23 Wild Stories Of What Happened To *That One Kid* From High School
Recently, we wrote about what happened to *that one person* people went to high school with, and the BuzzFeed Community chimed in with some truly wild new examples. Here are 23 more stories that I honestly can hardly believe are true.
NOTE: There are mentions of murder, child sex images, animal cruelty, and assault.
1."The year after I graduated high school, the class president/top student in the class the year below me wrote an online burn book that went into detail rating each senior in the class. He went through person by person (360 people), rated them based on a scale he created, and provided details about each person. I’m not sure if he put it online, but somehow, it ended up being circulated throughout the entire school. The local news was doing stories about it, parents were pissed, and it was the talk of the school for some time. The kid ended up being expelled and went into hiding. Not sure where he is now. It was wild — he spilt so much tea!!!"
—Anonymous
2."There was a brother/sister duo in my grade who always gave everyone weird vibes, and both of them were known for having extreme emotional outbursts (almost exclusively angry and occasionally violent) and for seeming weirdly close for siblings. A couple of years after we graduated, we learned that they had moved to Arizona together and had been arrested together for animal abuse. Their neighbors called it in because apparently the smell was so bad you could smell it from outside the house. The house was absolutely disgusting, and they found more than five dead animals in and outside of the house."
3."This kid was kind of a square in high school; he didn't really hang out. A couple years after we graduated, he blew his fingers off trying to make a bomb in the basement."
4."My senior year we had a student transfer to my HS from the next town over. We couldn't figure out why she didn't want to graduate with her own friends. Turns out her school made her transfer because she got married to one of her teachers."
5.This one's from college, but it's too wild not to include: "I took an Intro to Philosophy class in college and randomly sat in the back next to this quiet kid. We were both neuroscience majors and got along somewhat as we both disliked the very non-science-based explanations for things. I say somewhat because he always give me a weird vibe so I always declined his invites for coffee and drinks. We had to do a final project, and he chose to do his project based on the idea that a person could use LSD for mind control and, weirdly, brought cookies to share on the last day as well. I passed on the cookies. The following semester, he was arrested by the FBI for attempting to make ricin in his apartment with plans to put it in the water supply at our school."
—Anonymous
6."My high school had a small group of kids that made being the edgy outcasts their entire personalities. As the years went on, they started getting into partying, but that eventually led to them taking drugs. Sometime within the first year of high school, this girl P started dating a prominent guy in that group. She was a really sweet, homeschooled, naïve church girl that transferred to our school, and she fell for the 'bad guy.' As the years progressed, she became more popular (infamous) because of the drugs and partying and started fighting, etc."
"Sometime in senior year, they broke up. He started dating her friend, and she just really lost it. She didn't walk with us at graduation, but her social media presence showed that she was heavily into the party scene and would brag online about her excessive alcohol intake.
She passed away in a car accident. She was driving shit-faced, entered the wrong side of the highway, and hit a family van going 60 mph. She and the family she hit (five people) all burned alive.
And the 'bad guy' she fell for who got her hooked to drugs and essentially led to her spiral is in jail for beating up his baby momma (P's ex-best friend). Just utterly tragic all around."
7."One guy I went to high school with helped plan the Charlottesville Rally where the woman was killed, and he did time for his part in planning it."
8."I went to high school with this boy who was cute and quiet and just seemed like genuinely a nice guy. I had a crush on him in HS, but nothing came of it until a few years after and we reconnected and were casually seeing each other. But I was still hung up on my ex, so when he came back around, I kind of ghosted him. He was moving about 1.5 hours away anyways and was going to become a police officer. He wasn't on social media so I lost track of him. Out of curiosity, one day I googled him. He did become a cop, but unfortunately, he became a cop that has a reputation — and quite a few inquiries, as one that physically beats Black civilians. I really couldn't believe it when I read it... That was a few years ago, before COVID and the Black Lives Matter movement... I looked him up again more recently, and there had been a few more instances since, but he still has a job."
"Still shocks the hell out of me that that's what he turned out to be."
9."There was a guy that I had a crush on all through high school. Every girl pretty much had a crush on him. He only saw me as a friend, though, and we hung out all the time, even when he was dating other girls. We lost touch after graduation, but I kept up with him on Facebook. One day, he just disappeared, and I didn’t know what happened. Turns out he was put in federal prison for distributing child sex images."
—Anonymous
10."I was friends with the young guy who had a seizure and fell into the NYC Subway tracks when a man (whose little kids were right there) jumped down, covered my friend's body with his, and saved his life as the train went over them. The older man was hailed the Subway Hero (there’s even a 30 Rock episode about it). It was all over the news."
"My friend was one of the most genuinely kind people I knew from HS. He was quiet, funny, and sweet. I haven’t talked to him since high school, but I’ll always be grateful for that man saving my friend’s life that day."
11."Former classmate of mine. We had about every class together in elementary school from first to fifth grade. He was kind of a weird kid, always getting in trouble for dumb kid stuff. His family was super weird, too. His mom was constantly at the school just kind of hanging around. If she wasn’t in our class, she was in his younger brother’s class. Not because she was a volunteer, but because these kids constantly were in trouble. Like one time in second grade, her kid in my class had gotten in trouble for speaking out of turn. She just so happened to be walking past the classroom and caught wind of what happened, so she found some duct tape, took her kid, and put him in a chair in the middle of the room facing our teacher and taped his mouth shut and his body to the chair. We were all stunned."
"Anyway, years go by, and to my knowledge, nobody’s heard from him or of him in all that time. Until one day on Facebook, I see someone post about the kid with the weird mom. He had been arrested for trying to kidnap a little girl literally down the street from our old elementary school. From the look of his mugshot, it looked as though hard times had hit his life. Unfortunately, however sad this was, it wasn’t surprising. His home life as a child seemed pretty wild so it made sense that his life ended up this way. This was about 10 years ago. Haven’t heard a thing about him since."
—Anonymous
12."A girl who was in the same class as my sister in HS was murdered on her doorstep after getting dropped off from a night out with friends in a wealthy neighborhood. They never found the killer but had some suspicions of who — someone who lived a few houses down. Fast-forward 20+ years, this person we (and the police) were suspicious of turned out to be a serial killer, and was the one arrested in the Ashton Kutcher girlfriend murder in CA. Ever since I got my driver's license, I wait extra long to make sure my friends get in the house and the door closes and have taught my children the same."
—Anonymous
13."I had a friend in high school in the same year as me. He was our marching band's drum major, he wrote our school fight song, and he was a good guy. He went to school to become a pastor, and eventually became a lead pastor at a church in our area. A few years ago, he was arrested for molesting an 18-month-old girl from his church."
14."Our high school valedictorian married a teacher the summer after graduation. They’d obviously been together while she was still in high school."
15."Went to high school with a girl in a small tourist trap town, age of consent here is 16 btw. As a 16–17-year-old senior, she dated her track coach, and when her parents caught wind, she said it was non-consensual, and that guy got fired and had to register as a sex offender."
"She went on to date a local celebrity when she was 18–20 and he was well into his 40s or 50s. All I know from that is she threatened this guy with a knife a few times, and the police were called. But now, she’s a mega-Trumper, trying to be a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, and I think she’s had a small snippet on Fox News somewhere."
16."I went to high school with this guy; he was the charming troublemaker type. The kind of guy that was sweet to girls, kind to teachers, but skipped class often, never did any work, and got into fights a lot. I only ever had one class with him, and when he showed up, he always asked me for a pen, then would give it back at the end of class without ever writing anything. I knew he wasn't a great guy really, but he seemed harmless at the time."
"Well, if I google his name now, I get a long string of articles about his various court cases, charges, prison sentences, etc., mostly domestic violence, assault, sexual assault, etc. He has spent the majority of the 20 years since he left high school behind bars for violent crimes."
17."Middle school, sixth grade, there was this kid Greg, and he was in most of my classes (we were separated off for a gifted and talented program). He was definitely an oddball. He was into anime and once told me he ate raw beef because he was a vampire and needed the blood. One day, his mom picked him up early from school. We were in social studies presenting projects — I think he actually got out of presenting due to the early dismissal. That night, his mother put a bullet in his and his little sister's heads. She went to a building on campus of the local university the next day and tried to hold it up with a fake gun. Everyone assumed it was attempted suicide by police. When they asked her where the kids were, she told them they were safe and with their father. He had died shortly before the sister was born. I think about them often."
"On Greg’s behalf, I wanted to add that this was when the Twilight books first started popping off and the vampire thing was huge throughout my class."
18."A girl who was given the 'Best Christian' award got pregnant at 19 while unmarried. Don't get me started on the idea of giving a 'Best Christian' award even in a private school."
—ehch
19."A kid I grew up with is in prison for molesting his daughters. They were quite young, I believe. I had just seen him — he was a door-to-door salesman and came to my friend's house while I was there. Years later, I became close to his younger brother and heard more of the story. Very sad."
"He was always creepy, btw. From grade school on — bad vibes."
20."Elyse Pahler was a close neighbor of mine, and her sister was my classmate. She was murdered 200 feet from my house by my adjacent neighbors — these kids I used to walk up the street home with at the bus stop — in 1995. They also had sex multiple times with her dead corpse. Elyse Pahler’s parents were the ones that sued the band Slayer back in the day."
21."Kid I graduated with was voted most likely to succeed. Created a very public life in a city hundreds of miles away, all based on lies, fraud, and fantasy. He was eventually uncovered and was sent to jail for fraud. The trial produced evidence that showed everything about his life was a lie, especially his so-called wealth."
"Another kid who graduated four years ahead of me was an outcast. Very artsy. Did some drugs. Went through a 'Jesus freak' stage. He was a nice kid, but very odd. Of course, he was bullied. Within 10 years, he was a world-famous artist. Then all his bullies claimed he was their best friend in high school."
22."A girl I went to school with got into the drug scene early on. It was always rumored she would prostitute herself to older guys to get drugs. She snuck out one night freshman year of high school and was found two days later, laying facedown in a puddle of vomit, in the bed of a 30-year-old man. She had overdosed, and he left her there until police forced their way inside. She was 14."
23.And finally, here's one person who was the subject of a wild hometown story themselves, though it wasn't true:
"I was an honor student in HS. A total loser, sometimes bullied, but mostly a nobody. I had to drop out junior year and take the proficiency exam so I could move out of my home and start working. About a year later, I heard from a friend that a rumor was going around I had become an addict and dropped out of school to move to LA where I was working as a prostitute to pay for my drug habit. Really I was just working at Chili’s and going to junior college, but I’ve never gone to any reunions so I really hope this one is still going around!"
Do you have any wild stories about someone you went to school with? Let us know in the comments.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
