Paramount+’s School Spirits season three, episode four picks up with Simon frantically struggling to climb out of the hellhole. When he finally emerges, Simon doesn’t notice that he’s dropped the watch.
(The following is a recap of season three, episode four, and contains spoilers.)
Maddie (Peyton List) continues to have visions of the boiler room. She’s spooked and doesn’t understand why it’s happening. Xavier (Spencer MacPherson) shows up to check on her and notices she’s sweating. Maddie claims she’s okay, but it’s obvious she’s not. He even volunteers to stay, but Maddie insists she’s fine.
Nicole (Kiara Pichardo) is nursing her first hangover as the school day starts, and Xavier and Claire (Rainbow Wedell) give her a hard time. Meanwhile, Maddie’s shocked to learn that Wally (Milo Manheim) went into the hellhole. He and Simon (Kristian Ventura) lie and say Simon didn’t go, and Wally’s forced to confess that he scared Mr. South, the custodian, and made him fall off a ladder. Wally describes the area below as a sub-scar to all the other scars, and Simon describes it as a church.
Simon shows them a book that he says Wally found, and Maddie jots down the title. Simon believes there are people—and answers—down there. But are they ghosts or scar people? No one knows.
Maddie orders Simon to stop poking around in the hole until her dad has time to talk to the other hospital ghosts. The ghosts are stunned she talked to her dad and realize she’s not fine—even though she keeps claiming to be.
Wally promises to calm Simon down and get him to stay away from the hole.
Principal Hartman (Alex Zahara) gathers Nicole, Claire, Xavier, and Maddie in the lunchroom for Saturday detention, confiscating their phones. Rhonda (Sarah Yarkin) and Charley (Nick Pugliese) are also hanging out, and when Hartman steps out, Maddie quickly fills the gang in on what the ghosts told her. She needs to track down Simon. Claire worries she’s not okay, but Maddie warns them not to ask her again or she’ll lose it.
Yuri (Miles Elliot) heads to the band room after overhearing students discuss hiding shrooms there. He’s shocked that Mr. Martin’s hanging out there, and Mr. Martin (Josh Zuckerman) confesses he’s hiding from everyone. Yuri offers to share the shrooms, suggesting they might help him find what he’s looking for.
Quinn (Ci Hang Ma) pops in and wants some too. She eats the whole bag before Yuri can tell her it holds four doses!
While Maddie’s tracking down Simon, Xavier tells Claire and Nicole that Maddie’s mom went to detox. They’re going to give her some space. As they’re waiting, they find the paper Maddie wrote the book’s title on. It looks alien to Xavier, but Claire realizes it’s Finnish. Neither Xavier nor Nicole knew Claire spoke Finnish and she reveals she spoke it with her grandparents.
The book’s from a Finnish church and she grabs Simon’s tablet to translate it, but there isn’t any internet. Unfortunately, there’s a message from Simon’s parents wanting him to call them to make sure he’s okay. Nicole thinks she can find some of Simon’s old podcast episodes and cut them together to leave Simon’s parents a message.
Nicole and Claire take off, leaving behind Xavier to do all the homework Hartman assigned.
Wally blames Simon for making him lie to Maddie, but Simon insists that doesn’t matter now because they need to go back down into the hellhole. It’s only during this debate that they realize Simon lost the watch in the hole. Simon wants to use Wally’s key (a football) and take the long way around to enter Mr. Martin’s scar.
Wally needs to speak with Maddie first before they do anything rash.
Rhonda and Charley research churches that could have been in the area decades ago, and it turns out there were hundreds. Charley confesses he said things to Yuri that he shouldn’t have and wonders why he ruins good things just as they’re starting. Rhonda reminds him she’s not a relationship expert.
Their conversation comes to a halt when Dr. Deborah Hunter-Price (Jennifer Tilly) and Principal Hartman enter the library. Deborah’s determined to tear it all down, calling the school a deathtrap. Too many students have died there for it to be normal.
Yuri, Quinn, and Mr. Martin relax and wait to feel something, but nothing’s happening. Quinn confesses she doesn’t remember much from her life, and Yuri wishes he remembered less. Mr. Martin admits that decades ago he realized he couldn’t remember his mom’s face. Yuri points out they’ve been dead longer than they were alive.
They split up and Yuri heads to the greenhouse after looking at Janet’s letter again. Yuri activates his key (his lighter) and steps inside his scar for the first time. An old TV broadcasts a game show where he’s the host, asking how he’d like to live the American dream. He sees himself as a middle-aged man, seated in a recliner, drinking beer. His scar seems to taunt him with an ordinary life before choking him with a tie.
Maddie continues looking for Simon, and Wally and Simon realize she’s still pissed. Wally gets a minute with Maddie and tells her he doesn’t blame Simon for doing anything, because Simon is desperate to get back to her. Maddie claims Simon always jumps before he thinks. If he’d just waited for her to get back, he wouldn’t have gotten stuck in the ghost world.
Simon’s been listening outside the bathroom as Maddie confesses she’s overwhelmed by everything—her mom, seeing her dead dad, and Simon. She thinks she’s almost at her breaking point and Wally has her do an exercise his coach taught him. They get sidetracked talking about her favorite movie, Harold and Maude, and Maddie confesses she doesn’t want to be controlling. Wally says she’s a pivotal player in all this and is where Simon needs her to be—able to talk to the living and find out what’s going on.
Maddie gives Wally permission to go back into the hellhole.
Simon tells Wally he hates keeping things from Maddie, and Wally doesn’t like it either. He finally confesses he hasn’t told anyone—including Maddie—that he got his door. It’s been there since Maddie got back into her body. He hasn’t figured out when he’s going to tell her.
Neither Wally nor Simon is going to tell anyone that they’re going back into the hellhole.
Maddie runs into the custodian, Mr. South (Peter New), who Wally accidentally injured and tells him she knows he sees things. Maddie also sees things and asks Mr. South if there was anything on this land before the school was built.
Mr. Martin sits outside the school, and the shrooms are definitely kicking in. His mother passes by but we don’t see her face. She tells him to follow her.
Quinn wanders the halls and imagines the marching band has fallen in behind her. She runs outside and suddenly she’s in a dance number, making a group of students dance as she moves her hands. They lift her up and move with her as she loses herself in the music. She sees Rhonda in a pretty dress and smiles, and suddenly the action switches to the ghosts behind her as backup singer, seated for prom photos in 2004.
The students, including Simon, scream and cheer for them to run to the school bus and the ghosts do, stripping off their prom clothes. They can touch the students, and the students can see them in this shroom-fueled hallucination. Even Deborah and Hartman are in on the dance number.
The scene switches to Quinn on top of the bus as everyone continues cheering for her. A banner unfurls behind her reading “Go Quinn Go.”
Nicole is almost caught by Mr. Hartman while editing Simon’s podcast to fool his parents. Back in the library, Claire continues looking up the history of the school as Rhonda and Charley look over her shoulder. Suddenly both Charley and Claire say, “Holy shit.”
Mr. South takes Maddie just barely outside the school’s fence line. The last head janitor showed him a cornerstone there and when you get close to it, there’s an energy and vibration. He believes it’s like the stone tape theory, where places remember everything that’s ever happened near them—joy, grief, blood, and death. It’s etched into the walls, and under the right circumstances they play back the lost memories. He thinks the school’s not haunted; it’s trying to say something. That cornerstone has been talking for a very long time, even before the school was built. He tells Maddie to keep listening.
Mr. Hartman glances at the security cameras and sees Xavier alone in the cafeteria. Xavier knows they’ve been caught and runs through the halls (just like in The Breakfast Club) to get everyone to return. They run into each other in the halls and catch up on what’s going on as they hurry back to the cafeteria.
Maddie finally loses it, telling her friends that while she’s happy her mom’s in detox, they’ll be right back where she started in a week. She’s okay being alone because her mom does this so often. Xavier tells her she’s not alone.
Mr. Hartman runs through the building, but they beat him back to the cafeteria. He’s just sat down when Deborah calls him to the principal’s office. Once he’s gone, Claire reveals she couldn’t find anything on Split River going back decades because the town used to be called Stillwater. Rhonda and Charley are standing behind her, and Rhonda tells Maddie that thanks to Claire’s discovery, she realized she’d read about Stillwater in one of the old books. The town was known as Stillwater in 1912, when nine people died in the church that Simon believes is located in the hellhole. Eight were children.
Maddie tells her friends what Rhonda’s discovered. Mr. Martin hallucinates that he’s standing behind his mom, her back toward him, in the cafeteria as he listens to everyone discuss Stillwater. His mom turns around and tells him he remembers this. “It was the day they split the river,” says Mr. Martin.
His mom told him about it. On October 28, 1912, the town split the river to redirect water to local farms. However, the recent heavy rains caused the old church to flood. The church became a grave for those trapped inside. The school was built directly over it, and the memory of what happened is trapped here too.
Elsewhere, Wally and Simon continue to go through scars to get to the hellhole.
Charley joins Yuri outside the greenhouse, and Yuri explains that he went into the scar and it showed him he had a dead-end job, watched TV every night, and drank beer. “That was my horror, not a kid and a wife—just me, wasting away with no freedom,” says Yuri. He believes he trapped himself in fear of it.
He took a flower into his scar with him and when he brought it out, it didn’t reset. Yuri confesses the only thing he wants to make stay is Charley.
It’s getting late when Xavier finds Maddie and asks if she’s still there waiting for Simon to get back. She’s not sure. Xavier reminds her that they’re getting answers and are closer than ever to figuring things out. Everyone’s pitching in and the pieces are starting to fit together.
Maddie thanks him for being there for her. She’s also thankful for everything Nicole and Claire are doing. Xavier promises Simon will be there tomorrow and reminds her she can’t control everything.
Maddie’s dad, Dave, is searching for answers at the hospital and approaches a nurse, seated in a chair, smoking. He asks if she remembers him and she’s shocked to see him since no one comes to this part of the hospital. Dave knows she’s been there longer than anyone else and informs her there are also ghosts stuck at the high school. The nurse says they’re not stuck, “Not like the others.”
As Maddie’s leaving school, she steps on the mom figurine from her dollhouse. It cuts her hand and suddenly she sees her dollhouse go up in flames. When Xavier finds her, she’s holding keys and not a figurine. She asks to stay at his house that evening.
As the nurse is talking about the others, Simon and Wally are making their way down the stairs in the hellhole. Simon retraces his steps, looking for the watch.
The nurse says “these ones” will never find a way out, unlike the other ghosts. “There are spirits further down, older than us. They are truly stuck here. No way out. No escape. Lost. We call them The Forgotten,” reveals the nurse.
Simon finds the watch and Wally wants to leave, but Simon hears something. He sees a figure walking toward him, and it grabs his face.
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