Hoax Museum Blog: Pranks

Pillers, Keiffer and friend Elliot Tuleja were drinking at a house in Grover Beach on Jan. 18 when Tuleja passed out. Pillers and Keiffer decided to play a practical joke on him...
“They were drinking, and one of the guys passed out. So (the other two) said, ‘Let’s do something. I’m going to look for rotten fruit to (put) up in his socks.’
“The other guy found a bottle of cologne and poured it onto his pants. The one guy said, ‘That’s funny,’ ” Gran said. “The other guy said, ‘That’s not funny. If you lit it on fire, that would be funny.’ ”
One of the men then allegedly lit Tuleja’s groin area on fire where they had poured the cologne. Tuleja woke up, and all of the men attempted to extinguish the blaze. Tuleja suffered second-degree burns on his testicles and third-degree burns on his inner thighs, Gran said. Tuleja did not believe his friends intended to harm him, Gran said.

The problem photos are obvious. One girl's arm is missing. Another girl is missing her clothing – and was left with a blurred chest. Multiple students have the same body and clothes. Some shirt colors were changed, while patterns and wording on other shirts were wiped out. At least 34 students had someone else's body. Officials from Lifetouch National School Studios Inc., the Minnesota-based photography company, said someone at the company made the alterations in an attempt to comply with the school's photo guidelines...
Sophomore Brielle Anderson said she's pretty sure her head is on a boy's body. "I paid $80 for a cropped picture of my head on someone else's body," she said. She noted that she's also missing a few inches of hair. Chelsey Rephan, a sophomore, said one girl in the yearbook had her clothing digitally rubbed out.

Some people might find humor in a 10-foot tall likeness of the cartoon character SpongeBob Square-Pants painted onto a crumbling chimney in the middle of the woods. U.S. Forest Service officials certainly don't.
"I didn't chuckle," said Al Kane, a Forest Service archaeologist. "I kind of started crying." ...
As for solving the SpongeBob mystery, officials have no leads. Someone took a long time doing it and had the foresight to bring four colors of paint, officials said. It's a short walk from the nearest road. Asked if he had any suspicions about the kind of person who would paint a giant SpongeBob here, Healy said, "I don't know enough about them to know.
"Apparently they are SpongeBob fanatics."

What started out as a prank Facebook group called "On May 15th 2008, everybody needs to go out and panic buy carrots," with just a handful of the creator's friends as members, has exploded online and now has 231,000 worldwide supporters on the popular social networking site. British teen Freya Valentine, the creator of the group, admits the response has overwhelmed her. "It started off as a joke between a couple of friends, so we were surprised when we got 40 members, but it kept going up and up and now everybody seems to know about it. It's mad," she said in an e-mail interview. "All I can say is I never knew that the group would get to this size, and I hope that the carrots don't get wasted and they're actually used,"Valentine said.

In 1971, Mrs. Ross, longtime language arts teacher at the junior high, brought a doughnut to school to enjoy on her break in the teacher’s lounge. She and Mr. Nelson already enjoyed teasing each other, but on this day, Mr. Nelson took things to another level.
He hid Mrs. Ross’s doughnut. And then the doughnut disappeared. Did he eat it?
“I hid the doughnut but I did not eat the doughnut,” swears Mr. Nelson. “Someone else may have eaten it, but I did not.”
Be that as it may, the doughnut disappeared, and he was correctly identified as the thief. Mrs. Ross then bought another doughnut, glazed, and gave it to Mr. Nelson so that he would no longer have to resort to doughnut thievery.
“I thought he should have a doughnut of his own,” she says. “I think I bought it at a dime store.”
That is where things stood until Mrs. Ross’s next birthday, or maybe it was Christmas, they can’t remember which — this was 37 years ago after all, so we will give them a break. Mr. Nelson put the doughnut in a box, gift wrapped it and gave it to Mrs. Ross.
It has been passed back and forth ever since...
This tradition eventually became legendary at the Chatham school. Mr. Nelson sometimes directed one or two of his students to go down the hall to Mrs. Ross’s room with the gift box, hoping she wouldn’t realize who it was from until it was too late. The doughnut sometimes turned up in either teacher’s school mailbox.

The mystery Frankston signs have been carefully made to look like official road signs. Drivers have reported seeing them in Cranbourne-Frankston Rd, Langwarrin. Some think they are funny while others - and officials - aren't laughing...

Although VicRoads' media department thought the signs were "very amusing", its regional director Steve Brown was not laughing. The placement of inappropriate signs such as these was unsafe and illegal, he said. "VicRoads has arranged for them to be removed immediately and may request police to assist in identifying who was responsible."

"It's an enormous annoyance," zoo spokesman Brian Hill said. Thousands of people have received a message that someone has been talking about them. Some of the messages read: "Hey y is someone calln me and lookn for u n askn me where r u at n where u live heres tha # 713 555 650 tell then to stop calln me"
"It's scaring a lot of people," the switchboard operator told a caller. "We are working with the FBI and the major cell phone providers." Hill said that anyone who receives a similar message should trash it instead of calling the zoo.
"Chances are that if you get a text message, 'somebody's looking for you,' or 'I'm getting calls from somebody looking for you,' and our phone number is at the bottom of it, you'd be pretty safe to just ignore it and delete it," Hill said.

Elizabeth M. "Betsy" Ormsby's state Supreme Court lawsuit against Michael W. Behling, her former supervisor at the Washington Street office building, continues. Mrs. Ormsby, wife of Jefferson County Legislator Barry M. Ormsby, alleged she was duct-taped to a chair while working at the building in April 2006 and then, while bound, sent to several floors on an elevator. She claimed she complained about the incident to Mr. Behling, the building's superintendent, but was told by him to keep the matter quiet.

Campus police were still trying to find out who put the zebra on the third floor of Seney Hall sometime Tuesday night...
Putting animals inside Seney Hall has passed for a dry wit on the Emory at Oxford campus for decades...
Bowen said it was unlikely the responsible party would be punished. "We're not launching a major manhunt" he joked. And whoever put Barcode in the building made sure it didn't get hurt. "They lined up a row of chairs so the animal couldn't get close to the windows and injure itself," Bowen said.

So i was looking at your top 10 college pranks and i think that you are missing one.. last night some friends and i locked a Zebra in a building at Emory University. here are the details.

I was deeply disappointed when i read what the press had wrote about the Zebra incident at the Oxford College of Emory University. Quite frankly everyone has it wrong. I know, because i organized it and the executed the prank with a group of friends and lookouts.

First of all, the prank had no intentions other than to raise a certain spirit in the Oxford College community. The was no malice what-so-ever.

To the detail that you can varify that I am , in fact , the one whom the credit is due. -I cut a chain around a gate that contained the Zebra that was accompanied by only a donkey. This "pasture" is off of Collingsworth drive after the dead end. - then i unhinged the second gate with a wrench because that chain was too thick to cut. - I then proceeded to transport the Zebra on foot down Collingsworth to Wesley street and then down a power-cut that leads behind the college off in the woods. At approximately 0455hrs I left the Zebra in the care of my cohorts as i met another accomplice that had slept in Seney hall in order to let me in from the inside. We prepared the 3rd floor by placing chairs and tables by the windows so that the Donkey would not be tempted to go near them. We also moved picture frames so that they would not be hurt. Lastly we barricaded the doors using 2"x2"x4' board that extended over the door frame and then were secured to the door with duct tape, zip-ties, and 11/2 inch U-bolts. Once the buildings was prepared we then moved the donkey through the front doors of Seney to the elevator to the 3rd floor. We then unloaded the donkey and took the elevator back down to the first floor. (now this is a good part) we sent the elevator back up to the second floor (which was also barricaded from the inside) with a Chair, books, and a small shelf leaning against the doors of the elevator so that when they opened on the second floor, the chair would fall prohibiting the doors of the elevator to close for use. As a back up we removed the elevator call key panel from the 1st floor lobby and Removed, NOT Cut, wires from the back of the button. The most damage this may have caused is a blown fuse. All in all I believe that once people see the brilliance behind this prank and get off their high-horse they may be able to see that college is about relationships and memories, not a grade on a test or your attendance record. - Seney hall was discovered to be locked down at approx 0735 and it took until 1115hrs to remove the Zebra. - Ultimately this was a HARMLESS prank, NOT vandalism. - and when all is said and done, it may have been one of the greatest pranks ever pulled off in history of American academia... A zebra was barricaded into the most historic building of one of the highest ranked universities in America... thats awesome!!

Regards, The Emory Pranksters

Around 300 students were fooled on Sunday into going to Model Town Park for a free breakfast supposedly arranged by a well-known margarine brand. On arrival however, students found there was no breakfast or officials of the margarine brand. Students of three private schools received the invitation cards several weeks ago from unidentified people posing as officials of the margarine brand, who came to the schools to distribute the cards... the people posing as officials of the margarine brand seemed authentic, as they wore badges and stickers carrying the brand name.

Town historian Tracey M. Wilson says she heard that a condom was found on the finger earlier this month. Police, though, said they can't confirm reports of any pranks on Webster recently.

At least seven times just the past three weeks, a mystery caller has cleverly insinuated himself into the normally well-manicured ritual of the quarterly calls. As top executives of publicly traded companies respond to securities analysts’ questions about their balance sheets, he impersonates a well-known analyst to get called upon. Then, usually declaring himself to be “Joe Herrick of Gutterman Research,” he launches into his own version of analyst-speak.

“Congratulations on the solid numbers — you always seem to come through in challenging times,” he said to Leo Kiely, president and chief executive officer of Molson Coors Brewing Co., on February 12, convincingly parroting the obsequious banter common to the calls. “Can you provide some more color as to what you are doing for your supply chain initiatives to reduce manufacturing costs per hectoliter, as you originally promised $150 million in synergy or savings to decrease working capital?”

The University of British Columbia engineers are famous for their pranks, a yearly tradition during winter engineering week. Some of their pranks are wonderfully subtle, such as wiring the lights on the Lions Gate Bridge to blink "UBC Engineers" in Morse code. They once changed the chimes of the UBC clock to sound out the engineers' theme song. The engineers have a ritual involving the shell of a red Volkswagen beetle, which is deposited at some challenging spot around Vancouver, such as atop the 15-story Buchanan Tower, at the summit of a downtown clock tower, or suspended under a bridge (in a tour de force, one year the bug was suspended between the Granville and Burrand bridges). In 1992, it was floated on empty beer kegs to the middle of Stanley Park's Lost Lagoon, and the fountain -- which had been activated for the occasion -- was redirected so it shot out the car's sunroof.

It causes calls made from the target phones to reach wrong numbers! Think about how absolutely maddening and frustrating that would be if it were to happen to your phone. Now, you'll begin to appreciate the devastating effect that this device can have.

Just to toy with their fury and confusion even more, it is engineered to allow about 25% of the calls dialed to go through correctly. (Note: calls to 911 will always go through.) And, as is the case with all of the devices in this section, even once the target realizes that something very weird is going on, they'll be hard-pressed to stop it; replacing their telephones or even getting a new phone number won't do any good since they would have to locate the actual device and remove it. Installs anywhere along the telephone line;

The prankster, which California papers have called “a would be actor,” has placed fictitious ads in the past, including the Roanoke Times, where he allegedly found the diary of a “very famous American” inside an old clock, and in the Miami Harold, where he convinced the entertainment media that he was Elizabeth Taylor’s new beau.

Once, he said, he received a call from Nick Nolte after posting an ad in California suggesting he found an Academy Award in a Beverly Hills park.

Years ago, he said, he even placed an ad in the Missoulian claiming to have found an ancient sarcophagus filled with a mummy and artifacts.