El Paso High School's 1985 class panoramic shows a blurred young woman in white that nobody remembers standing there, and staff say she was absent from the negative. The building on the mesa has been collecting witnesses ever since.
El Paso High School sits on a mesa above downtown El Paso, Texas, and the strangest thing in its archive is a class photograph. The panoramic of the graduating class of 1985 shows a young woman in a white gown, blurred. Nobody remembers her standing there. KISS-FM El Paso's write-up places her in the second row from the bottom, right side of the frame, and according to school staff she did not appear in the original negative, only in the developed photo. The school's own student newspaper, The Tatler, runs the picture as a file photo and calls her the ghost of El Paso High.
The people who work in the 1916 building have their own accounts, and they put their names to them. Principal Mark Paz was in the auditorium with student activities manager Lindie Serna when he watched a woman get up from the top section of seats and walk out. Serna didn't see it herself. "I do know I've been with principals and teachers who have seen ghosts," she said. "I believe them." Librarian Jessica Silva tells about a friend who, back when they were students, went into a fourth-floor restroom, heard water running, and came out of the stall to find every sink in the empty bathroom turned on. Theater director Jacob Rodriguez went back into the darkened auditorium at night for something he'd left, felt watched, turned around and found a figure sitting in one of the chairs. He photographed it with his phone. "I was terrified," he said. "I mean it was creepy."
Sergeant Geoffrey R. Allen of the district's police told author Ken Hudnall in 2003 that no officer went into El Paso High alone at night: two officers, or an officer and a dog. He answered an alarm just after midnight, came up from the basement with his dog, and heard the school fight song, cheerleaders, a crowd, all the sounds of a pep rally, coming from the first-floor auditorium. The lights were on down the hall. Before he could get there the dog went berserk, fought free, and turned up hiding under his patrol car. When he finally reached the auditorium the doors were locked, the lights were out, and the building was deserted.
Who the girl is supposed to be depends on who's telling it. One version puts a student off one of the balconies in 1922; the folklore version makes her a jilted cheerleader in the mid-1970s. No death record, obituary or news account has been found for any of them.
Then, in September 2022, a commenter on the El Paso Museum of History's archive entry for the panoramic wrote that he knew her. Her name was Mary Lou Watts, Joseph Rios said, and the two girls beside her were Beatriz Campos and Catherine Roy, friends who came up together from Vilas and Lamar elementary. "So stop with the false ghost story. Mystery Solved."
No yearbook or roster has surfaced to check the three names against.
