In Brief
The Prosperity School Bed and Breakfast outside Joplin, Missouri, was a 1907 schoolhouse before it took in overnight guests. Some of them said children they couldn't see climbed into bed beside them in the dark.
The Full Story
For a while, you could book a room at the Prosperity School Bed and Breakfast outside Joplin, Missouri, and sleep in a 1907 schoolhouse. By some accounts, the guest rooms were named for the school's old teachers, and a few of the people who stayed there woke to children they couldn't see climbing into bed beside them in the dark.
The building was a school for over half a century. Two stories of brick, raised in 1907 and named for the lead-mining camp that sprang up after ore was struck in a nearby field. At its peak it packed in around 500 pupils under 11 teachers, running two sessions a day. It closed in 1962 when the district folded into Webb City, sat empty for roughly thirty years, then came back as a place where strangers paid to spend the night.
Janet and Richard Roberts bought it over Thanksgiving 2002 and drove up from Dallas. Within a month, they said, it started. Richard reported a dark figure of a man crossing from the kitchen to the front door. Guests reported knocking, and voices that came from no one. In 2005, a paranormal team out of Hot Springs, Arkansas spent time in the building with infrared cameras and dowsing rods and called the place actively haunted, by which they meant the activity moved and engaged rather than repeating on a loop.
Then there was the night with the box. In October 2007, a ghost hunter named Christopher Moon set a cigar-box device he called the Telephone to the Dead on the dining-room table, in front of about 15 students from Missouri Southern State University. Through its static, a voice answered as a little girl. She gave her name as Sadie. She said she was saying her prayers, and that she didn't like the cars on the road outside. Then, the group was told, she walked to the top of the second-floor stairs.
There is no record of a student named Sadie. The Robertses had heard the older stories too, the unprovable kind that gather in an empty building over thirty years. "But none of those stories are provable," Richard said.
The B&B is closed now. Prosperity is mostly closed too. The mines played out, the town of 1,500 thinned to a handful of houses along a county road, and the schoolhouse outlasted nearly everything else around it. It stands as one of the last things left of a place that has otherwise gone quiet.
