The Haunted School
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The Haunted School is the 59th Goosebumps book by R. L. Stine.
[edit] Story
When a teenager named Tommy moves to a new town, he finds it hard to make new friends at his latest school. He decides to help to do the decorations for the school dance. Thalia, a beautiful young girl also working on the dance, who applies red lipstick quite a lot, wants red paint, so Tommy offers to get it. While in the Art department he hears voices, but no one is there to speak. Tommy stumbles into a tall girl with eerie gray eyes on his way back to the gym and also gets lost and stumbles across a room marked 'The Class of 1947'. Inside are statues of 25 children, a the principal appears and explains that these statues are in memory of the 25 children of 1947 who suddenly vanished.
On the night of the dance Tommy and Ben (who so far had been bullying Tommy) need to get a banner fixed. This is when they stumble across an elevator that goes sideways and transports them to a classroom in 'The Grey World', a world where everything is in black and white. Here they meet Seth and his friends, a few of the members of the missing class of 1947 who are all the same ages they were in 1947. Seth tells them the story of how a photographer named Mr. Chameleon sent them to this grey world, in a FLASH with his camera during the class photo. Everything and everyone transported to this world slowly loses their color over time. As Tommy and Ben try to figure out how to escape Seth informs them that only one girl has ever gotten out and no one knows how. Tommy thinks that it must have been the girl with the grey eyes he bumped into at school. Tommy and Ben decide to investigate the world outside of the school although Seth warns them that his remaining classmates went crazy years ago and now roam the land outside the classroom as savages. Seth and his friends remain in the school because it's the only place they consider safe from their former friends
Ben and Tommy decide to try anyway and leave through the classroom window into the city outside. There they get attacked by the other members of the class of 1947, who perform strange rituals involving a pool of steaming gray goo. Angry that Tommy and Ben still have color they want to turn them into one of them by dumping the hot gray goo onto them. Seth and friends save Tommy and Ben at the last minute and return to the classroom. Tommy remembers the lighter his grandfather gave him and tries to use it to somehow escape but the flame is now colorless as well. Suddenly the elevator opens and Thalia appears shocking everyone. Seth and the others are excited to see her and already know her name. It turns out Thalia is the girl who managed to escape the grey world as she explained 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 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 and thats why she was always putting on makeup constantly. Not knowing what else to do she had stayed around the school looking for a way back into Grey World to save her friends but now after being in the real world for awhile decided that both she and her friends were better off in Grey world. Using her lipstick she opened a doorway for Tommy and Ben to escape while she and her friends decided to stay.
Tommy and Ben flee and return to the gymnasium having become friends after what they just went through. They arrive just in time for the principal to inform them that the dance committee is about to take their yearbook photo. As they are rushed into the photo the principal tell them to hurry up. Mr. Chameleon doesn't like to be kept waiting. Realizing what he just heard Tommy tries to stop the picture but he is to late.
"Mr who?" I cried. "No! Wait!" FLASH.
- It is written in first person with Tommy telling the story
- It is one of the least available of the entire Goosebumps series.
