Recently, we asked the BuzzFeed Community to share the wild stories of coaches and teachers from their high school, and I'm in shock at how many actually sent chills down my spine. Here are 28 stories that prove school staff are not always trusted adults.
1. "My high school principal was arrested for murdering a secretary and dissolving her body in a vat of acid in his basement."
—Anonymous
2. "Our English teacher was our classmate's mother, and she was goofy and smart, and everyone loved her! Her daughter was in sports and popular and super nice. Senior year she dated another of our classmates for a bit, but it didn't get super serious it seemed. Very, very shortly after we graduated, it came out that the mother was dating the ex-boyfriend...who had also been her student. Very seriously dating. She got divorced, had a period of difficult relationship with the daughter and all. They are still together over a decade later, and her daughter seems to be fine with it now."
—Anonymous
3. "A couple years after graduating high school, I learned that a popular coach’s wife was murdered by a home invader. It happened the day or so before they were supposed to leave the country on this huge business venture of the coach’s. Kids from school, and grads (including myself) went to the HS field and held a candlelit vigil for the family. It turns out that there was no huge business venture; the coach murdered his wife instead of coming clean, then made up the invader story. He is serving life in prison."
—Anonymous
4. "My elementary school gym teacher was a huge creep and was well known for harassing female teachers. An all around bad guy, often targeted students and made life hell for them. He got fired when I went to middle school. But about 15 years later, my best friend found out he was currently doing time in prison for possession of a huge amount of child porn. He’s still in prison."
—Anonymous
5. "The high school I went to had multiple teachers that made the news. My freshman year a special education teacher was accused of sleeping with three students. My senior year there were whispers of another teacher sleeping with a student — nothing came of it, but the teacher was released. Also, a few years after I graduated, a school resource officer was in the news for being accused of illegally strip searching students. Then another teacher was in the news for illegally distributing marijuana in the school. Lastly, another teacher made the news for a good reason — winning the teacher tournament on Jeopardy!"
—Anonymous
6. "I had a PE teacher my seventh-grade year who was best described as the cool teacher. Everyone loved him, he was kinda cute simply because he was younger than every other teacher in school, and he spoke to us like peers instead of students. Literally maybe a month ago, I randomly decided to look this teacher up, just for kicks, to see what he was up to. Married? Maybe a few kids? Those were the things I was thinking I’d see. Nope. MULTIPLE articles about his RECENT dismissal from his job at my former middle school (mind you, this is 20 years later) for sexual misconduct that dated back to before he was even my teacher."
"Apparently, he had been asked to resign from the school that he taught at a year before becoming my teacher for a relationship with a student that was proved and documented by letters he wrote to the student. The only reason that he was allowed to continue teaching was because the district allowed the reason that he was removed from his previous position to be stricken. Students, and apparently teachers alike, were all victims of his misconduct. From making creepy comments about their bodies to inappropriate touching. In hindsight, I guess he did favor some of the girls back when I was in school, but I don’t think any of us would’ve guessed that this would be his outcome. Gross."
—Anonymous
7. "My high school biology teacher used to wear very short skirts. She made it a habit to sit the guys on the first row of seats. She would then jump on the tall demonstration table in front of the class where she would sit and lecture. That gave us sophomore guys a close view of her legs. During lunch, she would invite some of us into the workroom attached to her classroom to help her with various tasks...but mostly to talk and smoke. One day, I was the only one she invited into her workroom. I got firsthand instruction on human anatomy. This continued for the remainder of the school year. I become quite familiar with the female anatomy. I never mentioned it to anyone, and as far as I know, she was never found out."
—Anonymous
8. "One of our high school security guards posted an explicit video. It went around the school like wildfire, and she left...only to return a year later when her children started high school."
—Anonymous
9. "I knew the School Resource Officer stationed at my high school fairly well (or so I thought). He was the officer running the D.A.R.E. program when I was in elementary school, and his daughter and I became friends in middle school. A few years after I graduated, the news broke that he had been having a long-term affair...with a girl who was in the same grade as his daughter. They had met while she was still in school. Not sure how long they had been *together* before the news broke, but he was fired from his job, and he left his wife. No idea what he does for work now, but I do know the two of them got married and have a few kids. It's been 10 years, and I will occasionally see them together in town."
—Anonymous
10. "A teacher (probably late 30s, early 40s) at my high school was pretty well known for flirting with and giving preferential treatment to pretty girls. He was a good-looking guy, tattoos, kinda looked like he should’ve been working at a bar rather than as a high school math teacher. Our senior year, he took particular interest in a girl I knew, but it didn’t publicly go anywhere. When we were in college, it became public knowledge that they started dating right after high school graduation and got engaged. He got fired from the school, and they got married anyway. From what I understand, he got violent with her a lot and had a drinking problem. They’re divorced now, and he no longer has social media or a teaching job."
—Anonymous
11. "High school girls basketball coach. Never got any weird vibes from him when I was on the team. But a few years after graduation, I read a news article saying he’d been arrested in a massive sting for soliciting sex from minors! Thankfully, the person he was texting was actually an undercover cop."
—Anonymous
12. "When I was in sixth grade, there was this one teacher in our elementary school who always seemed like the nicest teacher, and all of his students loved him. We all thought he was great. He would always compliment me on my auburn hair. He even got to know my mom and would talk to her every time she picked me up. Fast-forward a year later while I had moved on to junior high, this teacher had moved down a few grades to teach third grade. One day during school, he was immediately suspended and then arrested and taken to prison. He had been accused of rubbing at least one student's genitalia, putting his hand down the pocket of the student, and having the student sit on his lap during class and behind his desk so no one could see. Didn’t see it coming at all, and it shocked all of us. Turns out you never really know someone, I guess."
—Anonymous
13. "Two of the teachers at the elementary school attached to my middle school were married. They were both the super quirky hipster-types, and they had the kind of relationship that seemed to be as solid as a stone. It was obvious that they loved each other, even if they kept PDA out of the school. The husband would always write a note for the other in their lunch, and she kept them all on a little cork board behind her desk. The notes were either cute doodles or just little positive 'you can do it'-type things. The wife gave him little gadgets and fidgets that he'd set up on his desk. Turned out her husband also loved a bunch of other teachers at the school."
"It was a huge scandal, but not super surprising because it kind of seems like a lot of the adults at that school were sleeping around with each other at some point. They got divorced after I graduated high school. The husband no longer teaches and has a fairly popular local band. He apparently still loves lots of women. His wife still teaches first and second grade, and seems to be happy to be on her own with her pugs and her vintage Barbie collection — I pet sit her pugs which is how I learned about this."
—Anonymous
14. "One teacher was known for flirting with students. Before I moved to the high school, she slept with a student, and literally everyone knew about it, but nothing was ever done. This teacher was WILD. While I was in high school, a video was posted on TikTok by her two young twin daughters talking about their kitten that died. They explained how, and it was literally the wildest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Someone was doing laundry, and the cat jumped into the dryer, and somehow, no one realized and started it, and the cat died, and instead of just telling us that didn’t happen, she sat down with all of her classes and ADMITTED TO IT? And THEN this same teacher ended up having an affair on her husband (who was ALSO a teacher at this school) and married the local dentist. THEN very recently had another affair with ANOTHER MARRIED TEACHER in her car behind the gym DURING A BIG BASKETBALL GAME???? And another teacher ended up finding them."
"She still works at this high school, and he only got fired because he was sexually harassing the cheerleaders."
—Anonymous
15. "The music/band teacher from my high school was always weird/creepy, and one day he just didn’t show for class. Turns out he had been sending explicit pics to students and had gotten arrested. The student came forward after he tried to cuddle her under a blanket on the bus on a field trip."
—Anonymous
16. "I went to a college-type campus for high school, so we had three sets of schools on one property that we would go between for different classes. I remember being in one of the three high schools for economics class, and the third teacher that year was just caught for sexual advancements with students. My economics teacher said he likes to stay in the building we're in now because our school motto was our teachers keep their hands to themselves."
—Anonymous
17. "Before graduating college and for a year after, I was hired to work in on-campus housing at the university I had graduated from. As part of my job, I oversaw all of the summer camps and conferences that would reserve our residence halls to stay in. Every summer I would oversee a very large high school football camp that would take over every floor in every building we had. High school teams from several states would come and do a camp with the college players. There was this one coach for one of the teams that I always got an icky feeling from. You know, the creep-factor spidey-senses were going real hard. Turns out that while he was on a trip with his team, he had a 14-year-old high school girl as the team manager, and she would go to the bigger games and camps with the team. While he had been on these trips and while back at the high school, he had been sexually assaulting her."
"It happened over a period of time and while he was coming to the university’s sponsored football camps. I was required to submit documentation to the cops during the investigation as the girl had been attending these camps and staying on-campus. He was arrested on nine counts of forceful sexual abuse and one count of object rape. I hate that he was able to do this for so long to that girl and felt even worse that it could’ve happened while being in housing."
—Anonymous
18. "My son was in middle school, and he was supposed to be tutored after school by the special education teacher. There were about 8 to 10 kids in the program. Two months before the end of school, she was arrested. Turns out that she was leaving the kids to go next door to the high school and was having sex with several boys in the dugout of the baseball field. One of the boys confessed to his parents. She got five years in prison. I saw her at the store 10 years later, and she literally ran out to her car and tried to hide in the backseat."
—Anonymous
19. "My high school Spanish teacher was my very favorite teacher (back in the early 1970s) because she always cared about me and would try to help me when I had emotional struggles. She was my teacher for three years. Sometimes she would come to school with her arm in a cast or a black eye. Never thought about it — I think I was too naive to even consider spousal abuse. She was married to a UC Berkeley professor so it just never occurred to anyone. Several years after we graduated, a friend told me she saw in the paper that she murdered her husband because he abused her one too many times. She was caught running down the street naked with the weapon I think. I always felt so awful about that; she was such a good person…a Cuban refugee from the Castro revolution, etc. Never was able to find out what happened to her or if she’s even still alive."
—Anonymous
20. "I went to a small town K–12 school in upstate NY with a mostly Italian Catholic population, so additional elementary Catholic school classes and teen catechism classes were not optional. Enter Father Jim Mulcahy, our new priest AND somehow English teacher who had us write personal journal entries to him and then would comment on them in front of the class. This among other humiliating comments. A nasty piece of work. He’s a fugitive now for victimizing several children, including his foster children."
—Anonymous
21. "Before my mother passed away, she made a request that I attend Catholic school, which I did. There was a priest there that was the most friendly, kindest person that my then 8-year-old self could find. In 2016, while living in an assisted living facility for retired pressers, he was arrested for exposing himself to a 16-year-old boy who walked past his window on the way to school."
—Anonymous
22. "We had a high school teacher in our town walk into a local mall, steal flip flops from the Flip Flop Shop, and then run from the police when she was caught red-handed. She ran to the mall bathroom and tried to shove the shoes into the paper towel dispenser to hide her new pair of flip flops she ripped off. She was finally caught, and they let her keep her job as a teacher. She came back to class and just went back like nothing happened. We were looking at her mugshot every time she gave us a bad grade."
—Anonymous
23. "Went to a small school. Had a teacher there everyone loved. His kids went to school there, too. Find out years later on the news he had been molesting female students and only got caught recently."
—Anonymous
24. "I was a junior in high school, and there was one science teacher who would always have the senior girls in his classroom even when it wasn’t their class time. There were always rumors, but no concrete proof. One year, a 17-year-old (we’ll call her Jenny) born-again Catholic transferred into senior year. All the other girls either graduated or stopped hanging around the classroom. But Jenny always had a seat right next to the teacher, no matter the time of day. Jenny used religion as a way to act like she was better than others and say that everyone was going to hell. By the end of that year, she was pregnant by her boyfriend and had to redo her senior year. When the new semester started, she was in school, but the science teacher was not."
"Less than a month later, the local newspaper broke the story that they'd been together, and neither Jenny nor the science teacher was ever seen again. From what I last heard, he lost his NY teaching license, they moved to Florida, got married, and had two children. They’ve since divorced — she remarried and had her fourth baby."
—Anonymous
25. "Sophomore year I went to summer school circa 1993. The teacher had structured this English class entirely around watching and writing about Beavis and Butt-Head. I kid you not. Like many teachers, he had a student aid to help run errands for him and whatnot during class. She was in high school, obviously. The next year, I saw them holding hands in the grocery store I worked at just down the street from the high school. No clue if they were ever caught for being so brazen about it in public."
26. "The principal at a school my wife used to teach at bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle without his wife's knowledge, and was storing it in a building at the school. He allowed the school janitor to ride it sometimes in exchange for keeping it quiet. Well, the janitor got in a massive accident that resulted in him being in a coma for a while, and it came out in the news who the bike was registered to. His wife threatened to divorce him, the janitor sued him, the school board investigated misuse of school property...it was a LOT of drama!"
27. "I was a good kid and involved in a lot of clubs and groups and even was class vice president. I was maybe a bit nerdy but also very social in different groups. To maintain my teachers' favor, I also was very friendly with staff, teachers, and my counselor. Math was always my least favorite subject so I ran into a little bit of trouble my senior year. I went to my counselor to discuss the plan of action. He was always really creepy, had somewhat of a stiff neck walk and a rubbery smile. When I was sitting in his office, he closed the door behind me. He would sometimes call me a Puerto Rican princess, which I always felt uncomfortable with, but he’s mentioned it because he said he had Puerto Rican roots as well. I had my camcorder I would use to record my friends on the quad during lunch of us just being silly."
"I didn’t realize it was still recording in my bag, but I really wish I would’ve pointed it at him because he proceeded to rub my leg and tell me, 'I’m sure there’s something we can do to make sure that this class doesn’t hold you up at graduation.' Visibly shaken, I kind of ran out of his office. After that day, he made sure that no matter what I did in math to get my grade up, I would not be graduating on stage. ... A few years after graduation, I heard he had heart surgery and died on the table."
—Anonymous