This happened when I was in junior high school. My class was having the last English period of the day. It was almost summer, and since our school didn't have air conditioning, it was terribly humid and stuffy. To make matters worse, it was raining outside, and the sky was unusually dark—the kind of weather where lightning could strike at any moment. Because of this, I remember the entire class having a strange, huddled-together atmosphere.
That day's English assignment was to give a speech about oneself. My friend K happened to be standing up on the podium, and while the rest of us were heckling him, he started his speech in clumsy English.
In the middle of his speech, K suddenly stopped talking. As a wave of confusion swept through the class, a dazed K muttered under his breath, "A neck is floating."
When everyone followed K's line of sight, some of the students screamed. I was one of them. Right in the middle of the classroom, suspended in mid-air, was a clump of hair. The eerie nature of that object—so casually present, yet completely impossible—threw the classroom into a panic, mixing those who could see it with those who couldn't. What's more, that "thing" refused to disappear, lingering in the air until just before the teachers rushed in.
In the end, we were sent home in a group escort that day. Later on, based on the testimony of the English teacher who hadn't been able to see the "thing," it was easily dismissed as a case of mass hysteria. Yet even now, nearly ten years later, I still cannot forget that clump of hair floating in mid-air and the atmosphere of the classroom plunging into madness in a single instant.
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