A lot of us enjoy a good pretend-scare around this time of year.
But back in 1986, a school in California offered up a Halloween week hoax that was a little too on the nose for the student body.
Not everyone enjoys thinking that the end of the world is minutes away.
This was at Dominguez High School in Compton, California.
It was Homecoming Week, and pranks had long been a part of the annual festivities.
So a student cooked up a prank that was inspired by the famous Orson Welles radio adaptation of “War of the Worlds.”
A voice came on the school intercom and made a very important announcement, that the Soviet military had just declared war against the United States by shooting down two US fighter planes over the Mediterranean Sea.
Then she said that the US military had responded by firing missiles at the Soviets.
The voice said, “This can be the beginning of the end of the world.”
This was, to be fair, a sentence you might associate with “War of the Worlds,” but it was not a sentence that people generally associate with Homecoming hijinks.
And while the mid 80s weren’t the height of the Cold War, but that standoff certainly wasn’t over, either.
So upon hearing that the world’s two nuclear superpowers had now started an actual war, some of the students freaked out.
There are varying accounts of what happened, but some students said they rushed out of class in a panic, thinking that their best-case scenario was to run home and see their families one more time before the end of everything.
A few minutes later there was another announcement explaining that the whole World War III thing was just a hilarious prank, ha ha, we got you, but they couldn’t really put that toothpaste back in the tube.
Terrified students came home to tell their parents, who were furious and raised a ruckus with the school board.
Some of the board members weren’t happy, either, and the news media picked up the story and ran it all over the country.
The school’s principal said he took responsibility for what happened, since he had approved the prank.
But he added, “It was just a statement. I don’t see why this is newsworthy.”
Some public libraries offer a lot of items beyond books and movies for checkout, like tools or birding gear.
In Barnstable, Massachusetts, the Sturgis Library has something Halloween lovers might want to check out: a ghost hunting kit.
According to Neatorama, Barnstable is known for ghost sightings…
School Prank–Pupils Told That War Has Started (Los Angeles Times)
Ghost Hunting Kit Available at the Public Library (Neatorama)
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