Were you ever locked in a locker when you were at school? Or perhaps even more recently?
This doesn't seem too unlikely, especially if it happened at school: this is a prank which seems to take place from time to time in schools. If the lockers are big enough for someone to fit in, it almost seems an obvious thing to do in the context of general horseplay in locker rooms - a very likely location for such activity.
But did you actually enjoy being in the locker? Or did you enjoy seeing someone else get locked in a locker? - or perhaps even lock someone in yourself, and enjoy it rather? Were you in some vague way intrigued or fascinated by lockers? Might you even find the sight of a locker appealing still, to this day, and maybe even have a slightly embarrassed urge to get inside it and shut the door? (Just to see if you still fit inside - or maybe for more than that.) Would you still like to have someone lock you inside a locker, so that you are helplessly trapped inside it, quite unable to escape? Do you like the look, the sound, the feel, of all that sheet metal? Do you like the very sight of a locker, the sound it makes if you bang on it or shut the door - perhaps even like the very name "locker"?
If so, you are probably one of a very rare group of people. You probably have claustrophilia - which is the exact opposite of the better-known claustrophobia - that is, a love of small enclosed places, and a desire to be enclosed in them, or even helplessly locked or trapped in them. Some claustrophilic people appear to like almost any small spaces, whereas others appear to favour only certain small spaces, and not be especially interested in other ones.
I suggested that this is very rare. At least, I believe (without knowing for sure) that it is probably very rare: It just stands to reason that most people, including most of those who were at one time locked inside a locker, would not enjoy being confined in a very tightly enclosed space such as a locker - and that rough-and-ready method of finding what things appeal to people, the world-wide web, has very few references to people actually liking being in lockers or seeking it out, although it is not too hard to find passing references to people being locked in lockers. Because the WWW seems to contain references to all sorts of extremely obscure or unusual interests, if something cannot be found anywhere on it, it seems reasonable to assume that that something appeals to very few people. And enjoyment of being locked in lockers seems to be one of these super-rare things.
I enjoy being locked in lockers myself, and I want to do something about this dearth of web pages on the subject. I was locked in a locker nearly 40 times at school, and I loved every minute of it, right from the very first time, although I pretended I didn't, and struggled as they frog-marched me to the lockers and propelled me into an empty locker - both to avoid appearing strange to the other boys, and to make it easier to provoke them into locking me in more times, which I think they would have quickly lost interest in if they had got the idea that I was enjoying it. (It was more a joke than real bullying; but I don't believe the kids who locked me in thought they were doing something I wanted, and I don't think that would have especially appealed to them. They wanted me to resist, wanted me to struggle, wanted me to try rattling the door in vain once I was securely locked in - wanted to believe I didn't like being in the locker.)
What is puzzling about my fascination with lockers is that I do not really have any plausible reason to have strong connections with lockers, beyond routine use at school. I am not in the least sporty, and in fact hated being forced to participate in compulsory school sports, and did it as seldom as I could get away with. So I didn't use the lockers in the changing rooms as often as many other boys at school, and don't have strong memories associating lockers with sport, no reason to remember lockers later with nostalgia (beyond the lockers themselves). In fact, it would be quite true to say that the only parts of the changing rooms I got intimately familiar with were the inside walls of lockers.
So it seems I have no plausible reason to have got interested in lockers in the first place - yet the fact is that I did, and I don't quite know why, beyond speculating that it's a particularly strong aspect of a more general claustrophilia.
I am of the second type of claustrophilic people I mentioned above: that is, I like certain small spaces a lot, and have very little interest in others. Lockers are one of my very favourite ones, although others interest me also, such as suitcases, boxes, car boots (or trunks), mailbags, and various other kinds of bags.
I left school and mostly forgot about lockers for 35 years - but I was still kind of fascinated, and the merest sight of a locker anywhere during those 35 years always got my instant and undivided attention (which of course I would have to conceal if I was with other people). I think that, when I first got onto the Internet and experimented with web searches, "locked in a locker" was probably one of the first searches I did. I rarely found any more than passing references to this in my search results, though.
So I was astonished some years later, towards the end of 2003, to find this mailing list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Locker_Fun. Go there and take a look if you are interested in this topic (and you probably are if you are still reading this). You have to subscribe to the mailing list to read any content - but anyone can join the group.
It is about people being locked in lockers. When I first found the link to the "Locker Fun" group, of course it instantly got my fullest attention - but I thought it couldn't possibly be about what its name seemed to say it was about, even though the meaning of the name seemed quite clear and unambiguous. In spite of that, I thought it was very likely the mailing list was not about this, but perhaps just a general locker-room humour mailing list, or about pranks in locker rooms generally.
Anyway, I followed the link immediately I found it, to see what was there. And the blurb there made it very clear that the list was about what I hardly dared to hope it was about - and it explicitly said that it was not about locker rooms in a more general sense: obviously the mailing list's creator anticipated that people would think it was, and wanted to forestall this, and prevent them from posting general locker-room stuff, which he saw as being off-topic.
It took me a moment to accept that this mailing list was about the seemingly unbelievable topic of people being locked in lockers - but it was quite unmistakably about this, and of course I immediately joined the mailing list, and have read posts there, and made posts of my own.
(Note: there is an "adult" warning when you enter the site, asking you to confirm you are at least 18, although I don't personally see much if anything about this group that is of an adult nature. Nudity in pictures is explicitly forbidden, and there is no talk (so far, at least) about the sexual aspects of bondage, B.D.S.M., and the like, although some readers may personally find aspects of this sort in the topic. However, because this site is within the area that is age-restricted by Yahoo, you need to register with Yahoo first before you can gain access to the site, and you will need to log in prior to subsequent visits.)
I think finding and joining this mailing list reawakened my interest in lockers, and this reached the point recently that I bought a locker of my own and devised ways of locking myself in it (not having anyone to assist in this) - and, upon getting inside the locker, I felt so much at home in there that I realized that, for the past 35 years, I had harboured a desire to be locked in again.
I have no idea why lockers fascinated me so much at school, and why this fascination has been so durable, right up to the present day. It is part of a more general interest in the idea of being locked up in small spaces or containers generally.
As time permits, I will write a little more about this, describing my experiences, and possible ideas for anyone who shares this unusual interest to follow up. And that is why I have created this web site.
For the time being, this page will have to suffice as a teaser; but I do hope to write further on this topic later on. I have ideas for one or more stories involving confinement in lockers or other containers, and, if I can gather those ideas together sufficiently, I may write the stories and also include them in this web site - although I make no promises about this for the time being.
Meanwhile, if you find this page and have an interest in this topic, I would like to hear from you and discuss things. (If you are like me, you want to discuss your unusual interest with other like-minded people.) You could either join the mailing list mentioned above and post there (to a membership of over 1,100 people, most of them apparently inactive though - it's a very low-traffic mailing list) - or else you could write to me at the following e-mail address:
NOTE:
I have "munged" (disguised) this address to (hopefully) prevent spam robots (or spambots) reading and spamming the address, while (hopefully) making it easily readable to human readers. I have incorporated several simple disguises, because it is possible that spambots are getting cleverer at demunging e-mail addresses.
Please access the address in one of two ways:
1. Follow the above link, if you are using an e-mail program that automatically acts on e-mail links; or:
2. Copy and paste the above string into your e-mail program, into the "To:" field.
After you've done this, edit the string in the "To:" field to conform to the usual e-mail format, following the instructions implicit in the string (removing spaces, changing "at" to the "at" symbol, changing "dot" to a dot each time it occurs, removing the upper-case spam-blocking phrase, and so on).
Sorry for the inconvenience of doing this - but another e-mail address I have been using since December 1998 is seriously deluged with spam now, and is probably beyond salvation now, so that I am considering whether to change it. But I am forced to take hard measures such as munging all references to my e-mail address to protect newer e-mail addresses from abuses by spammers, whom I regard as the teeming, crawling cockroaches of the Internet.
I will also write a claustrophilia web page focusing on suitcases, although so far there is only a brief place-holding page, which is currently located at http://www.geocities.com/inasuitcase/suitcase.htm. (This may change as I reorganize the pages, and I may eventually put all material on the same site.)
Michael Tremayne.
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