There is a hidden world that many East students don’t even know about, and it’s right beneath our feet.

Go near The Jungle in the East High basement, and you will see a door. Not many people know what that door is or what it leads to. Well, during Final Exams, the East Highlights staff was given a chance to go and explore a different world that is unlike anything you have encountered before. 

Upon entering the tunnel, you will see nothing but a bunch of janitorial items that look like any other janitorial closet. Go a bit deeper, and you can hardly stand. The ceiling gets extremely low down here, and you have to crouch. 

Once down there, you will see a bunch of pipelines. The pipelines lead you to the boiler room, where you will find a big boiler that helps heat and power our school. 

There are words sprayed on the walls as you leave the tunnels, pointing out where things should be, like a garbage can or clean rags. The words take you to what appears to be a storage area full of a bunch of boxes. Then, the paved floor vanishes as you go a bit deeper. You start to feel like you are standing on dirt. It’s dark and low. You then see a rusty chair in the middle of the hallway. It looks like it came out of a horror movie. It’s a dead end, but you notice a window nearby. When you look into it, the deep end of the swimming pool appears out of the blue, and you realize you are actually underneath the pool. Quite an amazing view, right?

But perhaps the most amazing thing about the tunnel is not even in the tunnel. Rather, it is outside the tunnel, but not within the building itself. 

If you have a class that faces the baseball or football fields, you will notice a strange building that’s located next to the field house. A building that very few students have ever been in before. Along with the tunnel, we had the opportunity to visit that strange building. 

Stepping inside the building, there is a staircase, a rusty old staircase. You have to be very careful, or you might just fall down to the ground. It is very uncomfortable and underlit. It leads you to the top floor of the building. There are no lights, at least no artificial lights since the sun provides the light. You find a rusty old wheel with holding trays. You go a bit farther and see a track of these trays, along with a better looking wheel. The wheel system and the trays heated up our school when it first opened. It was a coal power system, and used coal to warm our school. Pretty interesting considering the world’s trying to ditch coal. But that is a different story.

There are a bunch of other interesting things we found in the tunnels, so much so that we cannot fit them all in this article, but over the coming weeks, we will share more here on our website.