I think my best prank was done at the age of 12 with the help of two friends. The Jerky Boys and Ferris Bueller had nothing on us when it came to complex pranks.
It was the summer of '83 and my friend Mike stops by in the morning. Fire up the Atari and play that for a while, then decide to hit the phone. First we called the "regulars". Our good friend Mr. Boner gets a call and then our favorite business, Ruth's Hair Removal...the pubic hair question always got Ruth fired up!
We needed some new material so we're thumbing through the yellow pages and there it was...the FUNERAL DIRECTORY! I called one funeral home to report a "deceased" but it didn't work since the name I made up wasn't reported to the Coroners office.
No problem, we just need to work on it.
We head out to the arcade at the local bowling alley and hang out there for a while and then decide to visit our friend Craig who lives down the street from there. Craig was on our bowling team for years and one grade ahead of us so he was already in high school. His mom answers the door and we find out a deep dark secret...Craig was at band camp and won't be back home until after 12:00.
Craig is jokester so we can't wait till he gets home to rip on him about that.
We then head over to another friends house. We tell Bob about the funeral home prank and since his parents were both at work we decided to call the coroners office.
Mike calls and starts sobbing about having a deceased. He keeps them going for a while and then as the end joke he tells the lady that "his son got hit by a toy tonka train". We're laughing our asses off but they took it serious! Between his blubbering she must have heard something totally different.
The lady asks for the deceased full name! Mike blurts out Craig ***** (I ain't gonna mention his last name here). Now they want all his info, so Mike starts crying trying to stall her while we look up the info in the phone book.
After a little while it's all done...Craig is officially DEAD and they're sending the coroner van to his house to pick him up!
Does it end there? Hell no! I now start calling funeral homes pretending to be Craigs dad who is currently out of town in another state on business. Hit a few dead ends but two fell for it...sure they were hesitant at first until they put me on hold and called the coroners office to confirm a report had been filed. You wouldn't believe how well "send the bill to my home address" worked. Even the casket was no problem...Craig just loved Mahogany soooooo much. In the end Mr. Popular was scheduled to make appearences at two different funeral homes.
Of course now comes all the tedious work, such as renting a limo to take the grievers from the funeral home to the cemetary, renting a hall and caterers for the party after the wake. Hectic times I tell ya! Never got around to ordering an actual cemetary plot or writing that obituary and submitting it to the local newspaper (thank God!) as it was getting late.
We took off and headed home. I'll never forget as I rode up the sidewalk on my bicycle. Both my mom and dad were standing there on the front porch with a look I had never seen before and never want to see again. Holy sh!t did they lay into me! Of course I denied everything and my dad drug me upstairs into my bedroom and pointed out the phone book that just happened to be open to the yellow pages funeral directory...dang busted! They told me the police are coming by and I'm in it so deep there's nothing they can do. I'm thinking to myself yeah right.
Next morning at 8:00 am I hear a car pull into the driveway and a door slam. I'm about ready to puke...look out the window and oh sh!t it's a cop.
I got lectured for an hour at the kitchen table about what kind of things happen to a 12 year old kid in state prison. The cop was so freakin' serious I really did believe him. Mike lived in a neighboring city outside his jurasdiction so he had me call him. "Dude, you aint gonna believe this but we're dead. There's a cop at my house that wants to talk to you". Mike starts laughing "yeah sure"! Cop grabs the phone away from me and tears into him and eventually gets his dad on the line. They had to make a trip to the police dept. to get the same lecture.
In the end we were grounded for months and had to go apologize to Craig and his family in person. His dad stood at the door while Craig stood behind him silently pointing, laughing and making faces at me as I apologized. Craig thought the whole thing was hilarious, turns out right after he got home from band the coroner meat wagon pulled up to claim him. All this time I thought the calls were traced but couldn't figure out why Bob didn't get busted since the calls came from his house. Turns out nobody would have ever pinned it on us if it weren't for the RECORDED calls at the coroners office and funeral homes.
Laid off the prank phone calls for a while until I was about 16 and smart enough to cover my tracks. Got real clever with cordless fone phreaking and even a high powered linear hooked up to a CB radio. Had horny truckers from all over the country calling one kid I didn't like. Had another visit but this time from a detective...kids parents knew it was me, detective knew it was me but all their traced calls went to various houses through out the city and not one to mine.
Oh man those were good times!