Natchitoches Gazette
By Robert Sevier
Natchitoches, Louisiana
Halloween Prank Goes Horribly Wrong at Local Boarding School.
An annual prank at Poison Wood Therapeutic Academy for Girls went horribly wrong this year.
One of the senior girls, identified as Lisbeth Warrington, slipped while on an overhanging branch and fell twenty feet onto the spired iron fence surrounding the graveyard, impaling her upper body.
She was air-lifted to the trauma one hospital in Riverbend where sources at the hospital say she is in a medically induced coma.
Every year students are escorted into the woods on Halloween night to an old graveyard on the property.
Teachers bring a record player into the woods with a recording of the eerie tale about the school’s founder.
While it’s playing, senior girls climb into the branches of an old oak tree over the graveyard.
At the right moment, they are cued by teachers to start shaking the branches to scare the younger girls.
It’s a tradition that started at the school in the early 1950s and has continued ever since.
Neither the girl’s family nor the school’s headmaster could be reached for comment.