Recently, Reddit user Defiant_Concert_9542 asked, “What’s the most memorable high school mishap, either hilariously funny or disastrously unfortunate, that you still chuckle or cringe about to this day?” People had some truly wild stories that were too unhinged not to share. Here are the events that went down in infamy at their schools.
1.“There was this dude (god, he was as high as a kite) who was the ‘most competent’ person to be operating saws. Anyway, he sliced off his first finger with said saw, and due to the copious amount of drugs in his system, he seemingly didn’t feel a thing. He left the workshop, walked to the front office (where I was at the time), casually walked in, put his finger on the counter, and asked to go home early. The office workers obviously called an ambulance, and I guess once the ambulance got there and the pain and realization set in, you could hear him scream from the other side of the school. I will never forget the office workers’ faces when he pulled his finger out of his pocket. It was absolutely priceless and a little traumatizing.”
2.“I was in colorguard in the band. We had a routine with flaming hoops, and we were going to perform it at the Veteran’s game. The entire auxiliary made a giant American flag in home economics and starched it with hairspray (the ’90s hairspray that was generic Aquanet). We didn’t have this massive thing with us during our practices, so we just pretended. There was a part of the routine where we turned, and if you got a few steps out of line, you would cut the corner to get back in place. So, cut to the game, and we were all ready to show our patriotism to the vets. Of course, I got out of step and ran to cut the corner to not be noticed while spinning a flaming hoop right behind a massive flag that was soaked in some of the most flammable crap outside of gasoline. The wind blew the fabric back to me, and I set the American flag on fire; it went up like a magician’s flash paper.”
“The routine stopped, and ashes were fluttering everywhere. I had to have an escort home for safety, and that school system countywide now forbids any fire in school performances. Sadly, that is not the only safety rule I’m the direct cause of. Band members must also have their health insurance on file and a treatment form filled out before performance to this day, and it’s been roughly 25 years.”
3.“It’s mad how I can’t find a news article about it, but there was a boy, Tommy, in the year above me. His family were farmers in the nearby village. We were in year eight (so roughly 13/14 years old). His grandad found an undetonated WW2 mine/bomb in one of their fields. They thought it was defunct, so they brought it to the school to show the teachers, especially the chemistry teacher Mr. Evans, as a kind of show-and-tell piece. We got to school, and he showed Mr. Evans, who inspected it and realized it was a live fucking bomb. They had to evacuate the whole school, and the bomb squad poured in and put it on the cricket field. I remember my P.E. teacher with his head in his hands as they detonated it, blowing a massive hole in his wicket. The whole school watched from afar and cheered. Fucking mental. Well done, Tommy, you brought a live bomb onto a school bus of 50 children and into the science department.”
4.“There was a hook for transferring large pieces of heavy metal in my shop class. It was hanging about head level, and I decided to show off my karate and hook-kick it. I did, but the hook caught my pants, causing me to momentarily dangle upside down, and then ripped the entire pant leg open from ankle to crotch on the inside, showing my boxers. I tried to duct tape it together, but it didn’t work, and it was a long, embarrassing bus ride home. “
5.“One of the kids in computer class sent a death threat to Bill Clinton when he was president. He signed it with the principal’s name. It was meant as a joke, but the Secret Service showed up, and it ended up being a big deal.”
6.“This was the early days of the internet. A guy in grade 12 posed as a woman on an online dating site and somehow managed to start dating one of his male grade 12 teachers. The kid maintained an online relationship for months and eventually announced this in front of hundreds of students, teachers, and parents during the annual ‘grad show’ (a night of skits, songs, and dances performed by students of the graduating class). It was definitely disastrously unfortunate.”
7.“In my sophomore year, I was in a Business Math class because I couldn’t (still can’t) math for shit. It was full of misfits. … One of the guys in the class who went by the name Spike had a glass eye. While we were sitting quietly taking a test, Spike was either done early or just over it, and his head was leaning over the desk and looking down. He casually reached up and slapped the side of his head, and his eye fell out of his socket onto the desk with a loud clacking sound, and the girl next to him passed out. Good times.”
8.“Some guy put sheep brains in the ranch dressing in the cafeteria. The biology class was dissecting sheep brains as part of a lab. I guess the teacher didn’t think they had to make sure no one took the bits with them, but some kid just thought, “Hey, you just ladle ranch dressing out of a pot in the cafeteria…I could totally slip this shit in there,” and that’s what he did. Many things changed about the biology class and the cafeteria after that day.”
9.“I got set on fire in shop class. A friend couldn’t light the soldering iron furnace and went to go get help but failed to think to turn off the gas while getting help. I had a fireball reach the entire length of my arm and up to singe my eyebrows.”
10.“In my junior year, some kids figured out how to send a mass email out to literally the entire school district. And the school couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it, so for nearly a week, thousands of kids were creating chaos in the school email system. One kid sent the entire script of Bee Movie when that dumb meme was popular. Another kid sent full-on furry porn (and I think he was expelled for it). … They gave literally everyone who had been involved in that email chain at least one Wednesday morning detention.”
11.“I believe it was in my junior year in high school. I wasn’t in the class, but I heard what happened. It was in shop class in the downstairs workshop. A buddy of mine called out another student’s name, and when the student looked, my buddy threw a nail across the shop at him, and the damn thing stuck in this other student’s head. I remember seeing him walking down to the office with a nail sticking out of his head, just laughing his ass off. I’ll never forget this.”
12.“I was skipping class when I heard screaming coming from the women’s restroom. I peeked my head in to see if anyone was dying (it was that loud), and lo and behold, one girl was on the floor of the bathroom with another over her, trying to give her a belly button piercing…once again, on a high school bathroom floor.”
13.“Spanish class junior year. We had to make an instructional video all in Spanish. One guy made a video about rolling a blunt using a tortilla and re-fried beans as proxies. The best part was that he made it into a skit in which his ‘girlfriend’ was played by a blow-up sex doll. Every scene had something inappropriate in the background, like a dildo or a bong. It was our Spanish teacher’s first year teaching, so she made the mistake of letting the entire video play. He got suspended for a couple of days, and I’m pretty sure she got in trouble as well, but it was absolutely legendary!”
14.“When I was in high school, there were these freshmen who decided to take a metal fork, throw it in the air, and see who could get it to stick prongs down into the ground. Well, one of them wasn’t paying attention, and it stuck in his head. He was in the principal’s office waiting for an ambulance, and they locked the office and closed the blinds to give him some privacy. I tried to sneak a peek through the blinds, and the principal flung them open and just pointed at me. I did wait around until they brought him out with his head all wrapped up and the fork still sticking out of the top of his head.”
15.“A science teacher was performing one of those experiments where you put a small piece of metal in water and watch the flaming reaction. Unfortunately, the small piece of metal slipped out of the tweezers and fell into the water from height. There was a small bang as it exploded straight up out of the water, a loud ping as it ricocheted off the ceiling lights, and a brief crack as it damaged the science room window in a hilarious Rube Goldberg setup.”
16.“My first year, I got to take biology class, and there was a section during the year about dissection. At the beginning of the session, my teacher had about 100 formaldehyde frogs and piglets for the classes to dissect. To set the stage, this was in Southern California, in about March or April. It was warm. Unseasonably warm. Within the week, most of the said stinky dissection critters were MIA, and they ended up on the school buses, hidden in various administrative offices, and so on. The school had to be closed for a week so they could track down all the missing critters. To be honest, I don’t think they found them all because we could smell it for the rest of the year off and on in different areas.”
“It was awful. We never finished the dissections and ended up having to watch on video what we were supposed to have learned by doing. We had to have an assembly where the principal basically offered amnesty for students to tell them where the rest of the bodies were. He was not pleased. I can’t blame him, really. From what I remember, no one took him up on the offer.
To this day, I can still close my eyes and remember the unholy smell from all the hidden critters.”
17.“There was this guy who showed up drunk to class. Obviously, the teacher wasn’t having it and sent him to the principal’s office. They decided that his drunkenness was grounds to search his backpack, where they found beers. Then they pulled out a brand new bong he had just bought. Principal: ‘What’s this?’ Student: ‘It’s a vase. I’m a botanist.'”
18.“There was a guy in my senior year who had already failed a couple of grades, named Mickey. He was a typical stoner. … He already had all kinds of tattoos and piercings, and at twenty? In the mid-nineties? That actually was quite impressive for the time. Anyway, he actually had a chain connected to his two nipple piercings and loved showing it off to anyone who was interested in seeing it. Well, one day, Mickey had fallen asleep in math, and the teacher … grabbed a ruler and started making her way to his desk while still lecturing us about whatever it was that day. She got there, and all we could hear was a loud ‘pop’ as she slammed the ruler down on his desk.”
“Mickey popped his head up groggily and let out a painful-sounding wince. And two circles of red slowly formed on his t-shirt.
Apparently, as he slept, his nipple-connecting chain had slipped up under his desktop, and when he violently sat up, it ripped the piercings out of both nipples.
Needless to say, he went home early, the teacher got a slight reprimand, and I have a story to tell for the rest of my life.
And good news, too — Mickey actually graduated with us that year! Apparently, the third time WAS the charm for twelfth grade.”
19.“After gym class, two guys had been going after each other in basketball, and it spilled over to the locker room. While in the shower, they started fighting. Teachers broke it up and had them walking, naked, to the gym office when they started fighting again. One teacher bear-hugged one of them and started taking him backward. The other kid kept hitting the now-defenseless guy. The wrestling coach picked him up over his head and body-slammed him onto the concrete floor. As the guy hit the ground, you could just see the fight leaving his body. The coach stood over him and said, ‘You done, or do you want some more?’ The guy just shook his head. This happened in the mid-’80s, so it was a different time and would never fly today.”
20.“Our first-year biology teacher was trying to show us a website we could use for research, but he typed the domain name wrong, and it redirected to a porn site that somehow was not blocked. There was definitely some biology on display. The poor teacher froze and stared at us wide-eyed for a few seconds while a picture of a girl giving oral was projected in front of the classroom. The weirdest thing is that I remember the site’s text being in Italian.”
“My next best/worst time is when I let out the worst fart of my life in Spanish class. The school had had issues with kids using stink bombs or ‘canned ass’ spray to disrupt classes, so that’s the conclusion the teacher jumped to. She was screaming at the class, demanding that the culprit come clean, when one classmate timidly suggested maybe someone had actually farted. This only enraged her further, causing her to yell, ‘No! No human could produce a smell that bad!’ I did not correct her.”
21.“It happened during my first year of high school (I’m currently a junior). A group of seniors … wanted to prank their friend and managed to place a pen vertically underneath his seat seconds before he sat down. Needless to say, the kid got out of the school bathroom with bloody pants. Yes, it sounds painful, but I heard he was surprisingly lighthearted about it afterward.”
22.“On the first day of school after they had built a new wing for the building, one of my friends went into a bathroom to smoke pot. A teacher smelt it and started investigating the area. A friend heard the teacher, freaked out, and threw his joint in the trash full of paper towels, which quickly caught fire. He booked it out of the bathroom and found me, saying, ‘I was here the whole time.’ The sprinkler system kicked on, and the fire department was alerted. The school was evacuated, and we spent the rest of the day outside while the fire department inspected the bathroom. The brand-new bathroom had to be rebuilt after three hours of use.”
23.“Back in the holiday season of 2003, during the first half of my junior year of high school, one of my classmates found a way to hack into the intercom system. All he needed was a cordless phone, a phone splitter jack, headphones, and a portable music player (a cassette one). In the middle of the class, our tech geek dialed the number used by the phones in the intercom system and hit play on the player after placing the headphones on the speaker end of the phone. Suddenly, a host of pornographic Christmas parody songs were playing over the intercom system. This caused a chunk of the school, myself included, to be sent to the nurse’s office due to asthma-like attacks from laughing. That tech guy got away with it because no one who knew it was him snitched.”
24.“When I was a freshman in high school, I had this awesome biology teacher. I had to fly to California for my cousin’s wedding, and when I came back, I had a new biology teacher. It turns out she was having an affair with the gym teacher, and they’d exchanged some very graphic and scandalous emails and accidentally sent them to the faculty and school board email lists.”
“And then there was the time someone put laxatives in the ketchup dispenser. I’m glad I didn’t have fries that day.”
25.“This was the late ’90s, and really good color inkjet printers had just come out and were popular. A small group of kids from my high school got one, or it was their parent’s scanner/printer combo. But they started making their own $20 bills and passing them off all around town. “
“I’m not exactly sure how they were making them, but it was working because apparently it went on for a while. But then, one day, one of the guys didn’t have his lunch money; he did have a front and a back of his fake bills (I’m not sure if they printed them separately and glued them together, or if he just had some practice ones or what, but he had a front and a back). He cut them out and literally slapped them together with a glue stick. One of his buddies tried to talk him out of it, but in his cockiness, he was like, ‘No lunch lady is going to know.’ But sure enough, she noticed immediately and contacted the principal and the authorities.
I was sort of friends with the group but not friendly enough to be part of the incident, and I only learned of them doing it when the Secret Service came to the school and started pulling me and other kids out of class to interview/interrogate them.”
26.“As a prank, some students stuck a giant dildo with rubber cement into the hand of the mascot that reaches out as if it is shaking your hand when you walk into the school. The next day, the principal decided he was going to pull it off and ended up fracturing his own hand trying to catch himself before hitting the ground. They had to call in a business to have it removed.”
27.“One teacher had a REALLY BAD combover, like plastered to his head. There was a special assembly where a guest singer was caressing his face, and she knocked it off his head. In front of the entire school body.”
28.And finally, this is elementary school, but I’m still including it. “When I was in grade school, there were two houses on the top of this very steep hill. Our school bus had to go up this winding, weird road just to pick up these two sisters who lived in one of the houses. Well, one day, one of the sisters wasn’t feeling well when she boarded the bus. She was sitting in the back, and as the bus started driving back down the road, she puked. It was disgusting. It was so bad that then her sister puked. The smell in the back of the bus made a couple of other kids puke.”
“Most of the kids puked into the aisle between the seats, so there was now a flow of puke making its way to the front of the bus as it headed downhill. As it passed each pair of seats, at least one more kid contributed to the river of puke, which just kept going all the way to the front of the bus.
Our bus driver, Jeannie, had no idea what was going on until this mass of vomit pooled on the steps for the door. She slammed on the brakes, stood up, turned around, yelled, ‘What in the hell is going on here!?’ and then immediately figured it out.
I still remember the look on her face today, almost thirty years later — revolt, realization, horror, and confusion about what to do next, all in one facial expression.
She radioed into the school to have as much kitty litter as possible available and that they’d likely have to call in someone to clean it up.
So we arrived at the school after traveling the last few miles in this stench, and there was the principal and the school nurse. Jeannie opened the door, and it had become a literal floodgate, and I remember the nurse going running. We stayed in our seats until they figured out what to do—they couldn’t have all the students wading in puke.
In the meantime, with the bus no longer moving and fresh air coming in, more kids started to puke. They eventually realized there was no getting around it and put down towels for us to walk on. Thankfully, nobody slipped and fell into the river.
We all went to the gym, where they did their best to clean up our shoes, but that smell stays on you. I recall hearing that in some other classrooms, the smell made other kids puke throughout the day.
I will never forget that day, nor will anyone else who went to that school. From that point forward, all the buses had spilled powder in a little box behind the driver’s seat, and we were instructed to tell the driver immediately if anyone puked again. Nobody ever did.”
What wild, infamous event at your high school passed into legend? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
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