Moaning Myrtle---Muggleborn?

[Eric Oppen]

No: HPFGUIDX 157151

How do we know for sure that Moaning Myrtle was/is (I'm not sure about the 
verb tense here) Muggleborn?

I know what Draco Malfoy says---but I don't consider Draco Malfoy to be a 
bubbling fountain of truth and information.  He's repeating what his Daddy 
says, and, as near as I can figure out, Moaning Myrtle died decades before 
Lucius Malfoy entered Hogwarts.

In that length of time, it would be perfectly possible for student rumor to 
get things badly wrong.

What do we really know about M.M., anyway?

We know that she was killed by a basilisk, sometime in the 1940s, and she's 
very sad.  Other than that, almost nothing (except that she rather fancies 
Harry Potter.)

We don't even know her last name, or whether Riddle killed her on purpose or 
by accident.  I have a friend who says that she may have died of her own 
stupidity---in a school of magick, when you hear someone speaking in a 
strange language and something large moving about, you do _not_ barge in and 
interrupt, since the person you are interrupting may be in the process of 
summoning something large and nasty, and if he doesn't manage to get the 
leash on it, it'll get loose and do Horrible Things.  IOW, Riddle may not 
have even known she was in the stall, and when she burst out of it to tell 
him to go use his own bathroom, she startled the basilisk and it zapped her. 
(This would make her death manslaughter of some sort, not murder.  Come to 
it---can a manslaughter be used to create a Horcrux?  Inquiring minds want 
to know!)

For all that we know, she could be as pureblooded as the Malfoys themselves, 
but from a minor or obscure family.  We know that Riddle doesn't give a hoot 
about pureblood issues---he uses them to lure his followers in, and he wants 
the purebloods because a lot of them are Old Money and have very useful 
social and business connections.  Not unlike Slughorn and his Slug Club, as 
a matter of fact.

While Myrtle may well be Muggleborn (her first name is Muggle, instead of 
something "magicky" like a lot of pureblood families like) she could be of 
any ancestry---and I am not committing to anything until I get conformation 
from a reliable source, like Hermione quoting from _Hogwarts, a History_  or 
Dumbledore (possibly in a Penseive scene.)