Senior Pranks

There are tons of stories of high school senior pranks.  However, most of them are from someone's older brother or cousin or a story that was told back in the 70s; there are very few first-person, verifiable records of certain specific pranks.  This begs the question:  Have these actually happened, or are they just the stuff of urban legend?  There are dozens of Reddit threads, teen magazine articles, and forum threads around the internet if you Google, but I've found very little to actually, factually corroborate these three specific senior pranks:

The first one is a rural school wherein a cow is led up to the second floor of the school and left there, because cows cannot walk down stairs.  This is specifically alleged to have happened at Hudsonville Christian in the 1970s, and Unity Christian in the 1990s.  The school administrators try to get the cows down the stairs, not knowing that cows cannot, while the rural students who know better are standing by and laughing all day.  This one has been attributed to Chevy Chase in the 1970s, but again...it's just hearsay; nothing verifiable to back it up.

The second is releasing livestock into the school...3 critters (greased pigs seem to be popular), numbered 1, 2, and 4; to make the administration think there were 4 critters released into the school, and they'd spend the whole day searching for the one numbered 3.  I've heard this with chickens (Unity Christian, mid 1990s; Jenison in the early 2000s; Black River in the 2010s), pigs (another one from Unity Christian in the 1990s; Grandville in the 1980s; Hudsonville Public in the 1990s; Freedom Baptist Academy in the 2000s), and squirrels (in the zeitgeist, no specific school named).  While the administrators are tied up chasing the critter numbered 3, other shenanigans are allowed to happen.

The third has bizarrely specific details:  The principal drove a Volkswagen Beetle.  The autoshop class disassembles the car, transports all the parts up to the roof, then reassembles the Beetle on the roof or in an inaccessible part of the building.  I've heard this from Grandville in the 1970s, all over Flint and Grand Blanc on the east side of the state from the 1960s to the 1980s, Jenison in the 1970s, and Black River High School in the 2000s.

A corollary to the third involves the football team picking up and moving the principal's car all over the parking lot during the last week of classes, sometimes reaching a finale when the car is disassembled by the autoshop class and reassembled on the roof.

Since all of these seem to rely on Ed Rooney-esque incompetence on the behalf of the administrators, it's very easy to paint them all as urban legends; students tell these tales to make themselves sound awesome, while adding in the little detail about "Oh yeah, the teachers are stupid, too."  It's a tale as old as time:  The students are smart, and the teachers are woefully out of touch.  While I didn't always see eye to eye with all of my high school teachers and administrators, I can personally attest to the fact that they were all pretty savvy - you simply don't make it in a public school setting for decades if you're constantly falling victim to the students.

I've found this article from Grimbsy, Ontario, Canada in 2016 talking about how a group of students who built a wooden frame, with cooperation from the custodial staff, to hang body panels of a Jaguar sedan from, and put on the roof of the building.  There's another example from Plainview, New York where a pink car was placed on the school roof - this time, the students were fined and prohibited from partaking in prom and graduation.

Alas, I have found no evidence of any of these pranks taking place in Western Michigan.  I don't want to say anyone is lying...but there's a very similar air to several other urban legends that I've covered on this blog.