The End of an Era, and the End of an Elephant Ghost for Horace Mann Elementary

FARGO — More than a hundred years after neighbors first petitioned the city to build a school for elementary schoolkids on the city’s north side, it’s surprising how much of the Horace Mann neighborhood still revolves around children.

Missy Tedford’s been manning the front desk here for 21 years, making kids feel at home and answering questions, often about the ghost story that was old when Tedford first started working here.

“Do you know the story? The elephant buried under the school?” she asks a small girl who’s been dropped off late and who needs her lunch order put in.

“Yes,” the girl replies. Her grandpa told her about it, she says.

Horace Mann-Roosevelt Principal Leandra Ostrom’s not surprised to hear it, she says, laughing,  since the story’s been going around Horace Mann “since the circus came to town,”

John Hallberg, archivist at NDSU, says there is some proof that the area around the school was used as a circus grounds by Ringling Brothers in 1902.

The legend would have it that a circus elephant died during the tour, and the circus officials buried the animal there, rather than haul  it away.

There are accounts of wagons being hauled several blocks to the north of Broadway, around where the school would later be built in 1915.

While the details are as dubious as the children who report hearing the trumpet of a trunk when the lockers clang, and a shudder from a ghostly elephant’s stomp through the halls, the rumors persist, although some would have it that the skeleton belonged to a giraffe, not an elephant.

Either way, the community’s memory is long enough to make a pachyderm proud.

But now, the Horace Mann community may finally get some answers.

That’s because, as the district gets ready to raze the old school building to make way for a new, modern schoolthat will combine Horace Mann, Roosevelt and Madison Elementary, they’re looking to dig up some facts while they’re at it.

Ostrom and district officials are interested enough in the old story to tell the contractors measuring the grounds for the new school to stop work and report back if they happen to find any animal bones… or tusks.

On the final trunk-or-treat night for Horace Mann school, there’s a big turnout — from former school workers in their nineties, to young people in their teens and 20s bringing friends and dates back to the old neighborhood, to current students bidding goodbye to the old school building.

“I’m sad,” says third grader Harley Quinn. “The elephant is my friend. I think the elephant should visit me in my classroom every day. ”

Some other students who’ve moved on to Ben Franklin Middle School say the old school, with its hardwood floors and historic details, has a character a new build just won’t have.

Tedford agrees. The new school is needed, with its greater efficiency, space, and safety, she says.

The old building’s “got the history and the charm,” she says. “But I get it.”

Ostrom surveys the crowd at the trunk-or-treat, and says it’s a bittersweet moment, as well as an exciting one.

“I hope they find Ellie, I do,” she says. “Plus, how cool would it be to see the trunk hanging in the new school?”

Connor Kessler, a former Horace Mann kid who’s now in 8th grade, stopped by the trunk or treat while walking his dog.

“I mean, one of my friends has three kids in his family who still have to go through to school here,” he says. “So I guess it’s like the elephant thing, the giraffe thing —  you just have to get into it, and go with the flow.”

And whether or not they ever find Ellie the elephant, it’s clear, at least with this neighborhood, her story is on solid ground.