The Enormous Bouffant

The bouffant was the most popular hairstyle in the mid-1960's. Some girls prided themselves on their ability to tease their hair and stiffen it with hairspray into a very high bouffant. One woman at a college in Mississippi had a bouffant that was almost two feet high. To keep it intact, she slept sitting upright in bed and wrapped it in  plastic before she stepped into the shower. Her hair was washed only once a month when she went to the beauty shop.

One warm spring day, just after she had returned from an appointment with her stylist, the girl decided to take a walk in her college's botanical garden. As she passed under a flowering dogwood tree, her  bouffant caught a spider web hanging from the branches. The woman never noticed.

Three weeks later, while she was sitting in class, she felt something warm and wet trickling down her forehead. A passerby hurried to her assistance, but the woman was unconscious. By the time the paramedics arrived, a pool of blood hand collected around the woman's head and her bouffant was matted with blood. A physician and two nurses met the ambulance in the emergency room entrance. "What have you got?" the doctor asked. "Its a head wound. But we can't find the source."

"Lets get her into Trauma One. And cut off that hair!" With the first snip of the scissors, a massive nest of spiders spilled out of the bouffant. It was pandemonium in the trauma room as the spiders leapt onto the doctors and nurses, swarmed over the woman's body and scurried across the floor.

Later, after the orderlies and hospital maintenance crew had the spider infestation under control, the trauma crew returned to examine the corpse. They cut off the rest of the bouffant and scraped away the spiders' nest. Underneath it was a hold the size of a dime where the spiders had eaten through the woman's skull and into her brain.

VARIATIONS: In some versions, the young woman becomes mysteriously ill and take the doctors some time to determine the cause of her malady. Once the bouffant went out of style, the subject of the story became a middle-aged woman with no fashion sense. In some versions, the protagonist is a young man with long unkempt hair.