Deer legs, fetal pigs, and jars of liquid mercury. You name it and the Community high chemistry closet has it in stock. Despite multiple cleaning attempts, it’s almost impossible to leave the closet without having found something out of place and sometimes terrifying. “If you want a descent into hell, that’s where you would go,” said science teacher Liz Stern.

Located in the back of Marcy McCormick’s science class, the chemistry closet makes even the toughest teachers uneasy. “I am terrified of the chemistry closet. Essentially, when Madeline Drake [a previous Community High science teacher] left that classroom, she asked me if I wanted that classroom because it was bigger than my current room and I specifically said no because I didn’t want to be near the chemistry closet,” said Courtney Kiley, a science teacher at Community. “There’s never a doorstop to hold the door open and I was always afraid I’d get locked in,” said Kiley.

Although some of the substances in the chemistry closet are justifiable, some are harder to wrap your head around. “There’s a lot of chemicals in there, but then there’s like a cow heart, owl pellets, fetal pigs, these rats that are dead and that are dyed yellow, and eyeballs,” said Kiley.

A lot of the items in the closet were originally used for dissections in an anatomy class taught by Madeline Drake, who was said to have had somewhat bizarre methods of acquiring supplies. “They used to dissect deer legs in anatomy and randomly one day this guy, who none of us knew who he was, would just show up with a garbage bag of deer legs. And then he would leave,” said Kiley.

Due to rat infestations and general disorganization, the chemistry closet has been cleaned out multiple times. “Every time [we clean] we find a box that has iridescent, radioactive looking chemicals in it or eyeballs or something creepy. The legend is that there was a human fetus in a jar but we’ve never found it, thankfully,” said Kiley. The consistency of the new discoveries being made in the chemistry closet raises the question: what has yet to be found?