People Share The Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened In Their Schools

Many of us spend a significant portion of our lives in school. Generally speaking, student life is supposed to be a truly memorable experience; however, negative (and sometimes traumatic) experiences can ruin that expectation for us. Here are some of the worst things to ever happen at school:

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#1 Leaving A Mark

We had some jerk go #2 down the staircase, hitting all three floors on the way. I didn't know this, but apparently, that can legally be classified as a biological weapon. The school had to be shut down for three days and the State Bureau of Investigation got called in. I heard the term "bioterrorism" get thrown around. They never caught the guy.

#2 Together Forever

#3 The Weird Kid

We had a kid at my high school who was the "weird kid." He was mentally slow, very socially awkward, heavily into anime and WWE, but also a really genuine great guy, which is why I started talking to him. We became quick friends, then about four months later, I heard from a mutual friend that he passed away in his sleep the night before.

He had heart problems he had to take medication for, but that night, he had a heart attack in his sleep and no one knew until his mom went to wake him up the next morning. Word got around school a day after that about his passing and it disgusted me how many students who barely knew him or talked to him were his best friends all of a sudden.

#4 Blown Away

It got destroyed by a tornado as we were evacuating. This actually happened almost a decade ago. It was right at the end of my sophomore year. A tornado came through, turned a large chunk of the city, along with my school, into a pile of rubble. Summer vacation was a few weeks early that year. The school was closed until at least the next school year while they rebuilt it. All the kids had to disperse to the other local schools for the remainder of the year.

#5 An Evil Energy

We were a poor trailer park school with high rates of domestic and substance abuse. The worst incident I remember at school was one kid hitting another kid repeatedly until he was unresponsive. He did it right in front of everyone in the hall between classes. That whole school felt like it was cursed, and people just got meaner there merely by walking inside its doors.

#6 A Tragic Moment

A parent dropping her kid off for school in the morning accidentally hit a teacher with her car. It happened right in front of the school so all the kids on the buses witnessed it. The teacher ended up having severe brain trauma and needed to be brought to the hospital in a helicopter. She ended up passing away in the hospital a few days later. It was an accident, but it was still so, so tragic.

#7 Two Tragedies

After school, three siblings were crossing the road. One was on a bike and his younger brother was on the handlebars when a truck hit them. Their sister watched the whole thing unfold. They didn't make it. The next year after I went to a different school. The band teacher's wife suspected him of cheating so she hired a private investigator. The investigator caught him with another teacher from the school he worked at.

#8 Three-On-One

Not really at my school, but when I was a junior, these three boys went out to this guy's house in the middle of nowhere to rob him. I guess he had a lot of money and stuff that they wanted. When he opened the door, they started beating him up... I guess they just wanted to beat him enough to where he couldn't fight back while they took his stuff. Unfortunately, they went too far and the kid didn't make it. Two of them went on the run while the third one showed up to school the next day. The police came and arrested him at school. That was a fun time.

#9 The Trap

A lot of this is secondhand because I was 10 when it happened, but here goes: A teacher at my elementary school was going through an extremely difficult divorce. Her husband was a generally angry guy, and he had really gone off the deep end when she served him the divorce papers. Also, he had two kids enrolled in the same school.

So the husband went MIA for a week or two—no contact with anyone unless it was through lawyers. Eventually, he came back, a whole lot calmer, and for another week or two, there was an uneasy peace. During this time, both of them were removing their stuff from the home to live separately, always with witnesses so nothing went down.

One day, she showed up at school more distraught than usual and left at lunch to go back to the house. The husband lured her there somehow. It was a trap. She showed up and it was only him, and he ended her before ending himself.

#10 No Compassion

There was a girl in my school who was being bullied and basically chased into the busy street in front of the school. She got hit by a few cars. The next morning, people were making fun of the situation because her shoes flew off after she was hit. My school was filled with jerks. I think she may have lost her life on impact. But the memory is fuzzy. She didn't pass away in the hospital, that I know for sure.

#11 The Merciless Officer

Well, it's still mostly speculation on the student's part because of how long ago it was, but there's a story that a few years back the seniors wanted to do a massive prank. They decided on bringing in a pig and greasing it up quite thoroughly, then releasing it into the school to run wild. The administrators and the resource officer struggled for a while trying to capture the animal, but they were unsuccessful. At this point, the pig decided that it wanted to stop in the lunchroom, which was occupied, to mooch some students' food. The resource officer was completely fed up at this point, and really just wanted to end the whole thing, so he tackled the pig and ended its life.

#12 Sniper Vs. Sniper

The year the DC sniper was at large, George Bush came to visit my high school. His security team brought extra snipers to put on the roof in case the DC sniper was nearby. They had snipers for a sniper who might be looking at snipers looking for a sniper. I thought that was pretty cool at the time, but looking back at it now, it was a scary time.

#13 The Not-So-Bright Idea

They gave us lanyards to put our student IDs on so we could always be showing them. It was intended to be a kind of a safety feature, but it turned into the opposite. Lots of people got in trouble for not having the lanyards around their neck, but that was only because they broke when people would pull on them. Or, other students would pull on them from the back to try to choke people. That lasted for half the year before they decided it's not such a good idea.

#14 On Lockdown

We went on lockdown for over three hours and students had to go to the bathroom in the trash cans. We were on lockdown because they thought someone walked by with a suspicious item, but it was an umbrella. Another lockdown happened within that month as well because someone that went to the school was walking on the trail nearby with a metal case that looked to be carrying something dangerous.

#15 A Deadly Allergy

A kid at my grade school (long after I graduated) passed away after her 8th-grade graduation party because she had a terrible peanut allergy and the Chinese place they ordered from wasn't as thorough about keeping peanuts out of the food as they claimed to be. The worst part is that the nurse's office had an EpiPen for her, but the nurse was too afraid to use it for liability reasons. I still don't understand why a 13-year-old with a life-threatening allergy to an extremely common food wasn't allowed to hang onto her own EpiPen.

#16 Fight Club

We had a fight week and a Twitter account was made that called out people. It got shut down by the police. It was a beautiful, beautiful week watching freshmen fight. Most of the fights looked like two people just windmilling each other. We used boxing gloves though and formed a human ring in the park. The cops came by once because they heard there was fighting going on.

#17 The Random Collapse

The staircase connecting the schoolyard to the second floor collapsed suddenly when classes were about to start. It was a solid concrete staircase, not sure what was wrong with it, just randomly collapsed. One kid was injured, I think. My only guess would be rebar rusting through. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing they have in places where freezing and thawing cycles are a problem.

#18 All About Steve

We had a kid, let's call him "Steve." He had some anger management issues. In kindergarten, he would get mad and throw things. In first grade, I was in class when he literally threw a chair, pushed over a desk, then punched and kicked a teacher. He was expelled and came back in third grade because in our district expulsion only lasted a year in most cases. In third grade, he pushed a girl up against a locker and choked her. He shut another kid in a locker too and was really mean especially to a different girl with Downs, who couldn't talk and tell him to stop. Steve threw a chair again at a teacher and was expelled again.

#19 Unfair Treatment

This was at a religious school when I was in 8th grade. In the three years that I was there, the worst thing that happened involved the senior sister of one of my classmates. She got expelled because she got pregnant. It was close to the end of the year, but they wouldn't let her finish... Condemnation and all that. I never thought that was fair treatment. And then her parents forced her to marry the father.

#20 Crying Through It

I had a teacher who was literally crying while teaching and no one knew what was wrong or what to do. Finally, she told us she found out her husband was cheating on her with her best friend that morning. No idea why she didn’t take the day off. She definitely needed the day and a real friend to talk to... I hope she's doing okay now.

#21 On High Alert

I was in high school at the same time as Columbine, and we had multiple security threats shortly after. They would evacuate the entire school and we would all walk down the football field, waiting for them to release us. After about 10 threats in a three-month period, they stopped evacuating us. About a month later this kid gets arrested in the parking lot one morning. He had really ill intentions.

#22 The Truth Comes Out

We had a couple of kids sneak in over the weekend, plug all the sinks and leave the water running. One of the kids was the son of the town's attorney. They only got caught because somebody started talking. From what I remember, one of the boys told a friend and it snowballed from there. Never saw the attorney's kid again after that.

#23 In The Nick Of Time

Someone tried to assassinate the physics teacher. Our high school was three stories. The math and science rooms were on the third floor. During parent-teacher interviews, someone turned on all the natural gas taps in his classroom and left a lit candle on the floor... the idea being that since natural gas rises, it would fill the room and explode when it touched the candle. The teacher found it only a few minutes after the would-be assassin left the room and was able to put out the candle. They never figured out who did it, to the best of my knowledge.

#24 A Senseless Act

A guy went #2 on a plate, microwaved it in the school cafeteria, climbed up a ladder to the vent system and place it right in front of the main air conditioning fan unit that connected to every room in the school. This was in early June when it was unbearably humid as well. The school year was canceled indefinitely as the smell was a biohazard.

#25 No Secret Here

Security threat, I guess. The actual worst part was that we had to sit outside in the football stadium for over three when it was about 90 degrees out with heavy humidity and no shade. None of the students took the threat seriously, because most of us knew who was behind it (it was the new kid who was a compulsive liar and clearly had some "serial criminal" tendencies). The police even came and got the kid from the crowd and nobody really reacted. I never saw the kid again.

#26 Just Accidents

I've got two incidents that immediately sprang to mind. In 6th grade, I had a friend who tried to vault the tennis court net. He got his foot stuck, landed on his head and fractured his skull. He turned out fine, but he was bleeding out of his ears and nose. It scared the heck out of the rest of us. Another friend in 6th grade tried climbing a pole to get his hat that some girls threw on top. He retrieved it and slid down, catching his leg on the hook and ripping it open to the point of needing several stitches.

#27 Girl On Crutches

Well, I knew a girl who was born with a deformity in her legs. She went in for this big surgery to reform or change the shape of her bones. I don't know all the details of the surgery. Anyway, she was off school for weeks, on crutches for two or three months, and finally got off of them. On her first day without crutches, she crossed the street from the convenience store to the school, got nailed by a jeep, and broke both her legs pretty badly. Crutches for the rest of the year.

#28 Life-Or-Death Decisions

One girl had an allergic reaction at my school. They went to the nearest pharmacy for an EpiPen but the worker refused to give them it without a prescription. The girl sadly passed away. I understand why someone might be afraid to give someone an EpiPen without a prescription when it's against the law and protocol, but if you can see with your own eyes that they really need it, then just do it. Why do rules matter when it comes to someone's life?

#29 The Playground Incident

A kid a couple of years older than me was balancing along the top of a piece of playground equipment that was clearly NOT designed to be used in that fashion. Picture a 20-foot long piece of cast iron pipe about three feet above the blacktop playground (it was the '70s). He fell, fractured his skull and lost his life.

#30 Two Deaths, Two Reactions

Two students in my class lost their lives (both accidentally) during the last year and a half of high school. The first passing got a lot of initial attention and was mourned over for weeks. A large percentage of the students went to the student's funeral. We had stuff dedicated to him. The second passing seemed to have been forgotten about by the next morning. What's worse is that at our graduation ceremony, they brought two candles to light, each one signifying one of those students. The first one lit up and stayed going the whole time. The second one wouldn't light even after them trying for an embarrassingly long time.

#31 You're Fired

I had a jerk teacher who was prone to violent outbursts. One day, near the end of the year, a kid asked if she’d be teaching next year. Some kid replied, “You won’t even be here next year, so why do you care?” Apparently, the kid was moving away. The teacher straight up started sobbing, ugly sobbing. It turned out, she was getting fired that year and thought the kid was talking about her. You had to feel a little bad.

#32 A Sad Trigger

A friend's sister was killed by a tipsy driver. Afterward, S.A.D.D. managed to get her smashed-up car so they could put it out in front of the school for major events (homecoming, prom, etc.) I felt horrible for the family having to see that visual reminder of her death a few times a year. S.A.D.D should have had some dang sense. It's not hard to get a car from a junkyard. It didn't have to be that girl's exact car.

#33 A Weak Heart

One of my classmates collapsed upon entering the classroom and hit his head on the teacher's desk on the way down. She told everyone to back up and give them room. Someone called 911. I went to get wet paper towels for his head because I thought the hit was pretty bad and we listened to him repeat: “I don’t want to die... Please, I don’t want to die” over and over again. It turned out, it was his heart that had the issue. He did pass away. It was terribly sad.

#34 The Bank Process

We would go on lockdown several times a year because dumb people were constantly trying the rob the bank next door. Last time I was home, I took a deposit to that bank for my mom. To get in, you walk into a glass box with a security guard, empty your pockets into a bin, one of the tellers will unlock the next door, then you pass through a metal detector to exit the box and enter the bank properly. To leave, you go through the whole process again in reverse. That's how I figured out why the drive-thru line was so long.

#35 An Unsuspecting Culprit

From South Florida. Class of 2010. I went to a school with about 3,500 students. As a prank, a few seniors put a six-foot dead alligator in the air conditioning of the main building on campus and cranked up the heat. The smell was beyond describable. Hazmat crews were called in. Industrial sized air purifiers were placed throughout the building. The building was shut down for over a week. Classes were held in random corners of the school while the building was decontaminated and an entirely new AC system was installed. This "prank" ended up costing somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000 when all was said and done. Turned out, the principal's son was the main culprit.

#36 Summer Excitement

Our school was next to a hospital, and the hospital had a ton of construction going on. The workers hit a gas line and it leaked into the school. We had to get evacuated and stood in an empty lot a block away for two hours in the summer heat before they actually canceled school. It's not the craziest thing, but in our small town, it was a pretty big deal.

#37 Student Stampede

Our schools take school spirit very seriously. During my sophomore year, we had a pep rally for a football game against our then rivals. Needless to say, a riot ensued. A teacher's arm was fractured when it was stepped on over and over by the stampede of kids descending the gym bleachers. Once the chaos had mobilized to the entire school, a teacher was hit in the head with a trash can that was thrown from the third floor to the second floor. It took the teachers, campus police and administrators an hour to get everyone back to class.

#38 The Asbestos Problem

The boiler room caught on fire during a blizzard, which caused an asbestos problem in a section of the school. It could have been a lot worse, but the ventilation hadn’t worked for over a decade so they were able to contain the asbestos threat to just the metal shop and woodshop area. It was sealed off for months and they had to cancel all shop classes for the rest of the year.

#39 Mischievous Deeds

During my very first semester in high school as a freshman, we had a rash of regularly called-in security threats. For the first two, everyone was taken to the school stadium. After those, we were never out there for more than an hour, but they still continued to happen. It took several months before the calls stopped. Supposedly, there were some kids from another school doing "favors" for another small group in our school to get them out of tests.

#40 My Brother's Crazy Ex

My brother dated a girl briefly in 8th grade who later snapped in high school. She had convinced a group of five other people to commit to a plan that involved welding the high school doors shut. The morning of the incident, someone was tipped off and the cops were called. The school went on lockdown for six to seven hours and they found the girl's parents taped up in the closet of their home. This was three years after my brother dated her.

#41 Bad Timing

The seniors planned their senior prank and had a bunch of alarm clocks go off in lockers all over the school throughout the day. The idea was that by the time one locker was unlocked to turn off the alarm another would be going off. Unfortunately for the seniors, the day they planned this happened to be the same day Obama was campaigning at the fairgrounds less than a mile away. The alarm clocks got mistaken as security threats and just about every senior in the school was questioned by either police or teachers. Basically it was just a huge misunderstanding that led to a whole bunch of wasted time.

#42 The Wrong Crowd

My classmate died in a car wreck during my junior year. He was an A student, an athlete, good looking, popular, never in trouble... He lost his life because he was in a car with a few kids who decided to buy drinks illegally. He was in the front passenger seat. A cop got behind them and flipped his lights on because they were speeding and they ran for it knowing the drinks would be a problem.

They turned their headlights off thinking they'd be harder to locate. They proceeded to hit a tree. The classmate in question had unbuckled his seatbelt to try and hide the drinks under the seat as much as possible in case they got caught. When they hit the tree, he was thrown forward and broke his neck, ending him instantly. The others in the car suffered only minor bumps and bruises.

#43 What's Going On Here?

A girl ran over her boyfriend in the student parking lot when he tried to break up with her. One of the female security officers got knocked up by a student. There was a student fight club held in the prop storage area behind the theater. Someone put a goat's head behind the band instrument lockers as their senior prank. An English teacher choking out a disruptive student.

#44 Two Options

Some seniors parked a broken down car on the courtyard for a senior prank. It had "Class of 2011" written all over it. The administration filed charges against them, made them either choose between jail time, or not being able to go to prom. Most of them chose not to go to prom if I remember correctly. Another alternative was not to walk at graduation.

#45 Setting It Ablaze

Arson. It was at night, so no one was hurt. The person that did it tried to set the office areas ablaze, investigators thought it was to destroy records or something. Firemen were able to put it out, but not before some good damage had been done. Also, in the process, the gym floor was ruined by the water. It was all warped and popping up. No one was caught but there were a lot of rumors that it was the mayor's nephew that did it, and also for the purpose of getting insurance money to upgrade and renovate instead of trying to pass a levy.

#46 5,000 Ladybugs

In high school, those graduating pull a “prank” on the school, which typically consists of a tailgate every year due to needing approval from the school for anything we do, so that was usual. So in my junior year, one senior decided to buy 5,000 ladybugs online and released all of them into the school the night before, needless to say, he didn't get to walk at graduation and he was banned from going to prom and the senior trip.

#47 A Racist Oversight

While working on our yearbook, the yearbook staff used to use "placeholder" words for people whose names they didn't know in group photo captions. The intention was to get the spacing right first and go find the person's name later. The picture for the National Honors Society contained one person the staff didn't know by name. She happened to be the only black person in the photo. The staff used the placeholder "black girl." They forgot to go back and find out her name. It went to print.

#48 One By One

Once, my P.E teacher didn't show up to take the class, and neither did anyone else, so the entire class had gotten changed into their kit, only to sit around wondering where she was. We had an assembly the next morning—she had passed away suddenly. My English teacher spent the morning quietly crying while we sat in a weird silence. Also, I had dropped out at this point, but my drama teacher, an amazingly sweet and passionate woman, she passed away a couple of years after getting cancer a second time.

#49 Junior Savages

The juniors went insane after the seniors graduated. "Junior Takeover Day," they called it, for the right of passage of being at the top of the class hierarchy. I wasn't there, having graduated already, but I heard all about glitter bombs, some band kid getting duct-taped to a chair (supposedly with his consent), and someone putting honey on cling wrap and sticking it to people's cars . The honey would strip paint when removed.

#50 The Greasy Incident

As a senior prank one year (not my class), a group of seniors greased the main staircase in the building. A girl fell and went into a seizure. 911 got called and she survived, but the principal got absolutely ripped apart over that one. What kind of idiots think that greasing a staircase is a prank? The only result of that prank is obviously that people will fall and get hurt. I hope someone pranks them with a couple of funny frying pan smacks to the face.