Beneath BHS

One of the places students are not allowed to enter in the school is A0-3A/B0-3A: the basement. From time to time, you can hear loud hissing, and see specs of light within the gaps of the door, but no student knows what is actually down there. A lot of speculation goes between the students of BHS, a lot of theories and ideas of what could be down there.

“There is something mysterious down there, dude,” a student said, adding that it was strange how no one ever thought of taking students down there for safety during storms. “It’s probably government things,” they added.

Most said they believed it to have extra materials, school supplies, desks, chairs, tables or even other equipment such as instruments. Another common idea was that it held utilities such as plumbing, the boiler/furnace, generators, a water heater, washing machines or just a storage unit. Quite a few students claimed they believed bad students were kept down there. One even said that “there is a monster the teachers feed bad kids.”

While not all of the responses were morbid or dark, there were definitely a few unusual ones: torture chambers, their grandmother’s ashes, a chihuahua. Whether it is a big statue of Dr. Daghe, dried pasta, a bunch of the school’s top secrets, a parking garage or genetically modified kids, the students of BHS will learn the truth today.

Going down into the basement, you’d first walk in to see a turn onto a long hallway. On the right of this first hallway are two Powerex air compressors. These create the hissing noise often heard behind doors B0-3A. One is used for the air nozzles in the large lab, left of the grand staircase. The other goes to the same lab, but it does the opposite, providing the vacuuming of the vacuum nozzle.

When you reach the end of the hall, you enter the next room, which is bare other than the start of metal pipes, as well as multiple white tubes that wrap around the rest of the basement. These are used for any and all plumbing around the school. Hot or cold, the water is supplied through them.

Starting halfway through this room, on the concrete floor, are the faded but preserved graffiti marks of school years before, the most recent being from the class of 2011.

As you walk and turn the corner of the second hall, a lot more is present: a few more pipes and the second entrance, A0-3A. To the right, a door similar to the ones used for classrooms, without a window, leads to a storage room that consists of wooden pallets, cardboard boxes and other items. The basement is in the form of a ‘U’ and this storage room is in the second corner, and going to the left leads you to the end of the basement.

The last hallway branches off to the right, leading to a door that looks similar to an emergency exit door, or the ones you’d find near the spot delivery trucks bring supplies to the school. It leads to a deep hole in the ground, with a grate blocking anything large. This is what they refer to as “The Pit,” and it sits right behind the main office. Everything else in the basement involves electricity, power and heat/air conditioning.

While it may not be as big of a mystery as we had hoped it was, the basement plays a big part in how BHS functions and will always hold great history.