We asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us about the most ridiculous rumours that went around their schools – here are some of the funniest responses:
1. The ghost.
In elementary school a rumour went around that one of the girls in our class was a ghost. I don't know why, she was just a normal classmate and we always gossiped about the fact that she was a ghost.
—daym
2. The unfortunate teacher.
Once someone started a rumour that one of my teachers didn't have knees. It's still a thing.
3. The Doritos bag.
There was a horrible rumour at my school about a couple who wanted to have sex under the bleachers but forgot a condom so they used a Dorito bag.
4. The bat.
There was a rumour that there was bat flying around in the bathroom and you couldn't go in the last cubicle because that was where it lived.
—Sneha Sharma, Facebook
5. The murderer.
My art teacher accepted a job at a different school before we came back after summer, but a lot of the kids didn't know.
On the first day of school, a rumour spread around that the new art teacher had killed her.
—Mariel Paré, Facebook
6. The werewolf.
A rumour was started that I was a werewolf. The evidence was that I had a unibrow.
7. The vampire rumour.
One day a rumour went round that there were vampires in our school. Supposedly a couple of kids were known to bite each other on the neck, and a bite went wrong and hit a carotid artery (never verified). The police showed up for something completely unrelated but it added to the drama. The whole school went nuts, and by lunch time, posters of garlic and the cross were posted throughout the hallway. The next day kids were kept home by their parents!
—Roselle Liza Mangilog, Facebook
8. The made-up drug craze.
In 11th grade one of the vice principals for some reason thought soy sauce was a new super drug some kid in my class sold. Students helped fuel the rumour by secretly trading packets of soy sauce at lunch.
9. The Sprite dream.
Someone started a rumour at my elementary school that when all the kids left the school the water in the water fountains would turn into Sprite. It wasn't true.
10. The bathroom couch.
In the fourth grade the girls collectively convinced the boys that we had a couch in our bathroom. They fully believed us and a lot of them got really mad about it.
11. The shameful historical inaccuracy.
There was a rumour that my history teacher had sex with Abraham Lincoln. Honestly, people at my high school had no concept of time.
12. The annual boob job story.
I recently discovered that there was a ridiculous rumour about me in high school. Apparently I needed to have a breast reduction surgery done every summer or I would die.
13. The fingernail story.
Everyone at my school believed that if you could grow your fingernails to an inch long, the Body Shop would buy the clippings so they could use them to test their products instead of animals.
14. The hand model.
There was a rumour that one of our substitute teachers was a hand model.
15. The spider lie.
I'm deathly afraid of spiders. In my first week of high school a guy reached up to my face and said he was trying to get a spider off me. I started screaming, crying, and hitting myself and then dropped to the floor. After it happened someone started a rumour that I had epilepsy and I kind of just rolled with it for the next four years because I was embarrassed to admit that it all happened because I thought there was a spider on me.
The yearbook did a special page about my life with epilepsy.
16. The reason you should never go on holiday.
After a two-week vacation, I went back to school to find myself dead from blood cancer.
17. The parrot.
Once our school principal came into the hallway and started opening all the lockers, because someone stated a rumour that a kid had a parrot in their locker. He never did find a parrot.
18. The iceberg boy.
A boy moved to my school from Iceland. He had a skin condition that made his skin peel quite severely and somebody spread a rumour that it was because he got stuck to an iceberg and floated over to England from Iceland. Apparently he just decided to start a new life here.
19. The Hitler rumour.
At my school there was a rumour that my dad was Hitler. People actually believed it – I'm only 20!
20. The Robot Wars dream.
Some kids in my year started a rumour that Robot Wars was filmed in the school hall and that if you got a detention you would be required to clean up after it. I deliberately got a detention just so I could clean up after Robot Wars, which in my opinion sounded awesome.
To my dismay there was no awesome robot battle; instead, I had to sit and copy out the first three pages of the Bible.
21. The body.
There was a rumour that our school hid a dead body by putting a speed bump over it.
22. The former underwear model.
At my high school the teachers started a rumour that our biology teacher was a Calvin Klein underwear model. It started five or six years ago and students are still talking about it.
23. The whistle.
There was this one girl with a super-annoying laugh and someone started a rumour that she had swallowed a whistle when she was little.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.