‘What was your school rumour?’ – 22 crazy tales that were passed down through the generations

As well as being educational establishments, schools are hotbeds of gossip, speculation and tittle-tattle, where fantastical stories are created and embroidered as they’re passed down through generations of credulous children.

They’ve been chatting about this on the AskUK subreddit after Haunting_Cell_8876 posted their own experience of this phenomenon:

‘What was your school rumour?

‘At my primary/junior school back in the early 80’s the rumour was a boy called Noddy was murdered by the caretaker and his body was buried under the stage in the assembly hall.

‘We knew this was 100% true because there was a red stain on the wooden stage floor. This was were he died. If you went to the toilets alone, this is where Noddy would get you and flush your head down the toilet.’

Terrifying stuff, and lots of other people had their own examples of this kind of hyper-local folklore made up by kids with a flare for the mysterious and the macabre…

1.

‘Mrs Mason was scared of ham, so every Christmas, kids would send endless Christmas cards to her but with ham inside. She wasn’t scared of ham.’
–Hefty_Anywhere_8537

2.

‘Every time one of my friends was off sick, 90% of the class assumed that he’d died in a car crash the previous evening at 22:30 on the way to McDonald’s. This was not an in-joke, people actually believed this.’
–Bbew_Mot

3.

‘Ours was that two teachers took turns sitting on a kid’s back, which ultimately killed him. The teachers did this to poor Timothy on the quad, in broad daylight, in front of all the innocent faces pressed up against the class windows.

‘The truth was rather boring: Timothy and his family had moved to the other side of the country. We’d already had his farewell party at this point.’
–HopeTheresPudding

4.

‘That there was a secret set of cellars under the East Wing of the school where bad boys were locked up forever (they’d probably been expelled).

‘There were other cellars under the other wing used for storage, and everything else in the school was symmetrical, so there had to be one, and that they were hidden was suspicious to an 11 year old mind.’
–Cyanopicacooki

5.

‘A girl left school and everyone said she had to leave to sell Christmas trees.’
–flexo_24

6.

‘Ours was that this kid put a rubber band around his head and left it there for so long that his skin grew over it.’
–H0rr0r_B0t

7.

‘That a teacher locked a kid in the old bomb shelter as a punishment but forgot he was down there.’
–Sure-Present-3398

8.

‘An ominous being named Tipsy Tapsy would come to get you if you used the school toilets. We had to have a talk by the headmaster to tell us it was safe to go to the bathroom because people were refusing to go to the loo.’
–gishwater

9.

‘We had a ghost too! Ours was the one legged ballerina. Our school was said to have previously been a dance school (zero evidence of this lol) and it was said that a ballerina fell from the balcony and died. Her ghost was believed to live in the bell tower and that she now haunted the school.

‘She was half skeleton and the skeleton half was missing her leg. The rumour has been going for years, a family member attended the same school 15 years before me and she was talked about then too. As kids, we were terrified of seeing her!’
–strawberrypops

10.

‘A girl at school got pregnant, she gave birth to a snake in front of an open fire and it turned into gold.’
–aunty_social40

11.

‘In primary school, a few of the classrooms had old, long lights that hung on cords (imagine a long rectangle with cords going into the ceiling at the short ends. To us, they looked like swings.)

‘One of the lights would swing slowly and slightly. We all wholeheartedly believed that the ghost of a little boy was swinging on the light.

‘The teacher tried explaining it was because the light was directly above a heater, and the air current was what was moving the light. Nobody believed her. We were absolutely certain a ghostly little boy liked playing around the ceiling, but strangely only in winter.’
–flyingfoxtrot_

12.

‘That one of the boys had a testicle removed and replaced with a ball bearing.’
–ComplexSquirelll