In the middle of October, 2006, the Grade Seven students at Brewer Middle School took a field trip to a building that they had seen from a distance for most of their lives, but had never visited up close. The tour guides were various city officials and the future developers of the old paper mill. It was raining quite hard and the students were poorly equipped with flashlight, which added to the overall effect of the visit. What follows are the essays, as written, by roughly half of the students. The essays are presented as written by the students, hoping to preserve their turns of phrase, their usages and their idiosyncrasies as writers.

Mikayla Love
It was like a dark, dark chilly feeling when I first stepped into the mill, when I first saw this I felt like I was about to enter a torture chamber. The crackles of people stepping on glass made me think of people stepping on bones. The drips of water made me think of blood dripping down. Dark corners made me think if I stepped into a particular spot I would be seriously injured by a dark object.

The things I saw there creeped me out. The rusty pipes, abandoned computer, numbers on the walls, dead pigeon, caution tap and danger tape made me have this feeling that I never had before like I shouldn't be there  like we should leave because this is some dangerous creature's house that we just invaded.

When I finally got used to the old mill I started to smell these weird smelly smells like there was 100 year old rotten eggs in these certain spots. Also when we were walking around I saw many cracked windows it made me feel really creepy inside. Also, when I was there in the mill, I saw much dusty stuff like no one has touched it in a lot of years.

A half and hour into the mill me and my friend Taylor Sands started to hear rumors of people talking about how Mr.Burby took a picture and one of the pictures he took it looked like there was a ghost sitting down in the picture or standing up something  like that. So then me and my friend Taylor stared looking around in these dark area's, to see if we could find any ghost and there was this one spot that we saw it looked like there was a ghost on the selling and as we got closer it would fade away. So there was one thing Taylor and I was suspicious about. But who knows? It could have been and I began to wonder about a lot of stuff like I why they shut the old mill down? I wonder who was the last person at the mill who closed the doors when it was closed. I wonder how old the building was because when we were there the paint on the walls was all chipping off. I wonder if there are ghost in that old creepy mill. And the last thing I wonder about the mill is what is the mill going to be turned into? So there you have it my story about the mill. I will never forget it because it made me have these feelings that I have never had before.

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