Paramount+’s School Spirits season three, episode five, is the series’ creepiest episode yet. Episode five starts with Simon (Kristian Ventura) in the creature’s grasp and being shown what happened in the church on the day of the flood. A loud thud from above echoes in the church’s basement as children sing in a choir just before their deaths.
(The following is a recap of season three, episode five, so there are spoilers ahead.)
Simon describes the encounter to the ghost gang, and Wally (Milo Manheim) adds that the being grabbed Simon and forced him to look into his “milky white eyes.” The super-tall Mr. White Eyes pounced on Simon and Wally couldn’t get to him fast enough before the mind meld took place.
The town’s history shows eight children and one adult died that day in the flood. Yuri (Miles Elliot) wonders why White Eyes would show Simon that story. Is White Eyes the adult who drowned? Simon’s weirded out and doesn’t want to go back down again, but Yuri thinks the rest of them need to go into the hole since there’s strength in numbers. Charley (Nick Pugliese) volunteers to stay with Simon since he doesn’t have much luck dealing with tall guys.
Xavier continues to help out hospital ghost Kyle by tracking down Tracey. When Xavier mentions that he’s calling about her former bandmate Kyle Jensen, Tracey quickly ends the conversation.
Maddie (Peyton List) fills Xavier in on White Eyes and admits it was good to spend the night at his house instead of home alone.
Claire (Rainbow Wedell) decides she can get info on plans for the school’s destruction from her stepdad if she acts like she’s moving back home. Claire’s changed her hair and looks gorgeous, which Nicole (Kiara Pichardo) points out. Nicole promises she will have her back, no matter what.
Over at the school, Quinn (Ci Hang Ma) wants to clear the air about trying to kiss Rhonda (Sarah Yarkin) in the hallway when she was high on mushrooms. Rhonda doesn’t think they need to talk about it.
Charley (Nick Pugliese) watches as Simon looks through his thumb drive full of horror movies for the one about a psycho who transfers his evil thoughts into a shrink’s brain. Charley has no idea what he’s talking about since he’s not a horror fan. Wally and Yuri lug boxes of supplies (rope, flashlight, cheese spreader) for their trip back down into the hole. Mr. Martin (Josh Zuckerman) points out they don’t need a hatchet, but Wally insists they need to be prepared. Wally is convinced White Eyes might not be the only creature they need to worry about down there. Even if they’re dead, they can’t be too careful.
“What if we go in the hole and it closes it up and we’re trapped down there forever?” says an upset Wally, who thinks they’re not taking this seriously enough. Rhonda points out this is a lousy pep talk.
Simon finds the film he was looking for (The Sender), just as the other ghosts head off to the hellhole.
Maddie stays in the car as Xavier goes into the hospital to speak with Kyle. Kyle’s shocked that Tracey didn’t want to talk about him and believes he’ll never have the answers he’s looking for. He recalls that right before he got on the bus, he asked her to go to the prom. She looked stunned, maybe because they’d been in the friend zone. Tracey was supposed to answer him the next day, but he died in the crash.
Maddie sees a message from Simon’s parents that they want to FaceTime with him. Suddenly she has another vision that includes Simon repeating, “You can’t save me,” right before he lands on the hood of Xavier’s truck, dead.
When Xavier finds her, she’s standing outside the truck and staring into space. Kyle gave him some useful info, so he wants to talk to Tracey at the Harvest Festival. Also, Maddie’s dad told him that there was a foundry on the hospital site decades ago. The foundry collapsed and the ghosts that were inside it are trapped here forever. Since the building they died in was demolished, they can’t cross over. These trapped ghosts are known as The Forgotten.
Maddie thinks they should keep this quiet and not alarm Simon or the ghosts. She wants to figure out how to get Simon out first.
Maddie puts a rubber band around her wrist at the suggestion of her therapist. If she sees something that’s not real, she should pull it to snap herself out of it.
Charley munches on popcorn as Simon watches The Sender, and Simon abruptly decides to stop watching the film. He wonders why White Eyes was holding rosary beads in his memory, and Charley thinks it’s because it was a church. But Simon points out Lutherans don’t have rosary beads. Also, Simon is certain those specific beads are the ones he had when he was adopted. They belonged to his birth mother!
Simon thinks White Eyes has his memories but doesn’t know why or why White Eyes sucked him into the ghost world.
The ghosts explore around inside the hole, exposing a stained-glass window. Wally reminds them to keep their distance from the water, and Rhonda grabs the cheese spreader for protection—just in case.
Yuri finds a paper with faded numbers and Finnish while Quinn plays a note on the piano. They wonder if White Eyes or the kids who drowned drew the freaky paintings of people either screaming or singing on the wall. Also, are they drawn in blood or mud?
The piano plays by itself as Rhonda screams about the water. Wally orders everyone to leave before they’re trapped. Mr. Martin refuses, even after Wally reminds him that he’ll be stuck there because he doesn’t have the watch.
Wally gets Yuri out and Rhonda grabs Quinn, who tried to get the piano to stop and encountered a ghost. Mr. Martin remains transfixed on the drawings on the wall.
Meanwhile, Superintendent Deborah Hunter-Price (Jennifer Tilly) is at the town’s Harvest Festival at the high school, using a puppet show to explain how great leaders make life better for future generations. She talks about when they split the river to make the town prosper. Maddie, Claire, and Nicole are in the audience, and Maddie reminds Claire they need to find out ASAP about the school getting bulldozed. Claire reluctantly leaves, dreading talking to her stepdad.
Deborah brings up the town’s first great statesman, Alfred Van Heidt, the man who was killed with the kids in the church.
Simon tries to clear his head by running, and Charley’s out of breath by the time they stop. It didn’t work, and Simon still has questions. But first, he has a confession. He told Maddie that he emailed his sister, Sabrina, back after she found him, but he actually never replied. Simon believes his sister resents him since their mom died giving birth to him.
Charley disagrees. Sabrina wouldn’t have tried connecting with him if she resented him. Charley thinks Simon needs to return to the living so he can call his sister. “The only way I’m getting back to my life is finding out why I’m here,” says Simon.
Simon spots Maddie and Nicole walking around the festival and admits to feeling really guilty for lying to Maddie.
Wally, Rhonda, Quinn, and Yuri try and figure out what the papers they retrieved mean. Yuri thinks one says something about “final offer,” and Rhonda searches for a magnifying glass to exam it better.
Quinn reveals she saw a child in the church who told her not to tell on him. She thanks Rhonda for grabbing her hand and pulling her out and then confesses she’s been wanting to kiss her for a long time. Their conversation’s interrupted when Charley runs into the library, breathless and admitting he lost Simon.
The group splits up after Charley teases that Simon withheld something important about the hole. Wally takes off with Charley and Rhonda to find Simon, leaving Yuri and Quinn to decode the hellhole papers.
Mr. Martin, still in the church, hears sobbing and sees a woman crying about her poor baby. A man shows up behind him, toasting the man of the hour and complimenting him that “all it cost him was one family heirloom.” The man says he better hurry before the dam breaks, and Mr. Martin hears a noise and follows it.
Livia’s manning the town’s Harvest Festival booth with her mom, Deborah, and Maddie wonders if there’s more about the town’s history on display. She sees a design for the new high school, and Deborah asks if she wishes she were a freshman because the new building will be amazing. Deborah believes you can’t stop progress but doesn’t confirm when demolition will take place.
The ghosts find Maddie at the festival but can’t talk to her. However, they can hear her when she tells Nicole that if the building is torn down, the ghosts will be trapped there and forgotten. Charley, Rhonda, and Wally are stunned when Maddie confesses that she doesn’t want to tell Simon or the ghosts—the people she loves—that their only option is crossing over, if they can.
Simon sneaks back into the library and takes the watch just as his mom calls Maddie, worried about him. Maddie lies and says Simon’s at a lake house with spotty reception.
Claire’s stepdad wasn’t helpful so that’s a dead end. A woman walks by who walked out of Deborah’s puppet show while calling her something in a foreign language. Claire translates what she said as “devil” in Finnish. They follow the lady, and Livia notices Maddie left her backpack behind.
Simon joins Mr. Martin in the hole and touches the drawing on the wall. It’s wet. Simon recalls seeing these drawings when White Eyes grabbed his face and wonders whose blood was used to paint them. Mr. Martin thinks the walls are speaking to them and that Simon was chosen for a specific reason.
Over at the hospital, Maddie’s dad, Dave, asks Kyle to join him on a mission. He doesn’t want Kyle to give up, but Kyle’s lost hope. Still, he agrees to go on a mission.
Yuri and Quinn figure out that someone was trying to buy the church, but the church didn’t want to sell it. However, that bit of news doesn’t seem to matter when Wally, Charley, and Rhonda reveal that if the school is torn down, they will be permanently trapped with White Eyes and the rest of the ghosts.
Wally suggests they concentrate on getting Simon out first and then address their situation. They realize that Simon stole the watch, which means they need to go through Yuri’s scar, the closest scar to Mr. Martin’s, to get him.
Xavier attends Tracey’s students’ performance, and it’s while they’re playing “Tubular Bells” that we’re shown Simon looking around the church. He’s being watched as he finds a gold ring in the collection plate. Mr. Martin thinks it might be the bribe the man was talking about minutes earlier. Suddenly, they hear pounding, and White Eyes appears.
Nicole, Maddie, and Claire speak with the woman who left Deborah’s puppet show, and Claire asks why she called her a devil. The woman reveals it was Alfred she was referring to, not Deborah. He called the townspeople vermin and killed those children in the church. He also died in the church, but that might just be karma. She says he was a twisted, greedy man who only cared about power and money. Alfred wanted to own the whole town and believed that killing the children would make the townspeople leave.
Charley’s been listening and since this is in the greenhouse, he can talk to Maddie. He informs her that Simon’s in the church and Maddie tells him to get Simon to safety.
Simon demands White Eyes tell him why he was pulled into this dimension. Simon yells at him to lift the veil and let him out of there, and White Eyes grabs his head again and forces him to see what happened.
Wally, Rhonda, Quinn, and Yuri show up as Simon’s still with White Eyes, and Wally orders White Eyes to let him go. Mr. Martin thinks they need to see what White Eyes is telling them, but just then Charley runs in and says White Eyes is Alfred and he killed all the children.
The vision shows a woman locking the basement door, trapping Alfred and the children.
Back at the Harvest Festival, Xavier’s ready to leave and it’s only then that Maddie realizes her backpack is missing with Simon’s iPad. They split up to look for it. Maddie’s in the puppet show tent looking around when she hears Simon say she can’t save him as she’s thrust into another vision.
Quinn picks up a board and tries to knock Simon away from White Eyes, but Simon screams at her not to. It’s too late and she accidentally hits Simon. As this is happening, Maddie hears Simon’s warning again. She snaps her rubber band and comes out of it as Xavier hands over her backpack he found in the petting zoo.
Xavier and Maddie have a heart-to-heart, and he knows he’s lost her trust but thinks maybe she’s seeing scary stuff because her brain is trying to help her heal. He’s working at the hospital now and sees ghosts all over, but he’s doing it to help them. She might be going through the same thing to help herself and her friends.
Maddie goes into the school, runs into Quinn, and asks where Simon is. Rhonda joins them and says Simon is a little injured but will be fine. Maddie swears she won’t let the school be demolished or let them be stranded there.
Rhonda assures Quinn that what she did was actually brave. She’s referring to the kiss, not hitting Simon. Rhonda hasn’t kissed anyone in 62 years, and she wasn’t even sure she could let someone get close. Quinn says she’s willing to wait…but she doesn’t need to. They kiss!
Xavier runs into Tracey and learns she didn’t have a good time at prom. Tracey drops a bombshell, revealing she went with Kyle. According to Tracey, he didn’t die in the bus accident; instead, he had a personality shift and became a real jerk. Tracey describes him as sweet and kind before the accident, but to this day she crosses the street when she sees him. She asks Xavier to lose their prom picture; she doesn’t want any reminders.
This means someone’s been walking around in Kyle’s body all these years!
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