Content Warning: Violence, Drug Use, Affairs.
Though we might not agree about whether or not we'd like to go back to the high school years and experience it for a second time, we can definitely agree that high school was a weird time.
Hormones, first relationships, first experiences, prepping for college and other future plans, and making some big mistakes, high school tends to be packed with memories that make us laugh, make us cringe, and make us not want to do that again.
But some high schools get a little wilder than others, and the students there will have some crazy memories to look back on.
Curious, Redditor Alarmed-Addition8644 asked:
"What was the most chaotic thing that happened at your school?"
Not A Good Prank
"A couple of dumba**es thought it would be a good idea to put baby oil on the stairs as a senior prank. Of course, multiple people got hurt, and those involved weren’t able to walk across the stage for graduation."
- motorcitystef
"Ah yes, a broken neck, the ultimate prank."
- Alarmed-Addition8644
You Never Know The Impact Your Words Will Have
"One of the teachers went off on a student because the student was being his usual lazy, school-hating, sleeping during class self; and the teacher told him as much."
"The next morning, we found out the student had overdosed after school. The teacher left his class without a word and cried in the teacher's lounge."
"It was the first death I remember of the opioid epidemic, and it was in 2012. From memory, it was considered accidental. And I think they were able to bust the guy who sold him the oxy."
- happyhumorist
Can't Mess Up That Attendance Record
"A teacher murdered his wife and then came to teach the next day..."
"She was pregnant as well, and they had a child. They had an argument and then he decided to kill her and his brother assisted in disposing of the body. There was plenty of evidence he did it. Got a bunch of years in jail but he's out now after doing his time."
- ASTR0PHYSICIAN
Woodstock 2.0
"There was a concert during lunchtime. Someone threw a water bottle on stage. They threw it back. Commence bottle-throwing war and the concert was canceled."
"Needing a new outlet, the crowd turned into a small riot and started rampaging through the halls. They tried to end lunch early but the orders were ignored."
"Teachers were tackling students. I think a fire was lit in a garbage can. School ended early and I got mugged walking home."
"After that, they banned water bottles at our school."
- broodfood
"That escalated quickly."
- Alarmed-Addition8644
The Audacity
"Well... there was the bomb threat kid who went to juvie..."
"But the one I remember is when a friend (A) of my sister went to a party. 'Friends' of A slipped her some drugs. When A became unresponsive, the 'friends' dumped her at an ER where she died."
"My sister and actual friends of A started wearing shirts that said, 'Friends don't let friends die.'"
"When the 'friends' got out of jail and started back at school, my sister was still wearing the shirt weekly. One of the 'friends' got offended, and their teacher demanded that my sister turn the shirt inside out. My sister refused and was sent to the principal's office."
"They notified my dad, who doesn't play around. This bada** showed up wearing the same d**n shirt (he literally went out of his way to go home, change out of his work uniform, and then to the school). They sent her back to class and told the 'friend' to deal with it."
- grill_sgt
"Wow, they f**king DRUGGED this girl, dumped her body at the ER, and essentially killed her. And they had the nerve to return to the same school after serving time?"
"F**k that 'friend,' f**k that teacher, and f**k that principal."
"Good on your sister and father, though. I hope this follows that fak s friend for the rest of his/her miserable life."
- midnightsunofab***h
"Dad showed up, all right. That's totally bada**. Good on her for not backing down, good on him for supporting her."
- That_Ol_Cat
Caught Red-Shirted
"Middle school seventh grade, my fault. I decided to throw a fire extinguisher off the railing of the second floor, and it exploded, and everyone got sent home for a MONTH because they had to professionally clean it."
"I got caught and expelled, very much deserved. I wouldn't have been caught if hadn't been a hardhead with the dress code, though."
"The dress code we had was strict. I was a problem child, and on more than one occasion, they had to dress-check me to make sure I was wearing a polo and khakis because I was that stressful."
"What got me caught was a red polo instead of blue or black, which was ironic because I blended into the ground of the track just fine. It wasn't even one of my worst; I don't think teachers ever seen a middle school kid come into school with a cropped tank top and s short skirt covered by a trench coat before that, lol (laughing out loud)." - notsurewhattodo898
Daylight Savings Time Strikes Again
"In March 2007, a 15-year-old student was mistakenly jailed for 12 days in a juvenile detention facility for allegedly making a bomb threat over the school district hotline, because school officials had overlooked daylight savings time while evaluating the calling records."
"The family was later awarded $84,000."
"The kid was calling to see if there was a snow delay which is how he showed up in the call log. I don’t think they ever found who actually made the threat."
- iEatJapaneseSnacks
Old Spice And Axe: The Scents Of High School
"Old Spice gave our high school hundreds of little sample body sprays in grade nine, and I swear I would still see them in random places by the time I was graduating. Kids were walking down the halls, spraying them, and the whole school smelled like Old Spice for a good while. Also, the school-wide food fight in grade 12."
- SmittyFromAbove
Wild Teachers
"Oh my, my high school was a crazy place. Small rural town in California for clarification."
"A math teacher threw one of those chair/desk combos things at a student. Obviously got fired."
"A geometry teacher just stopped showing up for work. Almost two years later (I had a period where I worked in the office), this same teacher walked in asking where his classroom had moved to."
"The school administrators were completely flabbergasted. He disappeared, they couldn’t get ahold of him. Turns out he was on some meds that he stopped taking and just fell off the map for a while and thought he would still have his job."
- rayferrr
Sudden Tragedies
"Our 16-year-old football star keeled over dead during practice."
- Gold-Cover-4236
"We lost a high school football star when he ran into the goalpost and exploded a weak blood vessel in his brain, dead before the paramedics got him on the gurney. Two weeks later our star running back took a bad hit and broke his neck and became a quadriplegic, he lived till he was 26 or so I don't recall exactly."
"About one-third of the team quit football for good and I decided that if I ever had kids they would never play contact sports with pads, especially American Football."
- RedditVince
Irreparable Water Damage
"Our school is next to a little river. That little river has a weir (a low-head or shallow dam), and when I went to school, this was locked."
"Now, one night, some twigs or something built up there. They would have had to open the weir, but couldn't find the person with the key. At least that's how they told us the story."
"So, the school was flooded. The floors of the sports halls had to be replaced! That was really expensive, and it is also why I don't understand why they didn't just cut open that lock at the weir."
"The ground floor of the library was also flooded. The books there were of course ruined, and it was only luck that these were the less expensive children's books and not the more expensive encyclopedias etc. that they had on the upper floor."
"The computer room was also flooded, which was very unfortunate because that was the end of our informatics classes. They taught us the basics on some C64 computers. The water stopped just under the desks, so the computers were undamaged, but the room couldn't be used anymore."
"That was crazy. I even went home to get a camera and then went back to school to take some photos. (Note: I live 7 km from that school, and I was going by bicycle.)"
- P44
The Sticker Incident
"The sticker incident."
"One of my friends figured out that you could go on the USPS website and order all kinds of various stickers and labels for free."
"They came in rolls of 1,000 so he decided to put in the maximum possible order of 1,000 rolls to have an even million. Well, they showed up on a truck to his house and they basically filled his parents' garage, much more than he had expected. He had no clue what to even do with this many stickers in the slightest so he decided to just start handing out rolls of them to anyone who asked."
"He figured he wouldn't get in trouble because he wasn't selling anything and explicitly told people not to vandalize stuff. Well, of course, people immediately began using them to vandalize stuff."
"Every single locker in the school had a sticker placed on it, every light pole in the parking lot, etc. A few of the players for the football team had even put them on their helmets."
"And it started expanding outwards from the high school to the point where there were stickers on the back of nearly every stop sign in town. We found them in basically every public bathroom in town, gas pumps, traffic lights, buildings, and more. If there was a place a sticker could be stuck, there was a USPS sticker there."
"And for the longest time, nobody got in trouble. They knew who had the stickers, who was distributing them, where they came from, and where they were being placed, but it was just a nuisance for a short while. And then some id**t decided to use them to make a swastika in one of the school bathrooms."
"That's when all hell broke loose. Anyone caught with USPS stickers for any purpose was immediately suspended without question. It was a s**tshow. They were scraped off of almost everything on school property over the course of about a week, but the ones around the town continued to exist. There's still a few that I know of more than 10 years later that are still there."
- bbbbbthatsfivebees
"What's great about that is the whole like grassroots viral expansion of them, if someone was so inclined at the time they could plot the incidence rate and trace back to the distribution area (the school) easily. Honestly, that's something to be proud of, not many people make a mark on the world for better or worse."
- Immersi0nn
"That's great. I did the exact same thing but without going overboard on my order amounts, so there were a smaller number of people putting stickers on things and it never passed that critical point."
"I see where I went wrong, now."
- papoosejr
"So USPS lets you order one million stickers for free?"
- WeinerBeiner5
"I just checked their website and it looks like you can indeed order certain shipping supplies (including rolls of 1000 labels) for free. I've got no clue if they've updated their system to stop you from ordering 1000 rolls at once though and I'm not going to test it."
"EDIT: One of the things you can get is a label that says 'Cremated Remains,' although those come in rolls of 100, not 1000. There's also a special option for a Cremated Remains shipping kit which comes with a box and an instruction pamphlet on how to ship cremated remains. This has been surprisingly educational."
- adeon
The Perfect Ending
"There was this one kid at my high school who looked like a fifth grader."
"One day, the math teacher came into class and saw one of the bigger kids holding the small kid upside down out the third-floor window by his shoes. Only his shoes were still visible."
"The small kid was yelling, and then the big kid said, 'Goodbye,' and let go."
"The math teacher was across the room in a second, and we were sure he was about to kill the big kid and toss his body out the window, too."
"The prank was that the small kid gave his shoes to the big kid and then went to the classroom next door to yell out the window there."
- fatnino
"Okay, that one? That ending? That was GREAT."
- NotAnotherBookworm
Sometimes tragic, sometimes infuriating, sometimes genius, these experiences were nothing short of memorable and totally chaotic. These are the kinds of experiences parents fret about their teens getting mixed into, and for good reason.
While harmless pranks with teachers and putting stickers everywhere are awesome, there was a lot here that we hope our loved ones would never have to experience.