Evelyn, are you there?

In the wee, still hours of a dark January 2022 morning, Jimmy Benson worked alone at Mountain View Alternative High School.

“I’m working, I hear the door open and close, I think it's the janitor," he said. "This happens two different times, both times, after the fact, I go out and he's not here, and I'm like, 'Who the heck came in?'"

He thought perhaps the janitor came into the building and left.

Then the door, which is near the boiler room at the end of a hallway leading outside, again opens and shuts. This time, Benson looks at the live security footage and sees no one.

“Then I run over to the window to look out, there’s nobody there,” he said. "As I’m walking back, all of a sudden, the door goes BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM! And I go running out."

Benson, a paraprofessional at the school, eventually went back in, yelling out, "OK, it's all good, if you're happy, I'm happy!"

"I walk back in the room and I never had an experience since," he said. "Every so often I do hear a noise, a bump, my door’s knocked a couple times. This building’s old; I can’t say what the knocks are for sure. But that door, that was something. I don't know what."

Some think they know what, or who, may have caught Benson's attention that morning — Evelyn, the school's resident spirit.

“The story goes that Evelyn was a senior here at the time," Principal Paul Uzzi recounted. "She got locked in the building and must’ve been cold, couldn’t get out, went down to the boiler room to seek warmth and tragedy happened in there. She got burned badly by the boiler and never left."

This was in 1942, so the story goes. Mountain View's collection of framed photos of graduating classes are on display in a main hallway, but, curiously, the class of 1942 is missing.

“We had a picture of her up there at one point, but I don’t know where it went,” Uzzi said. “She must have taken it.”

Mountain View, which was the original Rathdrum school, is nearing its 100th birthday. It's an old building that creaks and settles, with the original boiler that knocks and moans.

That doesn't explain some of the weird goings-on reported through the years.

“We had one custodian working here in the evening and heard a piano being played and someone singing from the stage,” Uzzi said. "No one else was in the building, and there was no piano in the building. That custodian got scared, ran out of the building and never returned."

Vice Principal Mark Gorton had a late-night experience when he was finishing up grading papers.

"I can remember the hair standing up on my arms and just going, ‘Woah, what is that?’” he said. “There was nobody else in the building.”

Gorton said a parks and recreation basketball team once claimed the lights just went out, for no reason. He said it's an old school.

"But you never know," he said.

When the boiler knocks, some say it's the spirit of Evelyn trying to get out. Her stories have become a part of school lore.

“Evelyn has kind of become part of what we do around here,” Gorton said. “A few years ago, the students were making Christmas door decorations and stockings and they even made one for Evelyn and hung it on the boiler room door. But Evelyn’s was huge. It was almost the size of the door. She is part of who we are around here.”

A small storage space with old wooden doors just off the boiler room is called "Evelyn's Room."

"It’s one of those places where you go in and the hair stands up on the back of your neck," Uzzi said. "It's cold, so it feels like there’s something else in there with you.”

Adjacent the boiler room is the gym, which houses the stage where the phantom piano music is heard. Stepping into the gym, visitors notice an immediate drop in temperature. Paranormal investigators attribute drastic temperature changes to spirits using the energy in the room.

Or it could just be the old heating system.

Junior Taylor Anders-Huntsman said he and a friend were in the gym when they had an eerie experience.

“A ball just rolled off the stage," Taylor said. "We were really confused. There was nobody up there, not one person."

Head custodian Logan Lane, whose office is in the boiler room, is also no stranger to Mountain View's strangeness.

“My summer service people told me stories that they believe someone is on the stage," Lane said. "Even people I went to high school with, when they found out I worked here, they told me ‘I really don’t like the gym, there’s something on the stage,’ a dark figure or something."

Students have also witnessed framed photos falling off classroom walls for no reason.

Old building? Sure. Resident spirit? Maybe someday we'll know for certain.

“I’ve said it before walking out of the building, ‘Have a good night Evelyn,'" Uzzi said. "She's a nice ghost."