Did Your School Have Its Psycho?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

i went to a “nice” girls school, but boy my year seemed to be full of odd people.

the clique of girls who starved and cut themselves were scary.

as was the girl with an IQ of 150 who turned up every other month, stoned, to hand in 20 page essays on classes she hadn’t attended. she came top in all the exams every year, but works in a local shop.

and the girl who carved things into the walls with a chef’s knife, spat at the teachers, and eventually left when she became pregnant at 14.

most of them needed therapy, and some of them even got it.

22

So, Eve, did somebody corner this guy at the reunion and ask him what the hell his problem was?

23

Hell, no—we were still scared of him!

24

Well, I did have one high school classmate who committed a particularly grisly murder, but it happened several years after graduation, and I can’t say he struck me as particularly psychotic while we were in school.

There was also Bobby “The Quest for Fire Continues” G-----, who communicated mostly by grunting (he wasn’t mentally handicapped or anything, he just chose to grunt) and had a friendly habit of greeting people by bopping them on the head. Sort of a cross between a cave man and Little Bunny Foo-Foo, only scarier, because he did have a way of following me around and muttering my name under his breath for reasons unknown. As far as I know, he’s still working a minimum-wage job and smoking dope in the ol’ hometown – no spectacular newspaper headlines or anything.

25

It wasn’t from my school, but I did encounter a complete psycho. It was late in a JV lacrose game with another school. We were winning, and I was in since our Coach was of the ‘everyone plays’ school of coaching. I was small, but decently fast.

Anyway, the player I had to cover had about 80 lbs on me ( I was about 105 lbs at this time). No biggie, but he started making a couple of rough shots, one of which got him a penalty. When he came back out of the box I managed to pull a move that evaded one of his checks (we were nowhere near the ball) and ran down field to where the ball had been passed.

When I slowed down (IIRC, there was an interception) I was slammed in the back with the end of the stick, follwed up by this psycho-player from the other school. I’m still unclear what happened next, but as I understand it he that started wailing on me with various kicks, and tried to jab the end of the stick anywhere, when that wasn’t satisfying enough he got down on the ground on top of me trying to pull my helmet off.

By this time the referee had whistled, but the guy didn’t stop. He kept trying to pull of my helmet and/or stick fingers in to gouge at my eyes, agian while kicking me.

Finally, he was picked up and thrown by a teammate, a huge fellow from Japan who in retrospect must have been the son of a Sumo wrestler. Where he landed, our team captain sat on his chest and pressed the longside of his stick into the guys throat to keep him down. Other players apparently surrounded him in case the other team started a brawl. But no tone of them even came to his aid, this apparently was no surprise to them and they seemed to feel that he was going to get what he deserved.

They got me offield, I was stunned, but not seriously hurt, mostly shooken up. The ref questioned me, both sides coaches and assistant coaches did every field test they knew to see if I was still coherant and funcitonal. All I really had was a bruise in the back, and a few sore spots. I remember the team captain asking me how I was doing, turning to an approaching member of the other team and yelling “Haven’t you done enough?!”. The other guy looked awful, I think he came over to apologize.

They decided I didn’t need to go to the hospital. And after a few conferences between coaches & the referee decided to finish the game. The psycho player was ordered intot the schoolbus that brought them there along with the assistant coach. I never knew his fate

Our team scored threee more goals in a very short period of time, mostly becuase I don’t think the other team wanted to play anymore. After the game when the players shake eacxh other hands the other sides team members all apologized as best they could. There were many comments, from which I gathered that they weren’t terribly surprised by this guys psychosis on the field and at the same time. They had a bad day turned into a shameful day from this guys actions. I suspect he didn’t last long at the school after that little incident.

26

Our top psycho in junior high was named, IIRC, Brian. He was a couple of years older than everybody else, having been held back more than once. Just one example of his bizarre behavior:

I remember sitting in seventh-grade English. Brian was two rows to my right. He was sufficiently volatile that nobody would make eye contact or overtly pay attention to what he was doing, but the odd glance made it clear he was carefully and systematically pulling the spiral wire out of his notepad.

Okay, dude, whatever. Head back down and don’t watch, don’t attract his attention.

Until some girl’s horrified gasp made us all look:

Brian had screwed the spiral wire through the meat of his right thumb. Blood was running down his arm. He was holding his hand at face level, fingers curled, thumb up, and was jiggling his wrist back and forth to bounce the protruding wire.

Silence falls. Nobody says anything.

Brian realizes he has everybody’s attention, including the teacher, who sits open-mouthed at the front. After a moment, Brian grins, gets up, and walks out, leaving a pool of blood on his desk.

Truly a freak. Regular fights, disciplinary problems, vandalism, you name it. But that act of casual self-mutilation is what really stuck in my memory.

27

This is not strictly on-topic, but reading these stories did bring to mind my experience with the comp.os.vms newsgroup, that I used to read when I was a programmer/DBA using VMS several years ago. There was one regular on the list (Carl) who was very knowledgeable about VMS and was always ready with correct answers to abstruse technical problems on the OS; on the other hand, he would flame mercilessly anyone who poster an incorrect answer, bad information, or even items that he disagreed with, but that IMHO represented a legitimate difference of opinion. Periodically on the list people would tell him that it wasn’t necessary to be such a jerk but he didn’t change.
Finally, one of the newsgroup participants who was personally insulted by Carl gathered up some of Carl’s most offensive posts and forwarded them to Carl’s employer. Carl was fired, and tragically died a month afterwards. Later on it transpired that he had been very ill in the past few months (years) of his life, and perhaps losing his job precipitated his death? It was a shame, not the least because he was an expert in his field.
Here’s a link with more details.

28

We had 3 different psychos in our high school. One went nuts because a girl snubbed him and brought a gun to school. (this was late-80’s) He then proceeded to take an entire classroom (a portable trailer classroom which was more isolated) hostage and terrorize the girl that had snubbed him. He brandished the gun for about an hour and shot a couple of holes in the floor before someone was able to talk him down and take the gun from him.

A few years before that incident, two young guys BURNED OUR HIGH SCHOOL DOWN one Saturday night.
REO Speedwagon played a benefit concert to raise money for the new school, incidentally. (like I said, this was the mid to late-80’s)

29

Errr…that should read “went nuts and brought a gun to school because a girl snubbed him”. :smack:

30

I remember Carl quite well from other forums. He even flamed me once when he misunderstood what I had said. I came back at him pointing at his error and he did not continue. However, as the description says, he did not suffer fools gladly. Given who some of the fools were on the sci.skeptic and talk.origins were, that was easy to undestand.

I don’t think he really deserved that firing though, the guy who did it sort of washed his hands of it, trying to blame Carl for being such an ass, but what the hell, it was USENET.

At least Carl didn’t drink himself to death like one of his s.s. opponents.

31

Ours could be divided into two groups: the dumb psychos and the smart psychos. Not necessarily a rflection of their actual intelligence, but of how well they avoided punishment.

The ‘dumb’ ones generally didn’t last long; they’d make everyone nervous for a while, explode, then never be heard from again. They included one 6’6" guy who put his fist through one of those ‘unbreakable’ wire-mesh door windows, and another who got back at someone for stealing his walkman by taking a 25-lb. barbell plate and clubbing the thief over the head with it.

The ‘smart’ ones were mainly into severe sexual harassment and racism. They also all had parents with political connections, and most of them got accepted at West Point.

32

Legomancer, your Paco story is really a good one. I think I can beat it, though :slight_smile:

During my sophomore year in high school, my friend Alan and I both took computer science classes. Our classes were in different periods, but taught in the same lab. A few weeks into the year, we were talking, and Alan mentioned this crazy kid in his CS class named Mike. Mike was a tall, thin, awkward-looking kid who had a bit of a temper, and would get increasingly angry with the compiler for reporting errors in his programs. He would scream obscenities, pound his fist on the keyboard, etc. One time he calmly stood up, backed away, and headbutted the monitor (didn’t actually push it off the desk, mind you). He never caused any real damage, and the teacher eventually gave up on trying to get him to stop this behavior.

A few months into the year, the computers started misbehaving. Each day, my class would come into the room and certain machines would not boot up, would blue-screen constantly, etc. One day I came in and my machine asked for a boot disk. It no longer had an operating system.

I was talking to Alan about this, and it turns out that Mike had begun punishing the computers that wouldn’t compile his programs by playing Russian roulette with system files. He would start deleting stuff until the machine would no longer boot, then move on to the next one.

One time, when he was supposed to be coding, he opened an eBay account under the name “Abrahamo Lincolni” (it still exists, look for yourself) and bid $34,000 on a Steinway grand piano. Fortunately, he lost the auction.

During our junior and senior years, his shenanigans got more and more unbelievable. One time he stole a 50-pound concrete chicken off someone’s front lawn, and placed it in front of the main entrance to the building. It remained there until a few kids lifted it and dropped it, causing it to shatter. I still have a chunk of Mike’s chicken on my desk.

During my senior year, the school installed security cameras. I was sitting on a bench during a free period one day, and Mike walked over holding a roll of duct tape. He ripped a big piece of black plastic off a trash bag, and taped it over the camera.

Mike had a short stint as a DJ on the school radio station. He was suspended several times for slandering teachers on the air, and finally was permanently banned from the station. He had racked up the MHS all-time record for FCC violations committed by one DJ. I listened to his show a few times, and it was actually really funny.

There are really too many Mike stories for me to list here. I could discuss the time he barged into the principal’s office and interrupted a phone call in order to complain about the Computer Code of Conduct. Or the time he produced $50 in pennies and $250 cash in an obsessive attempt to make the sophomore class lose a “Penny War” fund raiser contest. Or, the time he filled my friend Rob’s Chevy Lumina with garbage, up to window level. There really is just too much to list with this guy.

I heard that after high school, he went to the University of Connecticut at Hartford, where he was kicked out during his first semester for some incident involving a fire in his room. I’ve talked to a lot of people from high school, and nobody seems to know what has become of him since. As one of my friends put it, “He’ll either end up in jail, or in charge of a major corporation.”

-Andrew L

33

Rumor has it Charles Manson went to my high school… SHCP in San Francisco. Couldn’t find anything to support or deny that, though.

34

We had two that I can think of. Not that they were both notably psycho; they just had some bad turns and ended up badly.

Everyone thought Ben was just a bit strange. He came to school erratically, less so as we went through junior high. I could tell that he was poor by the clothes he wore, and I got the sense that he didn’t have a good homelife. I do know that he only went home when he absolutely had to. He was bizarre and chaotic, but brilliant. He was completely undirected, and usually didn’t show his intelligence (it didn’t fly with his friends, or really, with the way most people thought of him). I remember being confused by most of what he did.

Jason was the other. He and Ben were always together. Jason was a pretty big guy, and sometimes played the part of a bully, but usually his heart wasn’t really in it. He was a pretty nice guy when you got to know him, and I never knew him to concentrate insults on anyone.

Partway through 8th grade, Ben stopped coming to school. I heard rumors that he had gotten in trouble for drugs, but I’m not sure. It wouldn’t have surprised me, as I found out later that he was doing drugs. Jason still showed up, but I never talked to him much (I didn’t really know him except as Ben’s counterpart). I don’t know if anyone did. Near the end of that year he killed himself.

From time to time in the next few years I saw Ben. He had definitely worsened. I talked to him rarely because, frankly, he scared me. I knew he was involved in some bad stuff. Funny, because neither of them were in my high school, but they were still the acknowledged psychos of our class, to be mentioned in hushed tones and brooded upon for a few moments before returning to something else.

35

Alain.

He teased me mercilessly through middle school and high school. I was a couple of years younger than everyone, and a good student, and very, very involved in music. I used to miss a lot of school time for piano related things (lessons, concert, masterclasses)… so he picked on me relentlessly. I was a pretty vocal kid, so I could defend myself quite well, but his hurtful comments and the physical bullying were just way too much to handle.

One day in middle school, he stood by his locker (which was next to mine) and was harrassing me. I turned around and slammed the door of his locker on his head. The teacher (homeroom) who was right behind us pretended he didn’t see a thing. Revenge of the music nerd, that day. He still kept up his idiocy through highschool, but kept a clear distance from me (afraid of locker doors?)

He bullied everyone, and had his little band of thugs that followed him around like loyal dogs (think Malfoy in Harry Potter, just not quite as bright as Draco…) He picked on special ed kids. He picked on the gifted kids. He picked on the jocks, he picked on the geeks, he picked on anyone that wasn’t failing their courses, smoking like a chimney, and willing to screw every air-headed bimbo within a 100 km radius.

Revenge was mine when, two years ago. Guess who signed up for a class I was the TA for? Guess whose papers I got to mark? Exams? Booyeah. That felt GOOD.

He did come to me for help for his paper. And I did help. He actually seemed to have turned into a human being. He apologized for all his wrongdoings and actually seemed sincere…

36

Well, I knew a pretty good psycho in high school. In fact, its sorta a humiliating stain in high school for both my best friend and I. When we were Juniors, we met this girl in Drama named E__. At the time, we were helping make props for a play. I was doing it solely because I girl I liked was in the play/helping and I liked to hang around her. Well, we liked E___ at first because she seemed different, but later it became disturbingly obvious that she had some serious mental issues. Both my friend and I liked her at first, and we even stopped talking to each other over her. She played us against each other to drive us apart and take advantage of us. Eventually she tired of me and so had my ex-friend scare me off with various threats I was harassing them (I had emailed her sexually explicit stories I had written and her and ex friend used them against me). I gave up on it, thinking it was an awful stroke of fate that I would meet a psycho bitch and hate my best friend all in the same year. Well, over time she just got more and more disturbing. She had terrible personal hygene, and so she stank to high heaven. She was also totally oblivious to this; EVERYONE complained about it but she wouldn’t do anything about it. Twice she had to be dragged off campus by EMT because she just wigged out for no apparent reason; both times she was put in mental wards for observation. She was a compulsive liar who slandered everyone she disliked and stole from them. Physically she looked relatively attractive I guess her body odor had some female pheremone because she had no trouble attracting (mostly stinky) guys who would get suckered into buying stuff for her/ dealing with her enemies. My best friend dated this nut for 4 years. He had been starting to go through a depression when he met her, and even when he knew how awful she was, he was unable to break up with her. Also the fact that she would put him (and me) down, belittle everything we were good at and so take guys with low self-esteem and make them feel worthless to make her seem so great of a person. It was terrible. Eventually my friend snapped out of it and broke up with her, we became really good friends again. She lives near us so occasionally we will run into her by accident :eek: usually accompanied by some smelly guy hanging off of her because she’ll have sex with ANYTHING that moves-

When my friend dated her all of his pants were ruined because she wore his clothes and had an irregular period; she was so unkempt she often wouldn’t bother doing anything about the whole menstruation thing so many of her clothes and bedsheets were riddled with bloodstains. When talking to people she would always laugh nervously like she was holding back a funny joke which just plain creeped me out.

37

My school pyscho tried to kill me. Twice.
He was a big, slow (mentally and physically) guy named Ron, who was in special ed until late junior high, then mainstreamed into our classes.
The first time, I don’t think he really meant to kill me, although he said he was going to. I managed to get away from him, and brushed it off as nicely as I could. (I was young and sorta dumb; still thought I had to “be nice” to everyone, even those who grabbed me from behind and threatened murder).
The second time, though–wow. I was walking down a back hallway of the school (during class, so it was empty) and he dodged out of a side door, grabbed me, dragged me up onto the dark stage area, got his hands around my throat, and started banging my head on the floor. Luckily, some of the guys in a nearby class saw him drag me out of the hall, and–with the complete, bizarre logic of teenagers–asked to be excused to their lockers (instead of saying, “Hey! Someone just got kidnapped there!”), ran up to the stage, and dragged him off. His response: “I’as just jokin’,” and off he wandered to class, while I lay there and watched the room spin for a while. The guys gave me some sage advice: “Stay away from Ronnie, Karol, okay?”

Heh. Like I needed a reminder at that point.

38

We had 2 rapists, about 11 arsonists, one murderer, a couple of hard-core druggies -

Nope. No real psycho’s though.

39

It was around the time I was born (mid '80s), but my high school had a psycho. Okay, he had graduated a year before, but he went on a shooting spree through the local suburbs. He shot primarily inanimate objects, but did shoot one middle school kid, giving him a nasty wound. The shooter later surrendered to the cops.

Four people who went to my high school were killed by robbers, in what is generally a psychotic way. This was early '90s, they were closing up the bowling alley they were working at, and some robbers came in and killed them all execution style. Rather psychotic.

Then the elementary school my uncle went to in the late '50s had a psycho a few years before…A deranged father blew himself up in that elementary school (Poe Elementary), and took out 6 other people with him. Quite disturbing.

40

Psycho? Yeah, but not in school. Crazy Dave was an odd conspiracy theorist type who used to hang out at the popular bars in our town. Stories about him abound, including the one about him pulling a gun on a police officer who knocked on his door one night, and the fact that he kept an old bottle of penicillin in the fridge at one of the bars “just in case I’m here when the government gives everyone anthrax.” Yes, he said that to me. And was serious.

To cap it off, he recently deprived himself of sleep for (he says) 6 days, at the end of which, he decided that he was masturbating too much, so he went to a friend’s woodshop and proceeded to amputate his own left arm with a band saw.

Crazy Dave is now committed.