It was the kind of night custodians know well - quiet, fluorescent-lit, and empty in a way that makes every sound feel louder than it should be. On Monday, March 30th, 2026, at around 11:00 PM, Larry was doing what he had done countless times before - cleaning bathrooms in a quiet wing of the high school in Newton, Iowa.
The building wasn’t dark, every light was on. Nothing should have been hiding.
But something was.
When Larry stepped out into the hallway, he didn’t hear anything unusual. He didn’t feel a chill or sense a presence. But he saw it.
A black, human-shaped figure drifted silently down the corridor.
It wasn’t walking or running. It was floating. It moved with a steady, unnatural glide -hovering just above the floor.
Larry stood frozen, watching as the shape passed through the artificial glow of the hallway lights. It was completely black, darker than the shadows around it, almost as if it were absorbing the light instead of reflecting it. The only part of it that wasn't black, was the face, which Larry described as being gray. He didn't see eyes or a mouth, but says the being did seem to have a long nose. "It also could have been the angle I was seeing it from," Larry told me. "It was hard to focus in on it. It was almost as if it was blurry."
The figure was human-sized, and appeared to be wearing tattered clothing that hung loosely, frayed at the edges. For a moment,Larry thought of feathers. Not clean, soft ones - but ragged, broken feathers, like something that had been worn down over time. On it's head sat what Larry later described as a round-topped, wide-brimmed hat. "It resembled the hats that the Amish wear," Larry would later say.
But the strangest detail wasn’t the clothing. It was the posture and lack of obvious support.
The figure leaned forward, as if bracing against wind that wasn’t there, or maybe urging itself forward. And beneath it - nothing. No legs and nothing holding it up. It gave the unmistakable impression that it was riding something… like a witch astride a broomstick - except that in this case - there was no broomstick.
Larry watched as it drifted past him. It didn't instantly disappear as he turned his glance toward the entity, as so many shadows do. This "thing" allowed Larry to watch it for what is a paranormal eternity, 20 or 30 seconds.
There was no sound, and no interaction. It didn't acknowledge Larry's presence. It just passed silently through the hall. Larry said that he didn't feel fear at this point, just wonder. he couldn't take his eyes off of it. Every custodian who works at the high school has their own ghost stories - the school definitely has it's share of haunts - but what Larry witnessed is next level.
After it glided down a small stairway into a lower hallway, it began to fade. Not instantly in a flash, like one second it's here, and then the next it's gone... On this night It SLOWLY dissolved into nothing. It broke apart into the air itself - like smoke evaporating out - until there was nothing left. No trace of the entity remained. Just empty hallway.
 |
| The hallway from which the entity appearred from |
To this day, Larry is struggling with what he saw. He's a religious man, and this experience has placed him on the edge of what he's always understood about God's natural world. "This wasn't natural," he told me. "I don't feel that this was one of God's creatures."
In a brightly lit school hallway, in a building that should have held nothing but silence, something passed through as if it belonged. It gave every indication that it had been there before; and it gave every implication that it knew where it was going. Natural or supernatural, it wasn't waiting for an invitation. It forced it's presence, and it couldn't care less about witnesses.
Larry finished his shift. The experience happened over a week ago but Larry says it remains on his mind constantly.
Whatever he saw that night didn’t belong to the world we understand. It certainly didn’t need the lights to find its way through the dark.
Or maybe, what Larry saw WAS the darkness.
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