There was a school (some actually thought it was an insane assylum) where little children lived and learned. It was an orphanage, no less, which is why there was a dormitory. This school operated just fine through Breathitt County's frequent flash floods, just seeking higher ground until the storm was over. However, one night, the radio weather forecast was not for another flash flood. It was for a tornado. Therefore, instead of hitting the hills, the students and faculty were assembled in the boiler room of the dormitory to evade being killed or carried off to Oz or the Dark Side of the Moon. Unfortunately, the meteorologists were wrong, and the flood waters entered the boiler room drowning several if not all of the students and faculty.
It makes perfect sense. This is why there would be restless spirits there that "don't know they're dead yet." This is what we believed because somewhere in a corner of our minds that has some kind of immunity from indictments of being morbid, that is what we wanted to believe. The story satisfied that itch that makes us follow the life and times of Michael Meyers (not Austin Powers -- that's a less taboo itch). Nevertheless, this story couldn't be any less true.
Magoffin Bible Institute moved to Breathitt County for undisclosed but probably obvious reasons in the early '40's, setting the construction date after the great flood. It was both a grade school and a high school, starting at first grade and ending with a diploma. As a Baptist institution, it kept the Methodist run Zion's Hill Academy a couple miles down the road down to just an elementary school. That school has long since been destroyed by a vandal's fire after abandonment.
The reason for the dormitories--the boys' dorm in the pictures and the girls' dorm apparantly destroyed--was because it was so far out without a decent highway, it was impractical to commute. For this reason, tuition was high, and children whose parents couldn't afford it were allowed to work for their tuition on the campus farm. The crop(s) raised there are forgotten, but the barns up that hollow look like tobacco barns. The hollow is narrow around the campus, but it does widen out enough for a large garden back away from the road.
It had a beautiful stone church on campus and several other nice buildings that have collapsed or been intentionally destroyed. When Alta Linden taught elementary grades there in 1959, Oneida Baptist Church was over the curriculum. She went on to Morehead State University for her BA in education, and later to Eastern Kentucky University for her MA, but she enjoyed the short time she spent there, and recalls that the gymnasium and football field were as good as that of the county seat's public school at the time.
The school became less and less popular over the decade of the 1960's and enrollment was decreasing to an unproffitable, unsalvageable low. The remainder of the students were moved to a new Baptist school in Oneida, which is still in operation today.
Ms. Linden attended Zion's Hill Academy for her elementary education, but never was a student at Magoffin Bible Institute. She wishes the community had done something with the campus, or at least the gymnasium after the school left the area in the late '60's or early '70's due to a diminishing student body. Several years ago, she wanted to use the stone chapel on the campus to have church meetings. Loretta Taulbee, the land-owner at the time, would not hear of it for some reason. The once gorgeous building has recently collapsed. Ms. Taulbee has since passed away, as well.
So why would there be spirits at a place where no one has died? I believe it because the spirits there were trying to prove the myth true, so that they might cause people to believe in an afterlife on before divine and final judgement. For more detail, click here.