Prosperity School Bed and Breakfast

A charming one-room schoolhouse in Joplin that's now a bed and breakfast. It still feels like the old schoolhouse it was — Ghost Hunters paid it a visit too.

The Prosperity School Bed and Breakfast near Joplin, Missouri, began its life in 1907 as a schoolhouse in the once-thriving mining community of Prosperity, built as a two-story red brick and Carthage stone building in the heart of the tri-state lead and zinc mining district. During the mining boom, the school served as many as twelve hundred students, their voices filling the corridors and classrooms with the sounds of childhood. But as the mines played out and the population dwindled, enrollment dropped steadily until the school closed its doors in 1962 with a final enrollment of just thirty-two students.

For thirty years, the abandoned schoolhouse sat empty, its classrooms silent and its hallways dark. It was during this long vacancy that the building's reputation for ghostly activity began to take root. Local residents reported seeing lights in the windows at night and hearing sounds from within the empty building -- laughter, footsteps, and the faint echoes of children's voices carrying through the still night air.

When the building was renovated and converted into a bed and breakfast, the rooms were named after longtime teachers who had spent their careers at the school. Perhaps it was this tribute that stirred the spirits, because guests immediately began reporting encounters that went far beyond the building's empty-building reputation. The most common and most unsettling experience involves ghostly children who climb into bed with sleeping guests. Visitors have awakened to feel small bodies pressing against them under the covers, a sensation so realistic that some initially assume a living child has wandered into their room before realizing they're alone.

Richard Roberts, the owner of the bed and breakfast, has witnessed phenomena firsthand, including the recurring appearance of a dark figure of a man walking from the kitchen to the front door -- a route that suggests the ghost of a caretaker or teacher making habitual rounds. Guests report ghostly knocking on doors and walls, otherworldly voices that speak in indistinct whispers, and persistent electrical disturbances that affect lights and equipment throughout the building.

Photographers have captured images containing floating orbs, vortexes, and mists that appear with unusual frequency, and SyFy's Ghost Hunters television program investigated the property and captured footage that investigators described as a ghostly child running down a hallway. The image was compelling enough to be featured as one of the episode's key findings. The NWA Ghost Connection and other regional paranormal groups consider the Prosperity School one of the most actively haunted locations in the four-state region, with evidence suggesting that the spirits of children and teachers who spent their lives in these classrooms have simply never left.