14 People Whose Pranks Had an Unexpected Finale

More often than not, pranks evoke positive emotions, albeit through the prism of shock. But sometimes those who pull them don’t realize that even the most harmless joke can lead to unpredictable consequences.

• I came home and saw the door open. My wife was at the neighbor’s house and forgot to lock it. I decided to play a trick on her: I took the TV set into the garage, scattered the clothes, and I hid in the wardrobe, waiting for her reaction.
  I realized that the prank failed when, 20 minutes later, the police arrived, put handcuffs on me and wouldn’t even listen to my words that I was the owner. It turned out that the neighbor had seen everything, told my wife about it, and she called the police. © Chamber 6 / VK
• When I was 8 years old, my mother shook me awake excitedly, “Lacy! It snowed last night! You don’t have to go to school!”
  I sprang out of bed and ran to the window to see the beautiful snow. And instead saw grass. That was 31 years ago, and I’m still learning how to trust again. © Lacy Windham / Quora
• I found an old photo of a couple kids and realized that one of them kind of looked like a friend. I decided to prank him big time; I wrote a letter to him on an old typewriter pretending to be some third-rate Southern lawyer telling him that he was actually adopted, and the photo was proof and also included his brother whom he had never met, “Doug.”
  I let him in on the joke after a couple weeks, and he was like, “Oh my god, that was you?” He had actually called his mother to ask if it was true he was adopted. © Unknown author / Quora
• My husband pulled a prank on me. We worked 14 hours for 5 days in a row. On the last day, I came home and passed out. Right with my clothes on.
  My husband wakes me up, “Get up, we overslept!” I jumped up and went to make coffee, and he started laughing, “Go back to sleep, honey, you only slept for 30 minutes.” Oh, how I chased him round the house! © Charlotte Evans / Quora

• I slipped a note under my husband’s pillow saying, “I know everything,” packed up and left. I decided to pull a prank on him.
  I didn’t answer the phone, but I got texts, and here’s some of them: “I won’t show your underwear to my friends anymore, come back,” “I won’t sleep in our car at night anymore, sorry.” God, what a weirdo I live with. © Chamber 6 / VK
• I work in tech support, setting up websites for people. On April 1st, a client came in screaming that his website is offline. I checked it from all sides — everything is fine, no problems, but it doesn’t work, no matter what!
  I spent 2 hours, eating my brain out with a teaspoon, trying to figure out the problem. I decided to get the whole technical department involved. In the end, the client said he was joking, everything was fine, he just decided to play a joke on us. And he closed the chat room.
  Afterwards, I made sure his website was actually down for 2 days. Happy first of April, darling! © Overheard / Ideer
• As a kid, I was very gullible. One day, a friend told me he saw a giant dinosaur. I believed him, ran home, locked myself in and peeked out of the window until nightfall. That boy knocked on my door and shouted that he was joking, but the monster never left my imagination. © Overheard / Ideer

• I decided to pull a prank on my husband. I told him that I’d stay at my friend’s house for the night, but hid in a wardrobe, planning to jump out of it spectacularly when my husband came home.
  So, I jumped out screaming, “Congratulations!” and saw him with some lady from work. I kicked them both out, spent the rest of the night in the wardrobe, wiping away tears. Well, at least the prank was successful... © Overheard / Ideer
• We were at the country house. A mate, who couldn’t cook at all, decided to boil dumplings and asked me how to do it. I said something like, “Pot — water — boil — dumplings — boil — 10 minutes.”
  After the allotted time, this guy comes running in a panic, “The dumplings are floating on the surface, what should I do?” I said, “That’s it, throw them out, they’re spoiled.” He actually took the pot and went to throw the dumplings out. © squirrel / ADME
• I’m in my late thirties, have never been in a long-term relationship. I broke up with all my ex-girlfriends for various reasons after 3–4 months. All of them found their love after breaking up, even though many of them had never had a long-term relationship before or no relationship at all.
  Now almost all are married, happily married. I recently joked about it in a conversation with my current girlfriend. I said, “You’ll leave me and get married.” And she dumped me. Seriously. © Overheard / Ideer

• My bosses are 2 old idiots. During the year I worked with them, I had an entire prank store in my office, shocking gums being the most neutral. They hid in my office from our chief accountant, because “she will break our brain,” disrupted the working Friday more than once. Calls on Saturday morning (“You overslept work” and Homeric laughter) is a classic of the genre.
  And I still can’t understand how our office still manages to work with founders like this! © Overheard / Ideer
• The beginning of the last century. Village girls used to go to dances along a certain road. And my grandfather and his friends spread rumors that there were ghosts on the hill.
  And so it’s night, the moon, the girls go from dancing, and some human figures in white silently dance on the hill. They got scared, screamed. And these were my grandfather and his boys who stripped down to their underwear and pretended to be ghosts.
• I pulled a prank on my city friends. The city people don’t believe in stories about Leshy (a wood deity) in the woods. I bought 7 “talking” hamsters (the toy that repeats voices), took the receivers with speakers out of them and hid them in the hollows of trees on the route to the river.
  In the evening, we went fishing, it got a little dark. All day long, I was telling stories about Leshy for a greater effect. Then, when we reached our destination, the hamsters began to repeat some phrases from our conversations, and then began to shout with the voices of my friends. It was very funny. © Overheard / Ideer
• My mom told me about my grandfather. He was a boy and lived in the village. One of the neighbors made bricks and left them to dry. And the grandfather walked barefoot on the bricks.
  In the evening, the angry neighbor came running, saying, “Well, let’s see whose footprints are these!” But the grandfather was smart: when he walked, he tucked in his toes.
  He confessed about this prank to his parents when he was 20. Turned out they knew, but they also kept silent. I guess they didn’t like their neighbor.

And here are some stories from students who pranked their teachers.