Revealed – the haunting legend of Wolverhampton Royal School's Long Dorm
They called it the Long Dorm, and it was a place of unusual schoolboy punishment as well as schooldays legend.
According to the story, on Founder's Day the ghost of John Lees would walk the Long Dorm. There were tales of other ghosts too, a boy and a cat.
John Lees? He was the founder of The Royal School at Wolverhampton which this year sees its 170th anniversary.
There can't be many former pupils around today who can remember the Long Dorm, which was already a fading memory by the time one of our reporters paid a visit back in November 1966.
Once holding close on 80 boys, the long dormitory, stretching over 180 feet – that's over 55 metres – had by then been turned into classrooms.
For punishment in the old days schoolboy offenders had been made to count the floorboards.
With the school built on a hill, with the next highest point eastwards said to be the Ural Mountains, our visitor discovered that the pupils still talked about going "up" and "down" as every journey within the school was either up or down.
