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.