When we are in school, we often put together some of the more interesting experiences in our lives. We might even hold onto some of those memories and, although we don’t think about them often, they do come to mind when we are reminded of them. In some cases, those memories are very funny and in others, they are just weird. When people were asked to talk about a time when teachers just got up and left the class randomly, never to return, the memories people gave were really eye-opening.
1. “The elementary school my mom used to work for had some crazy drama. The principal disappeared. No joke he just didn’t come to work one day. He never called, no emails. Even his WIFE had no idea where he was! There was a police investigation and everything.
Weeks later the truth comes out. He was secretly gay and ran off with some other man.
Just packed a bag and left his life completely and was never heard from again.”
2. “I have two stories. My 4th grade teacher never came back after Christmas vacation. He was a very sweet old man, and looked just the way you would imagine a 75 year old cowboy to look like. He was very cheerful and a great teacher. Often he would make time for some very cool stories from his youth if we finished the lesson early and sometimes he even would play the harmonica for us. Even parents loved him. Just one of the best teachers a 4th grader could ever desire.
He passed away at some point during the holidays. But we weren’t told. The official announcement was that he had retired and went back to his hometown or something like that. I only found out about the truth about a year after. I cried so hard… I just would have liked to say goodbye to such a great man and hear his music one last time. He’s a very happy memory from my childhood.
Another time, my 7th and 8th grade English teacher went on vacation in Germany. She never showed up to school after that. I heard she got back with a ‘friend’ and just stayed with him in Germany. I hope she’s doing alright. She was such a sweet person.”
3. “It happened with a substitute teacher. It was obvious she was fired.
It was 12th grade English. Walk in to find we have a sub. Young girl not long out of college. Apparently, she was another teacher’s daughter. First thing she did is ask the class ‘Does anyone know Mrs. S?’ Some responses ‘Yes.’ She then replies, “Yeah she’s my mom, she’s a total witch isn’t she?’ Class went quiet.
She then starts telling us that she’s only subbing until she gets her very successful business off the ground. She spent the first half of class telling us how amazing her company is and that anyone can join and make big bucks. Yes it was an MLM (aka pyramid scheme). She was trying to recruit high school kids. We didn’t really know what was going on so we just let her do her spiel.
Bell rings for lunch (split period). When we get back from lunch she continues to lecture us about this ‘amazing opportunity.’
Out of nowhere, a kid screams ‘where is my freaking iPod?!?’ The teacher tells him to calm down and the kid goes ‘No! My iPod was in my backpack before lunch and now it’s gone! You were the only one in here, where is it?!?’ She got super offended and started yelling at the kid, he started yelling back. Finally, she says obviously someone in the class must of stole it (yeah right), and conducts a search herself. She makes every kid empty their pockets, bags, and purses. Obviously, none of the kids had it, so the poor kid asked the sub to empty her purse and pockets. She flat out refused. The kid storms out and goes to the principle. Moments later the office staff show up and take her out of the classroom and we never heard from her again.”
4. “One of my high school teachers stopped showing out of nowhere and we had substitutes for a week or so. In the meantime, rumors arose that he was involved with a student and all sorts of things. He finally came to school one day and told us that he was leaving and he felt weird. We heard a couple of weeks later that he was beat up in the parking by a student’s boyfriend (who went to jail for that, not his first rodeo) and the teacher was like… Nope I’m out of here. Turns out the rumors were spread around by the girl to hide what really happened. Apparently, she had bad grades in his math class. He was never involved with a student. It’s a shame because he was a great teacher and genuinely a nice guy.”
5. “Science teacher in my high school. Let’s call him Mr. B. I wasn’t in his class at the time because I had already finished my requirements, but my friends were. Halfway through Junior year a lot of substitutes are coming in, all tight lipped about what had happened to Mr. B. Everyone was curious about what could have happened, and at the time the only information that substitutes would give was that he was taking time off due to ‘family problems’.
My friend, who knew a lot of people and had been asking around, said he was in trouble with the law because he had been asking a fifteen year old girl for nudes. Many people started to come forward saying how much time she would spend with him after school and would always sit in his chair while he was teaching. The girl’s friend found out and told the school officer about the text messages. Rumor had it that he was also going to leave his wife for her.
A friend of mine got to read the text messages and said that he was the one who texted her first, asking what positions she liked while shagging and if she would touch herself in the classroom for him. All the weird and gross stuff you would expect from a 40 something year old man and a fifteen year old girl.
Word got out and it caused a scandal because this was a very small, and religious town. The girl was bullied so bad and mugshots of Mr. B were distributed throughout the school for everyone’s enjoyment. Jokes were made, and teachers did not know how to deal with the situation and anytime his name was mentioned in a joke they would awkwardly laugh and change the conversation.
Few weeks later, the girl posts on Snapchat saying she is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is.”
6. “My sophomore year, we went through a couple of Spanish teachers.
The first was a male that didn’t even last 6 weeks. After a series of subs, we got a new teacher. She claimed to speak 10 languages, but didn’t know how to teach. I spent Spanish class with my desk pushed against 3 others playing cards. Of course, not everyone kept to themselves. The teacher was an easy target for bullies. She lasted a few months of mean kids doing things like putting chalk dust in her drink (and I don’t know what else since I mostly kept to myself) and then she was gone. The school told us she left for health reasons. Rumor had it that someone put glass cleaner (or some other chemical) in her coffee.”
7. “I taught high school. A few years ago I had a coworker that was fresh out of college, still loved to party, and I was pretty sure she was hungover every day. Students obviously loved to talk about her and find her Snapchat and things like that. So, there were lots of inappropriate rumors floating around.
One time I overheard them saying she had told them all to face the front of the class so that she could change clothes in the back (she had a party to get to). Next thing I know, she has a sub and is living in a different state.”
8. “My calculus teacher in college went with his family one weekend to a wedding away from the city. In the reception, an armed command irrupted and opened fire against everyone.
Apparently, someone in the groom’s family was related to illegal substance trafficking. Only his daughter survived in his family because she was in the bathroom at the moment of the attack. His office was left alone with all his books, laptop, notebooks and the rest of his stuff for a whole year, a black ribbon was placed over his chair.”
9. “My art history professor was present for our online course for two weeks, then she stopped grading the work we turned in. No biggie, I thought. Just keep doing the coursework and she’ll get to grading it eventually.
She did not.
When it came time for the final, no one in our class had any clue what the heck we were supposed to be doing. Someone made a post to the discussion board asking what was going on. Then another. Soon enough, almost everyone in the class was posting and begging each other for information regarding the final exam or what happened to our professor.
Eventually, someone contacted the dean. According to the dean, our professor had, for some reason, been in Europe for the past two months, coinciding with when she had stopped grading our work. The dean had no idea where our professor was, as she hadn’t been replying to emails, calls, nothing.
Since our online course was pretty big, around forty people or so, there was a LOT of ungraded work. The dean had to issue us a new professor to grade everything and get the class under control. The course had to be extended all the way into December because not only was there a lot of work to be graded, a lot of people incorrectly did their work and were granted redoes on their assignments because our professor wasn’t there to instruct them that they were doing their assignments wrong.
I still have no idea what happened to Professor S., and apparently, neither does anyone else.”
10. “I had a school bus driver go missing. Now you don’t normally pay much attention to your bus driver in school but all throughout elementary school I had this same old man and he was the greatest guy ever. We had this really casual friendship thing going; I would get on the bus everyday and give him some insult jokingly and he’d do the same back.
Sometime through 5th grade he suddenly stopped showing up. It was always a sub. A few weeks later the principal came on to the bus to tell us that he had died of a heart attack, and gave us each a letter to give to our parents. I don’t think anyone on that bus was as heartbroken as I was, it really was like losing an old friend that day.
To this day, whenever I see a bus with the number 399, I still get sad, even though it was almost 10 years ago.”
11. “I had a teacher in eighth grade I’ll call Ms. B. She was one of the best teachers I’d had to date. She was extremely down to earth, hilarious, caring, and passionate about her job. Everybody absolutely loved her. She was my absolute favorite teacher and I trusted and loved her so much. I didn’t think it was abnormal when she casually told us one day she wasn’t allowed to hug students, and that she’d been let go from other schools in our district and couldn’t even teach in her home town anymore. None of this was suspicious to me.
Right after winter break, I walked into her class and was surprised to see a male teacher in there. He said he’d be teaching us for a while, that Ms. B was out on a ‘family emergency.’ I despised him. I feel bad for it now, he was a pretty nice guy, but he was such a step down from Ms. B that I just couldn’t like him. He taught us for the rest of the year, and we never found out what happened to Ms. B.
Until a few years ago. Out of curiosity I googled her name just to see if she was still teaching and if I could get ahold of her and say hi. I found pages after pages of legal documents explaining that she could no longer teach in my district, that she was put on emergency leave because she was grooming and preying on middle school girls. I don’t know if any of them went to my school or if these happened at other places she taught, but the papers explained that she had shared extremely personal information with these girls, and oftentimes tried to get them to question themselves and such to make them more comfortable with what she was saying to them. It really broke my heart. She was such a good teacher but it made me realize that didn’t make her a good person, and I knew that I easily could have been one of her targets, as I’d always been one of her favorites, and was a naive 14 year old that looked up to her with so much respect. I didn’t want to believe the statements, but it was right there in legal documents. I don’t know where she is now, but I just hope she’s doing better, and is making better choices.”
12. “I actually have two.
The first one was my 10th grade science teacher. He was new and young-ish, maybe around 30? I don’t know for sure. Possibly because he only showed up for about three weeks total the first nine weeks of school. Most of that time he didn’t even bother teaching us anything. We just watched NatGeo videos that had absolutely nothing to do with what we were supposed to be learning in that class. He came in one day and assigned a project for us to do and was there (surprisingly) the day we turned it in.
Fast forward to about the end of the first nine weeks. We hadn’t seen him for 2-3 weeks by then and had a sub, I’ll call her Mrs. B. She had been taking care of the class as best as she could since he hadn’t left any lesson plans to follow, so she didn’t have much to grade. We got to look at our grades in my HS before report cards to have a chance to bring up our grades or fix any grading errors. This is when she learned, to her horror, about the project. Nobody had a grade and it looked as if nobody had done it.
Turns out after us asking multiple times before and after report cards that he’d just stopped showing up or calling in. Nobody knew/knows why or what he was doing. He’d taken our projects and donated them to a retirement home without grading them, something that was 50% of our grade just gone. We all got A’s and Mrs. B took care of us until 2nd semester when we got a new teacher who actually taught us something and we all liked which was a nice change.
The second one was when we were in elementary school. We had a substitute who subbed for K-12, (we’ll call him Mr. P) and every girl had a crush on. He was a young guy in his 20’s and very easy going so we all looked forward to having him as a sub. One day we were outside on recess when we heard yelling. So, of course, being kids we ran to the fence to see what was happening.
This sub lived behind the school and his wife was throwing him out in the middle of the day. We were all shocked, but we couldn’t stop watching and the teachers had to make us go back inside. Later that day my older sibling came home and said that Mr. P was supposed to sub for them and didn’t show. Everyone was shocked when we told them what we’d seen. Still, nobody really had a clue as why it’d happened or where Mr. P. went after that since no one had seen him since that day.
Fast forward about a week or two and the full story came out as to why his wife had reacted that way. Turns out she came home at lunch after someone tipped her off that he and the teen girl they were hosting had called in sick to school. She found it odd since they were fine when she’d left that morning for work and came to check on them (I should add the girl had been acting odd whenever the wife tried leaving her alone with Mr. P. and told people she wasn’t comfortable with him – people just chalked it up to her culture instead of asking questions or investigating since he was a really nice guy). That’s when she found him cornering the girl trying to force himself on her and she lost it. Last I heard Mr. P. was fired from being a sub, charges were filed and the girl finished her time here and went home. Taught me a lesson that someone that looks good and acts super chill could be a monster in disguise. I feel bad for that poor girl and his wife, too. F Mr. P!”
13. “One of our economics teachers, let’s call him Mr. F, used to teach half the year. Meanwhile another teacher taught the other half. His half were all failing and getting poor grades whilst the other half were easily achieving A’s and B’s.
The other teacher came to inspect Mr. F’s class to see what was going wrong. Everyone was messing around and no one did any work really. Didn’t help that the teacher couldn’t explain half of the questions he was asked by the few kids actually listening. The other teacher looked less than impressed at the end of the lesson. After that half term, no one saw Mr. F again. He didn’t turn up to his classes and they were all covered by a sub. Then a month or so later all the parents get an email saying that Mr. F had sadly had an operation that had gone terribly wrong and caused Mr. F to be unable to continue teaching. Everyone felt awful for him.
UNTIL about three months later on someone’s Snapchat story someone spotted him and inquired about it. Turns out he was working at another school 5 or so miles away.
The school FAKED medical issues to effectively sack Mr. F in a massive coverup.”
14. “Had an English teacher in high school who was a self-admitted dyslexic, couldn’t spell, and his appearance was slovenly.
His clothing was always stained, dirty, wrinkled, and he often would smell musty and mildewy.
We were freshmen and absolutely savage. As the first semester started winding down, he disappeared. We sat the first day of his disappearance by ourselves (first period) for almost an hour before an administrator came to sit with us.
We then had a dozen substitute teachers until we picked up a full-time teacher when the second semester started.
Rumor was that he had a mental breakdown because we didn’t respect him and treated him terribly. He was supposedly in and out of rehab and students were seeing him around town looking homeless.
Supposedly he bounced around from teacher to teacher, sleeping on couches or floors until he randomly sold all of his possessions and bought a one-way ticket to Japan to go teach English.”
15. “This teacher wanted to become a YouTuber so he stopped coming to school so he could film for his channel. He apparently showed up one day randomly and told everyone he was quitting so he could become a famous YouTuber.
He completely failed. I graduated so I don’t know what happened to him but I think someone said he got his job back after his failure.”
16. “In high school my Spanish teacher got along with the students pretty well. One day, my friend was Googling his name (for whatever reason) and found a picture of him hugging a guy on this obscure LGBT forum.
Things were tense in my school district because another teacher had been accidentally outed as gay and was eventually fired.
My friend started spreading the word around school and said Spanish teacher was understandably on edge. For whatever stupid reason, a couple idiot students decided to prank-scare him by jumping onto his back when he walked into his classroom while it was still dark. This led to him throwing the student over his shoulder, mistaking him for an attacker, and throwing out his back. He was hospitalized and we had a sub for the rest of the year.
That’s what they told us anyways. They really downplayed what happened. I’m not sure if he returned to teach because I graduated the next year after but I hope he’s doing better. With my school specifically it’s become less of a ‘fad’ to be LGBT just within the past couple of years, so I hope future LGBT employees have no issue.”
17. “He wasn’t just a teacher but the VP and general School Admin as well. Man dipped out and for the first little bit all we heard was that he was going in for surgery and would hopefully return quickly after a speedy recovery.
Fast forward a few more weeks and we’re hearing nothing and honestly starting to imagine what really went down. In reality, he beat his wife and kid so yeah he doesn’t work there anymore.”
18. “I was in secondary school at the time and I was about 14 years old. I had this awesome French teacher and one day she didn’t turn up. Then it became 3 days, and eventually became 3 weeks. We were all extremely worried at that point and then the word broke out on the local news and social media that she was burned alive by her estranged husband.
It was so bizarre and still haunts me because she was my favorite teacher.”
19. “When I was in high school, one of my teachers left in the middle of the school year, and we later found out my teacher’s husband had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She and her husband took all their savings and went to travel the world for the year that he had left so he could say goodbye to the whole world.
When we found out it changed the way we all thought about what was important in life. What a great lesson to have when you’re 17.”
20. “We had a Religious Education teacher who mysteriously stopped coming. He was always really funny and sarcastic and a bit edgy, but was still a good teacher.
We all assumed he was ill or something when he disappeared. Then we heard he’d been suspended, but not what for.
Eventually it came out that he’d been caught having a relationship with a former pupil, which they suspected had started whilst she was at school. He had a wife and two kids. He left his wife for this 18-year-old girl – who was also his NIECE – shagged her for a bit, dumped her and moved onto another school, where he did exactly the same thing.”
21. “My 11th-grade functions teacher stopped coming to teach us for months and we had so many different substitute teachers, no one learned anything after. On the day of our final exam, our teacher finally came back and acted as if everything was normal.
A classmate asked what happened and the teacher said, ‘I had some chips and ended up in the hospital’. Turns out she’s allergic to salt.”
22. “I was a senior in high school and my school offered concurrent courses where we got high school and college credit. The instructor would be at our actual campus sometimes and others we did class over video.
Two instructors that year went MIA. Keep in mind they were actually college instructors who just volunteered to teach the concurrent high school class.
1st one: 9 weeks into the semester, 5 people out of a 15 person class get an email explaining he has been let go from the college and won’t be our instructor anymore. A few weeks later my mother (who worked at my high school) discovers via the admin that he didn’t get fired but he also technically didn’t quit. He just sent out that email to a few of us and then quit showing up. Still don’t know what became of him.
2nd guy replaced the one from above. Guy 2 was weird as all get out. He taught us for the rest of the semester and 2 weeks into the new one he just disappeared one day. Turns out the college fired him for stalking a girl.”
23. “Turns out my social studies teacher in the second grade was attracted to children and was arrested for touching a bunch of kids.
Similarly, the vice principal of my high school was arrested and charged with multiple counts of inappropriate relations and filming kids in explicit acts. He was married with kids and no one saw it coming. He would cruise Grindr for underage teenage boys. He just filed an appeal and lost. I hope he rots in prison.
Maybe my school district had more of these cases than others, but it was definitely a bit unnerving to find out that multiple people working in the school system would commit such egregious acts on children.
24. “My Freshman Algebra teacher came in for about two weeks, everything seemed fine. Then one day, we had a sub teacher and she said that Miss H wouldn’t be teaching us anymore. Nothing was ever said about what happened in class that day, we asked but the sub wouldn’t elaborate further. Apparently, Miss H’s husband was hiking and fell to his death. She never came back to teach that year and I never saw her anymore after that.
Had another one my Sophomore year. I had Chorus class first period that year and Mrs J was our teacher. She had a teacher’s aid as well that wound up taking over Mrs J’s spot as the main teacher. She never told us why Mrs J wouldn’t be back but we found out later that year that apparently Mrs J got caught in the band room messing around with the principal.”
