Urban Myth. Young man, overcome with stress, puts a pencil up either nostril during an exam and brings his head down on the desk. The pencils go into his brain, killing him instantly.

The rumour that everyone in the room gets compensated for their mental trauma by getting a free A* means that most people have the vague, unspoken idea that witnessing a suicide would be fucking brilliant.

I actually became good friends with someone a couple of years ago who claimed to have been in the room at the time of the 'incident'. When I met him, he could barely talk due to severe drug abuse over the preceding years (presumably to get rid of the 'nasty' images in his head) and he had a genuine fear of pencils - he was fine with pens but pencils would make him start shaking and crying. In retrospect, he was probably just another guy who took too much acid too young...he's probably dead now.

My best friend claims that when he was about 8 someone in his class called Wayne really did accidentally kill himself by putting pencils up his nose and bringing his head down on the desk. My friend's exact recollection of the incident was "I don't mind that I saw it happened, I mean, it made me the person I am today. I didn't really know what was happening to be honest, but there was fuckloads of blood."

I just laughed because this urban myth is rife with fifteen year olds around the time of GCSE mocks. I still don't believe him but he swears it's true. It happened in Wigan, which makes it ever so slightly more believeable.

File under pencil murder, anal.
Boy 1 holds pencil, point up, on chair of boy 2. Boy 2 sits down, pencil forcibly tears through his trousers into his rectum, shears through the sensitive tunnel, javelins the prostate gland, leaving the child in excruciating agony as he slowly dies of an internal bum haemorrhage.
This version is funnier because it has a bum in it.

A similar, but non-fatal, injury befell Nicholas Smith in our third year. Holding year-group assemblies in the dining hall was a brave move, given the dangerous mix of weaponry and boredom, but ironically it was a carefully positioned 3-inch pepperpot that did for him.

From my vantage point one bench behind the suspense was paralysingly funny, but when the time came he sat down with such vigour that it still sends a shudder through me to picture him rocketing back to his feet.

By sixth form he had taken to wearing an orange ankle-length frock around town.

This isn't connected to the classic exam-room urban myth, but one day school gippo and twelve-year-old Aphex Twin lookalike Louis Gibbs decided that his Dr Martens were most ideally used as pencil destroying machines. Maybe they were, in some ways. But not pencils that were pointing upright. And definitely not with a stamping action.
Those pencils slid through his Dr Martens as though they were fashioned from wet toilet paper. Louis rolled around on the floor screaming after jumping off the table onto one of these pencils. When a teacher entered the classroom and saw what had happened, he asked "Are you able to pull it out?" with an obvious lack of giving a shit.
I literally get high, giddy and sick when I remember seeing less than half a pencil sticking out of the sole of his shoe. Groo.