High school is an impossible time for a lot of people and these people have the stories to prove it. Check out the harrowing stories of high school horror.
The Stuff Of Horror Movies, Literally
“Back in the early 1980’s, my brother’s high school principal arranged for an English teacher to murder another English teacher and her kids. The teacher was murdered, the kids were never found, the principal went to prison but was released because of misconduct by the prosecutor/police but he died shortly after that, and the murdering teacher died in prison. It’s unclear why it really happened but there are rumors of a love triangle and insurance payouts. Tere was also a rumor of the kids being burned in the school’s incinerators which were quite large. It became a book/movie called Echoes In The Darkness. Oh, and the same school produced a murderer who assaulted and killed a mom and her infant daughter. I knew this kid really well and I was not surprised this happened (his name was Caleb Fairley).”
Two Funerals
“Sophomore year, one of my childhood friends died in a car accident after he fell asleep at the wheel and smashed his car into the limestone wall bordering the entrance to our small town’s cemetery. He is buried in that same cemetery, and his parents were sent a bill for the repairs (everyone was really mad about this, and chipped in to help them).
Then my junior year, three of my friends from the class under me piled into a car one night and went to go drinking in the middle of a field where an old missile silo was. It was a pretty popular hang out for teens from the local area. The farmer who owned the land was tired of kids constantly hopping the barbed wire fence, and so went to chase them off, driving like a bit of a psycho. His wife had called the cops a few times, but it’s hard to get anyone out to such a remote farm in short notice. This all happened before any officers managed to arrive.
They piled into the car and peeled off, but being idiot, wasted teenagers, decided to go back and taunt the guy. They went back, parked in his driveway, and started yelling at his house. He stepped out with a his hunting weapon. They turned around and started high-tailing it out of there, but he decided to fire a few ‘warning’ shots (his words) into the back of the car as they were speeding away.
Two of them ended up with some pretty serious, if not life-threatening, lacerations. One of them, though, took three rounds; one in the back, one in the side of his face which blew apart his lower jaw, and one in the back of the head.
Dude went to prison for murder and two counts of attempted murder, and I attended my second funeral for a friend in high school. There were only like 70 kids in my graduating class.”
This High School Had Quite… Interesting Teachers
“Band teacher got one of the clarinet players pregnant and then paid for her abortion – he was quickly and quietly dismissed and she transferred to a different school. This was back in the ’80s; if it happened nowadays it would have been all over the news.
One of the social studies teachers was arrested for driving his car naked.
In retrospect, my high school had some pretty weird teachers.”
How Could Anyone Do This?
“One of the cheerleaders was ‘selling’ a special needs girl for her own financial gain. I don’t even think it was to other students – it was too much older men.”
A Horrific Mystery
“The body of a student was found rolled up in a wrestling mat in the corner of our gym. Most kids freaked out and about a third of the students had their parents come check them out.
People speculated that it was gang violence, school rivalries, and some people even believed that the sheriff’s daughter had something to do with it and there was a lot of speculation about racism. It was a mess. Still hasn’t been figured out.
Rest in peace, Kendrick.”
No One Saw It Coming
“We had a kid at our school that had autism, we’ll call him Trev, wasn’t too severe but you could still tell from interacting with him and looking at him that he had a disability. He was actually a very smart kid – took AP classes, asked questions in class, debated things he thought were wrong. Everyone knew him and everyone liked him and did anything they could to help him along.
One day he comes in with a butcher knife and he goes to our school correction officer, who was also good friends with Trev and well liked by pretty much everyone, and says he wants to kill himself. The report said that Trev was very upset and distraught and our correction officer tried to stop him, which cause Trev to turn the knife on the officer. This led to the officer pulling his weapon on the kid, shooting him in the leg in hopes of disabling him. Apparently, with all of the adrenaline going through Trev he kept coming and got a few stabs into the officer, and I guess out of self-defense, the officer shot Trev a couple times in the chest, killing him. It was probably the worst tragedy at our school because no one saw it coming, especially from such a calm and loving person. I actually walked past Trev in the cafeteria that morning and I still remember what he looked like that day.”
Their Whole High School Career Was Traumatizing
“My freshman year 3 members of the football team killed themselves within a week. After the school did some investigating, they found that there were extreme hazing rituals that went on within the football team. Like it went past hazing and was straight up bullying. The worst part of it is that the coaches sanctioned and even encouraged it to try and ‘toughen up’ the new football players. Yeah, they got fired almost immediately, and the whole program got a complete overhaul.
My sophomore or junior year there were a couple more suicides, but these were not related to bullying so much but from the stress put on them my parents, faculty, and other students. One of them jumped in front of a moving train, and the other overdosed, I think. There was an assembly the next day about it and counselors ready to talk standing by. The most important thing is people’s lives in Northern Virginia is getting into the best college. It’s like a disease, and there’s this preconceived notion that if you don’t take any AP classes or don’t have a 4.0 GPA you’ll never amount to anything.
Then my senior year, one of them was is a chemistry lab where one of the teachers was doing a demonstration with a Bunsen burner and the fire caught faster than she thought it would. One student got 3rd-degree burns on something like 20% of her body (she recovered luckily). And the hospital had to send in one of those medical helicopters to airlift her out. The worst part of the story is that the teacher was also burned, but she was 8/9 months pregnant, I don’t think she got fired but was definitely placed on leave for a while. She gave birth to a happy healthy baby boy.”
Not A Happy Ending
“A couple stories. There was this one kid, I think a year older than me, who disappeared one night after a party. I didn’t know him well, but rumor had it that at this party, he and his girlfriend were drinking (as was everyone else) and she ended up passing out early. He was so wasted that he thought she died and took off into the night. To my knowledge, he STILL hasn’t been found. There was a fund started in his honor for the acting program, though.
The other story was in the auto shop class. This kid was working on a vehicle that was lifted up so you could work underneath it. The lift failed and dropped the truck on the kid, crushing him. The whole wing of the school with the auto shop ended up getting taped off by police, classes were cancelled. They wheeled his body out on a gurney covered by sheets, I guess he died pretty quickly.
The worst part of the second story was that his mom was a secretary at the school, and she was working in the office that day. She ended up taking the rest of the year off, but still hadn’t returned by the time I graduated (couple years after) so I don’t know if she ever went back.”
Tumultuous Family Drama
“One morning a girl didn’t come to school. Police came and started questioning teachers and students after they were alerted that someone saw her getting dragged in a van. Turns out she was kidnapped by her stepfather. He brutally murdered her the same day. Her body was found buried in the woods a few days later. Several weeks later he hanged himself in prison.”
A Psycho Defeated
“The most horrifying story was one that resulted in a threat to my life and the lives of others.
I was the new kid in a high school in a very, very small town. Everyone there had known each other forever and I was a pretty socially awkward little thing, too geeky for a place like that, too quiet for kids who loved rodeo and pickup trucks. They were great people in general, I just felt pretty out of sorts.
A few months later I find someone with some commonish interests. Anime, video games, comic books, music that isn’t country. I think that’s great. We chatted it up in class here and there and I thought he was OK. He asks me to go to coffee with him after school one day, and I agree.
Within 5 minutes of sitting down to coffee, he is showing me a picture of his dead sister and telling me about how she killed herself and how he wants to take me to her grave. This is… weird. I figured if I had a sibling off themselves I’d be pretty messed up about it, but probably not so forward. But I was 16, stupid, and wanting a friend. we kept talking for a while and it was pretty nice.
He dropped me off at my place. In the driveway, he turned to me and said, ‘Would you like to be my girlfriend? I really like you.’ I was so taken aback that I meekly replied ‘…sure?’ and he smiled wide and drove off.
The next day, he takes that as license to grope my behind right in front of a lot of people I knew. I got weird, disapproving stares and was not cool with any of it. I told him off for it. A smart kid would have just called things off then and there, but smart was not in my arsenal. Hormonal and lonely was.
We’d talk on MSN messenger in the evening if we didn’t go out. We spent some time at each of our places making out and playing video games. The next ‘date’ we had, we went for pizza. He insisted on holding my hand constantly and he told me he loved me. I just stared at him, very confused.
A few days later when I mentioned I was going to be busy at a friend’s place riding horses over the weekend, he confessed to me his love of bestiality. Not cool. I kept my distance but was worried about breaking things off.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was one evening I was having a family night and had left my computer on. I didn’t reply to any messages and he angrily called my home phone, demanding to my mother that I talk with him right then. I broke it off with him and he told me it was a big mistake. He told me he was going to hurt and possibly kill all of the people I cared about, over IM. The psycho. I told my friend about it late that night and he called the police, who showed up at my place in the dead of night and woke my parents, who had no idea this had happened.
The next day, the psychopath was cuffed and hauled out of the school in front of everyone. they found a hit list in his truck and he was kicked out. People CHEERED. People were happy someone finally did something about that sick psycho. Apparently, he had been tormenting or otherwise weirding out and threatening people his entire school life.
This won me a bit of favor with a lot of the kids in the school, and that helped me tremendously. Too bad that I had to deal with this crazy guy stalking and cyberstalking me for YEARS after the fact. Thanks, psycho stalker!”
Dodging Rocks
“I was openly gay in high school, in the bible belt. I was also the head of my drum line in the band. While marching (I think during a homecoming parade or something), someone in the crowd picked up a rock and threw it at me. Then another. Then someone else joined in. It went on for what felt like quite a bit.
My bandmates later told me that at least 7 people threw stones at me. I was bleeding pretty bad by the time it stopped (face and arms mostly). A couple people had fallen in step around me and that’s what ultimately stopped the rocks from being thrown. I kept marching though; to heck if I was going to be intimidated, and to heck if I was going to stop in the middle of our awesome cadence. The only thing I felt bad for was that someone else was hit (accidentally, I presume) in the process.”
A Lot of Stress And A Very Nasty Principal
“I went to Bronx High School of Science for 3 years. I had some truancy issues mainly due to pretty severe depression, but I still managed to get okay grades. They’re pretty serious about good grades at that school so the teachers kept putting me down saying I was too stupid to get into college since I had a B- average. Sadly I believed them and this hit me pretty hard. My junior year I ended up being hospitalized for 2 months, due to the depression. When I got back to school, my parents and I were called into the principal’s office, where the principal proceeded to ask why my grades haven’t improved since I got out of the hospital, since in her words ‘I thought you fixed him.’ She then looked at me and said that ‘depression is an excuse for fat lazy kids like you to get out of doing work.’ After that, she started yelling at my dad and said ‘You’re a horrible person for sending your child to such a prestigious school when he is obviously too stupid to do well.’ It all ended with her saying that if I was ever absent again for any reason, even if I had a doctor’s note, she would discharge me as a drop-out. Even though this was obviously illegal, I really did not want to stay at such a horrible school so I transferred, but not before she deleted several credits from my transcript to make sure I’d have a hard time at another school.”
Bullied On The Bus
“In grade 9 I had a hard time making friends. I had some truancy issues because I went to school out in the country but lived in the city. I wasn’t a bad kid by any stretch of the imagination. To this day I’ve never even been in a fight. In January, the principal decided it would be best to ship me off to an ‘alternative’ school. It was a school for bad kids. Kids who were getting in trouble with the law. You know, little psychos.
At this school, I got beat up on a daily basis. The bus was especially bad. I wasn’t a white trash loser like the rest of the kids, so I was bullied mercilessly. One time I was punched so hard in the back of the head that the lump was about the size of a softball cut in half. Another time, a girl ripped a huge clump of hair out of the side of my head. I had a bald spot. When she was confronted about it, SHE started crying about how SHE was the victim. It got so bad that they actually installed cameras on the bus. They didn’t help. I left after a little more than a month. I did homeschooling through the same school for the remainder of the year. The next school year, I went back to a regular high school in the city.”
Ditching Your High School Years
“I live in a very small town. In this small town we have a bunch of idiots who think they are ‘cowboys’ – we called them the ‘hicks.’ Well, they either intimidated or seduced the administrators into allowing them to do whatever. They always had their knives on them, and a few times they brought their hunting weapons to school, they did donuts in the parking lot and would threaten anyone who wasn’t a hick with the knives I brought up earlier. They somehow got a personal vendetta against my friend and me by connection. We complained to the school and they did nothing. We were harassed (‘Hey girl! How much for a good time?’) and verbally abused numerous times and all we wanted to do was go to the library after school.
Those ‘hicks’ also spray painted hate scenes onto the gym: Swastikas, the ‘N’ word, a noose, a bottle for god knows what reason, pretty much every satanic and racial hating symbols. Two brothers and a couple of their friends actually burnt a cross on a black preacher’s front yard and threw a brick with the words ‘get out of town you stupid -insert racial slur that I do not like saying/typing-‘ and all they got for both was a slap on the wrist and they had to write an apology letter to the school and the preachers family.
I’d like to point out that these people were pretty much raised up on pedestals. I am not proud to have graduated from my high school.”
The Lingering Affects Of Bullying
“This kid bullied me. Old story, happens to a lot of kids. But it wasn’t about the random punches in the mouth or the knife he stuck in the back of my neck in English class… it was about the humiliation, the taking from me my adolescence. He had me cowering in fear in the locker room with all the other kids watching, shocked that I wouldn’t even try to defend myself. He proved to me that I was weak. Not inferior, mind you, but a weak little wimp who can be toyed with at another’s whim.
I found him on Facebook and let him know that I have not forgotten, that it doesn’t go away. It’s a ‘slow burn,’ I think I said. I didn’t threaten him but I won’t close the door on ways to get back at him. He made me an angry, bitter man who went out of his way to be confrontational with others, probably as a means of disproving what was so clear on that locker room floor that day.
That was 30 years ago but it may have well been yesterday.”
The Violence Inherent In The System
“You mean besides the Snapple bottles chucked at my head because I was gay?
How about the asthma attack I had while running the mile that I knew would result in me failing gym and not graduating if I didn’t keep running? That one sent me to the emergency room.
I know. How about the teacher who didn’t like that I was gay and decided to embarrass me. The word ‘blithely’ was a vocab word and meant ‘joyfully or gaily.’ She took to describing me as blithely in front of the class on a regular basis. Perhaps the most amusing part was that this English teacher was using an adverb as an adjective (should have been ‘blithe’ or ‘blitheful’). Luckily my mother was supportive and confronted her about it, but it was a very uncomfortable conference explaining to the principal, in front of the teacher, what had happened.”
The Embarrassment Of Youth
“Senior year of high school I spent Spring Break at the beach with a bunch of my friends. I was fat back then and had low self-esteem, so I had trouble approaching girls. At that point, I had never had any intimate experiences. I was hanging out with this girl who had a reputation for being pretty ‘loose,’ hoping to maybe make out or something.
We had a few drinks and I ended up kissing her and touching her awkwardly. When I got back to the hotel room I was very excited so I told my best friend. He told others until the story got back to her.
Embarrassed, she decided to deny any consent and claimed that I had forced myself onto her. The whole thing escalated after she told her parents and they ended up pressing charges. Her family was planning on taking me to court, but my dad managed to get them to agree on a settlement. That was the worst time of my life.”
