Patsy Bryant, in the meantime, has by no means had one supernatural encounter in all her years of labor. “Individuals would reasonably consider the scary tales than the intense issues,” she says. “I might go up there nearly day by day, lock myself in and go to work. And there ain’t no ghosts in there. I’m not saying I don’t consider in spirits – however not there.”
Graffiti on the roof. Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
One story from author Tim Gilmore of Jax Psycho Geo elucidates how these legends unfold and evolve – and the way Annie Lytle Elementary got here to be dubbed the Satan’s Faculty. He went twice with pals as a teen round 1991. “Some issues that occur if you’re that individual age that simply type of turn into your individual mythology, your individual mythos, you realize? Going into Faculty Quantity 4 was that for me.”
Gilmore doesn’t recall listening to any of the now-common ghost tales concerning the constructing earlier than his first legend-trip, and positively nothing about satan worshippers. “The factor that I actually bear in mind was this story that any person had hung himself over the stage and that typically folks would go into the varsity and see him nonetheless hanging there, despite the fact that it supposedly occurred a very long time in the past.” On the second journey, an artistically gifted buddy had the thought of spray-painting completely different rooms with themes. “He did like a Volkswagen Bug room – he drove a Bug – and we did a Peace Room, with identical to flowers and stuff like that. However one of many rooms we did with flames painted on the partitions and we known as it the Hell Room.”
Mixture variety of the beast? Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
Gilmore was perplexed some months later when an area information station did a narrative on Annie Lytle that includes footage of the “Hell Room.” “I bear in mind the digicam panning slowly throughout the flames. The information report was that our graffiti was proof of satanic exercise occurring on the faculty.” This was information to Gilmore, who grew up a fundamentalist Christian, however this was a time of the Satanic Panic, a media-abetted conspiracy principle that purported {that a} secret cabal of satan worshippers was committing nefarious crimes throughout the nation as a part of their darkish rites. “We had been very irritated by it, like they stole our imaginative and prescient or one thing, but in addition weirdly proud,” says Gilmore. “One thing we did made the information! In fact they didn’t present the Volkswagen Bug room or the Peace Room.”
Patsy Bryant at an Annie Lytle Preservation Group cleanup in 2018. Photograph by Mark Krancer.
Gilmore and co weren’t alone in leaving graffiti that pearl-clutchers interpreted as clear-cut proof that the varsity was an lively temple to the darkish lord Lucifer. By the point I made my first trek to Annie Lytle in 1999, this had turn into an indelible a part of the mythology, and legend-tripping was drawing in so many bored younger folks every weekend night time it’d as nicely have been Journey Touchdown or Einstein A Go-Go. Shortly thereafter, the varsity was subjected to an explosion of protection by web sites, native articles and books on mysterious locales that continues to today. Sadly, for as a lot as Annie Lytle meant to native legend-trippers, the years of vandalism, climate injury on account of busted home windows and two fires took a heavy toll. In 2005, after the most recent effort to redevelop the construction had failed, the house owners explored demolishing it altogether.
Then a bunch of do-gooders entered the scene – and supplied a method to discover the construction whereas serving to protect it. Native advocate Tim Kinnear was against demolishing the varsity, and took it upon himself to mow the grass and have a tendency to the property. “Don’t let it’s derelict look and state idiot you into believing it’s going to collapse,” says Kinnear. “It was designed after the Nice Fireplace to be fireproof.” Working with the house owners beneath a hold-harmless settlement, he established the Annie Lytle Preservation Group, a band of like-minded preservationists who organized cleanups to take away particles, clear off the graffiti and stabilize the constructing. Patsy Bryant was one of many earliest members. “I began speaking to Tim and I cherished him from the minute,” she says. “We might go up there and work, and we began getting different folks to return up there too.”
Photograph by Erik Hamilton.
Sadly, the destiny of Annie Lytle Faculty is as a lot in limbo now as when the Faculty Board exited its storied grounds within the Seventies. After years of failed tasks, a sophisticated collection of property transfers has left the constructing beneath a separate possession than the encircling land, which nonetheless belongs to the Ida Stevens Basis. The preservation group has turn into far much less lively as Kinnear, Bryant and others have needed to step away from the common cleanups. As we speak, full and even partial renovation appears distant.
“It isn’t unattainable if the best minds with the enough cash sources might persuade the current house owners to in some way merge this property again collectively,” says Kinnear. “There are numerous prospects for the varsity… it’s going to all the time be my hope that in some way, a way this place can be spared and repurposed.” “I simply need it fastened again the place folks can go in and simply see it the way in which it must be,” says Bryant. “Even with the mess of it, it’s a lovely constructing.”
For now, Annie Lytle Elementary Faculty nonetheless stands, because it did when Miss Annie walked its halls, awaiting its likelihood on the renewal now sweeping Brooklyn.
Extra Jaxlore
Article by Invoice Delaney. Pictures by Erik Hamilton. Contact Invoice at wdelaney@moderncities.com and comply with Erik on Instagram at perfectance.