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School Legends

or the sort of thing kids are really scared of?
 
Maybe, but I don't recall being scared of getting a table stuck in my head when I was a kid. The reason we weren't to run in corridors at school was that we might slip on the shiny floor.
 
Sorry to bump this up from page 11 or whatever, but I'm lurking through all the old threads and thought I'd make my maiden post one that actually has something to do with the topic :)

Right, I can remember 2 ULs from when I was at secondary school:

1) The music teacher was a paedophile. All kinds of stories circulated about this guy, especially after he left the school (some said sacked, but I've got no idea whether that's true or not), including:

Someone calimed to have seen him having sex with a Cello (????!!!)
Apparently he made you close your eyes to listen to music so he could look down girl's blouses.
He also used to drop his pencil to look up girl's skirts.
Someone claimed to have seen a notebook in a drawer of the music room listing all the girls at the school with points for how much he fancied them.
Someone had seen a semen stain on the front of his trousers after lunchbreak.

And loads of other guff that patently wasn't true. Pretty much all my friends have mentioned a teacher at their school who was 'dodgy', and I think there's one in each school chosen to be the 'peado' and have identical stories told about them, probably cause they have bad breath or a beard or something...

2) One of the lads in my year (who was slightly mentally deficient) had once slipped while standing on the railing in the playground, and unfortunately split his scrotum open. So obviously, the Textile design teacher sewed it up for him with needle and thread during lunchbreak.

Quite a few people seemed to believe that one too.....
 
i attended the same high school that my mother had been to, and after my first day she aked me if a particular teacher was still there. when i said yes she told me never to be alone with him because when she was there the rumour was that he assaulted girls in stock cupboards etc. it wasn*t all bad though,it was here that i put my first steps on the fortean ladder of knowledge thanks to the music teacher whose 40 minute musi lessons ended up being 5mins music ,(unless it was glenn miller-pennsylvania 65000 is still lodged in my brain)10 mins on running marathons,and the rest on ufos :D not sure how fortean this bit is but so far this summer 5 children at the school iwork at have reported seeing a tiger in a small wooded area just off the playing field :shock:
 
In my Junior School there was a legend that once upon a time a boy had been accidently locked in a certain room and left there over the holidays. They looked high and low for him, but to no avail. When school opened up again they unlocked the room to find him in there dead.....

With his forearm missing where he'd started to eat himself..

Yeah yeah I know :rofl:
 
one of our English teachers was reputed to wear rubber incontinence pants, while the history teacher was said to have an artificial breast.
 
one of my form teachers at high school had three nipples (guess what we called him!)
 
There was a rumour at our school that a kid had climbed up the outside of the boiler house chimney and was showing off to his pals when he fell in and killed himself.

As they would have to demolish the chimney to get his body out it was just left there. And we believed that.

Another rumour at our secondary school was that a rather attractive female teacher used to go skinny dipping in the local river. She was always seen by a friend of a friend's big brother.
 
Bell Tower...

When I was at primary school, there was a tale that a pupil had commited suicide by jumping from the bell tower (actually not a tower, just a small dome on the roof; the bell was long gone by the time I went there)

I believed it until I went to the local college and heard exactly the same story about the bell tower THERE.

Anyone else heard this one?
 
Did anyone else have the story at their school about a kid who stressed out in an exam, shoved a couple of pencils up his nose and then headbutted the table?
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
Did anyone else have the story at their school about a kid who stressed out in an exam, shoved a couple of pencils up his nose and then headbutted the table?

Yes, we had that one....
 
Isn't there a whole thread about that one somewhere?
 
Timble2 said:
CarlosTheDJ said:
Did anyone else have the story at their school about a kid who stressed out in an exam, shoved a couple of pencils up his nose and then headbutted the table?

Yes, we had that one....

Same here. Plus the usage (in class) of king size mars-bars and rulers by various girls.
 
Did anyone else have the story at their school about a kid who stressed out in an exam, shoved a couple of pencils up his nose and then headbutted the table?

We had that one too. I think everyone may have had that one. I seem to recall, cira late 1980s, that The Scum ran it like it was an actual story...
 
Timble2 said:
CarlosTheDJ said:
Did anyone else have the story at their school about a kid who stressed out in an exam, shoved a couple of pencils up his nose and then headbutted the table?

Yes, we had that one....
..on page 3 of this very thread, for a start, and in its own dedicated thread here.
 
Re: Bell Tower...

Fluttermoth said:
When I was at primary school, there was a tale that a pupil had commited suicide by jumping from the bell tower (actually not a tower, just a small dome on the roof; the bell was long gone by the time I went there)

I believed it until I went to the local college and heard exactly the same story about the bell tower THERE.

Anyone else heard this one?

Yep, my junior school had this tale, the bell tower was supposedly haunted due to this - as well as the suicide-by-pencil, too.

We also had a haunted lavatory block - supposedly, a boy, larking about had accidentally got his neck caught in a towel roll dispenser, died (which I believe may have actually been based on a true incident but occuring elsewhere and appropriated for school legend by some bullsh*tter) and came back to haunt the place. This was backed up by the fact we had to use paper towels to dry our hands...

Also, there was a rather grim death-by-radiator tale - where a boy (again) was running in the hall, tripped and the radiator thermostat (which didn't have a cap on it) went through his temple and killed him outright.
 
We had the bell tower one, the skinheads coming to kill us and the chelsea smile ones. Also we believed the music teacher was a Mason because he always wore brown. The English teacher told me she'd seen a ghost in the Victorian attics.
 
When I was in junior school we were told in morning assembly not to accept transfer tattoos from strangers outside the school, as they contained acid. Having no conept of recreational drugs at the age of 8 or 9 and none of us having heard of LSD, rumours started going around that someone had taken one of these transfers from a stranger and the acid had burnt all the flesh off his arm.
 
I heard that one. Not from a kid though, it was in a magazine article my Mum cut out and made me read. :roll:

We had the guy-licking-the-woman's-hand one, and the guy-with-an-arm-off-and-replaced-by-a-gold-one-who-haunted-his-wife one (WHERE"S MY GOLD ARM!) and that's about it.

My sister and a friend and I did find some weird graffiti in the loo once though. It said something like Beware! Beware! Bilby be there today or something like that. We got convinced that there was a ghost in the loo and told a whole bunch of other kids and there was a bit of a riot near the loo (someone else mentioned something really similar to this earlier on in the thread). Anyway, can't remember how it all ended now but when I look back on it, well :lol:
 
At the primary school I attended, there was a rumour it was haunted by a girl killed when the bell fell from the tower and hit her.
Many times over the years the tale cropped up until I discovered an old newspaper article and it turned out that the story of the girls death by bell was true! I can't vouch for the haunting though - I certainly never saw the ghost.
 
Interesting note here: through younger relatives, I've heard that students at one of the two grammar schools in the town where I grew up still pass along the urban legend that two members of staff (one male media teacher and one female whose subject I cannot recall) were rumbled in their extra-curricular and extra-marital affair when a video tape of their going at it in the gym (her bound to the bars with school ties) was found by a student who was discovered it in place of his group's media project.

Except this definitely isn't an urban legend. It was a huge and hilarious scandal during my last year at school in the town.

It made the local press and both teachers were dismissed and, understandably, moved away.

Edit: misremembered: it was a media project, but the teachers were chemistry and physics--it seems that it made the national papers, too. The search for the story turned up lots of more recent students saying 'I never knew this really happened!'
 
Interesting note here: through younger relatives, I've heard that students at one of the two grammar schools in the town where I grew up still pass along the urban legend that two members of staff (one male media teacher and one female whose subject I cannot recall) were rumbled in their extra-curricular and extra-marital affair when a video tape of their going at it in the gym (her bound to the bars with school ties) was found by a student who had discovered it in place of his group's media project.

Except this definitely isn't an urban legend. It was a huge and hilarious scandal during my last year at school in the town.

It made the local press and both teachers were dismissed and, understandably, moved away.

Edit: misremembered: it was a media project, but the teachers were chemistry and physics--it seems that it made the national papers, too. The search for the story turned up lots of more recent students saying 'I never knew this really happened!'

Chemistry and Physics teachers do Practical Biology.
 
I love this thread's casual re-appearances over the decades.
My secondary school had rumours about a teacher taking too close an interest in students. Which I would assign to the bin of myth, were it not for the fact that I saw a deputy head telling some girls that "It's OK to do that subject now, Mr ........... won't be teaching it anymore" which is a little sus. And also deeply unpleasant that this was the sole extent of any action, if there was anything to take action about.

The school I work in nowadays is very old - perhaps 80 years or so - and has a strange absence of much myth and legend. There's a story told of a tragic death, but sadly, it is completely true and not Fortean so I won't mention the details. The point of interest is that the events in question took place well over 30 years ago now, and yet the students have the story quite accurately.

Lastly, there was a rumour that one of the teachers was trans, and said they wished they could dress like Lady Gaga in school. But that was me, which rather short circuited everything when I came out to everyone. The head told me not to dress like Lady Gaga. Spoilsport.
 
Lastly, there was a rumour that one of the teachers was trans, and said they wished they could dress like Lady Gaga in school. But that was me, which rather short circuited everything when I came out to everyone. The head told me not to dress like Lady Gaga. Spoilsport.
Awww, the head - what a party pooper.
 
We had a school caretaker who looked like Adolf Hitler crossed with a chimpanzee. Of course the rumour circulated that he actually was Hitler - who had not been ratlined to Argentina or Brazil, but was hiding in a secondary modern in the back end of nowhere putting sawdust on piles of sick and roaring at spotty gobshites. The situation was not helped by the fact that some of our teachers were veterans of WW2, and actively propagated the myth.

And he really did look like Hitler crossed with a chimpanzee.
 
We had a school caretaker who looked like Adolf Hitler crossed with a chimpanzee. Of course the rumour circulated that he actually was Hitler - who had not been ratlined to Argentina or Brazil, but was hiding in a secondary modern in the back end of nowhere putting sawdust on piles of sick and roaring at spotty gobshites. The situation was not helped by the fact that some of our teachers were veterans of WW2, and actively propagated the myth.

And he really did look like Hitler crossed with a chimpanzee.

Caretakers.

Mine was a little eccentric.

Ex-military, known by his christian name alone. He wasn't named Ken, but he could easily have been--also helped run the CCF.

After the school gates were padlocked and the premises emptied, he'd let his dogs have the run of the grounds. I know this, because I tried to return one Friday evening to collect my shin-pads from my locker for a weekend match and they terrified me.

He certainly did deal with some trespassers over the years, but the rumour is that when a gang of local troublemakers climbed the back fence, his dogs located them in minutes and he soon approached with an unloaded L-98 rifle from the armoury, which was sufficient to encourage an exit.
 
We had an insane games teacher who was an ex-para (not WW2 - too young for that). The rumour was that he would launch himself off a pub bar and drop headfirst towards the ground, with his arms tight at his sides - and only at the very last moment put out his hands to break his fall and stop his skull splitting open on the floor. I thought it was all talk until I saw him do it one night in my local some years later.

(The guy was a bit of a sadist. We were a predominantly working class football school and I can't kick a ball straight for shite; basically, I kind of play football like a cow would - which at that kind of place imbues one with the same kudos as someone who eats out of bins and licks park benches. Said teacher took every available opportunity to remind me of this every single games lesson I had, for several years. Rugby though, was a different matter. It was introduced late in my time, but I took to it readily and guaranteed my own little place in the school mythology by knocking out said teacher in a pupil/teachers match - and, realising that I would never have an opportunity like it again, actually going back and standing on his face.)

Oh, happy days.
 
Caretaker at my grammar school looked exactly like Jimmy Savile. One of the lads took to shouting 'Jim!' or 'Jim'll Fix It!' at him and running away. Needless to say, the poor caretaker did not like the comparison and he'd shake his fist angrily.
 
In the mid-70s the Headmaster of my Grammar school convened us all in the assembly hall to announce the discovery of a large bowel movement in the Gym showers. Not believing there weren't any witnesses, he stood with his hand under an armpit and demanded we give up the perpetrator - "He won't be punished, he's sick, he needs help". Thus the legend of the Phantom Crapper was born. No one came forward, Staff guarded the showers but eventually the moment passed.
He struck again. Head went ballistic in assembly -" I know who it is and if I ever catch him, he'll be sorry! " Head then visited every class with "I'm looking at the sick individual right now, it would be wise if he reported to my Office etc etc". Guards at the showers were doubled, whilst we got our heads down with exams.
Mr P. Crapper may have struck a turd time, I'm not sure, it was hushed up. The Head took a colleague from my year for a walk across the Playing Fields and invited him to leave the School - don't know if this was related to exam results or the showers, but heard later that during the 'speech' the boy had his hand under an armpit muttering " I'm sick, I need help".
Two years after I left school I had an opportunity to go back and chat to a younger pupil still there. He knew nothing about the Phantom Crapper but apparently the phrase "He's sick, he need help" had entered into School legend but without anyone knowing the origin.
 
Lastly, there was a rumour that one of the teachers was trans, and said they wished they could dress like Lady Gaga in school. But that was me, which rather short circuited everything when I came out to everyone. The head told me not to dress like Lady Gaga. Spoilsport.

'There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about' - Oscar Wilde.
 
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