Coda: The Chameleon

[gehayi]

In a recent post about YA Paranormals, I questioned why a vampire (or anyone, really) would want to pose as an adolescent and attend high school forever. My reaction was that it was highly, highly unlikely that anyone would do this. Why endure high school multiple times if you don't have to?

That was before I heard about Frédéric Bourdin, a serial

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Yes, there's been a few other cases as well - a woman who passed as a teenage boy until she was 38, staying with foster families and repeating high school again and again; a man who went to high school well into his 20s to recruit younger boys for the paedophile uncle who had also abused him. It's disturbing and/or a mental illness, not charming!

[gehayi]

You wouldn't happen to know the names of those people, would you? I'd like to look them up.

[lilacsigil]

I can't find those specific ones, annoyingly, but here's some more that came up instead:

Here's one and another, both playing basketball.

And one who claimed to be a teen victim of Satanists.

[daegaer]

There was a case a couple of years ago in the UK where a man in his early 30s went to a secondary school posing as a teenager, and had almost finished school when he was discovered. Apart from the general creepiness of the whole thing, he doesn't seem to have engaged in specific creepy behaviour, and (AFAIR) explained it as literally giving himself a new start in life as he felt his life to date had turned out a disappointment. Which makes me think that maybe plenty of other such people slip through the net and it's only the unlucky - or serial impersonators - that get heard of.

ETA: I also think the question of possibility and the question of why are different - a friend of mine could easily have passed for a young-mid teenager until a couple of years ago. Now she could pass for someone in their late teens. She's forty five. (And, er, lives as an adult with her family, I feel I should say!) A lot more people could do it than actually do!

[erastes]

Nod nod - and in the first episode of "Identity" a new Brit cop show about a squad set up to battle identity theft, the storyline is about exactly that - a 24 year old man who is posing both as a high school student of 15 and a university student of 19.

[tammy_moore]

Hey, I watched that show. I thought it was strange that element wasn't the centre of the plot. It was almost thrown away when I thought they could have made much more of it.

[erastes]

i'd probably need to watch it again to be sure, but i'm sure there's a legal point which blew away the motive - his father would NOT have been able to cut him out of the will if he was under age when the father died (which he must have been as he was given to a guardian) as the law changed in 1982 saying that dependents couldn't be disinherited /law geek.

[kagyakusha]

I read an article yesterday about a 31 year old woman pretending to be a 14 year old boy so that she could date a 16 year old girl. http://www.disinfo.com/2010/07/31-yr-old-woman-poses-as-14-yr-old-boy-to-become-16-yr-old-girls-boyfriend/
also I saw a photo of her and I thought that she could definitely pass as a boy.

[gehayi]

You're right. She could DEFINITELY pass as a teenaged boy.