Good evening Ireland and that’s an order. Have no plans? Read on…

Last week , we saw a brilliant but terrifying prank featuring a man in an owl costume scaring the life out of visitors to an abandoned children’s hospital. The poor victims of the prank will probably never sleep again, but while we were awake at night with the lights on, holding a pitchfork and awaiting the inevitable visit from Owlman, we got to thinking: what are the best viral pranks we’ve seen? Here are our selected favourites that have terrified us, or made us laugh, in the last while.

The reason we’re never going to Brazil

What’s scarier than ghosts? Child ghosts, of course, and when you’re trapped in a lift with one, it’s a truly horrifying and terror-inducing spectacle. The reason we’re not headed to the World Cup in Brazil is because we saw this video and decided that we’d be safer at home.

Possessed baby, anyone?

In a brilliant piece of viral promotion for a movie, there were even more scary ghost children type-things, this time in the form of a devil baby. The unsuspecting public on the streets of New York had the bejaysus frightened out of them by a screaming spinning-headed possessed infant that has haunted our dreams ever since we saw this video. Hey, watch out buddy, he’s scarin’ here…

It’s not the end of the world. Oh wait, it is?!

LG decided that they were going to promote their new ridiculously big 84 inch TV on the basis of the fact that it was incredibly sharp and defined, and that the picture was so good, you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from real life. They brought a whole bunch of candidates for a job into a room, only to give them a terrible fright as the cityscape behind them began to explode having been hit by a meteor. Not how you want a job interview to go…

She knows how to twerk it

Jimmy Kimmel knows how to make things go viral, and he pulled off the most amazing of his feats with the now infamous “twerking fail” video. The Kimmel crew used a stuntwoman and a computer camera to create a video of ‘Caitlin’ catching fire as she tried to create a twerking video, and then a few weeks later, after every media outlet in the world had reported on it, revealed that the whole thing had been one big prank. Well played Jimmy, well played.

How do you take your coffee? Milk? Telekinesis? Sugar?

Finally, one of the best and one of the first that really went viral was this telekinesis prank, again for another movie, Carrie. Using some hidden cameras and some stunt people, the unfortunate customers of this coffee shop in New York (which is beginning to look like a place where these type of pranks keep happening, so we’ll also cross that off our list of cities we want to live in too) were made to think that a real life telekinetic was in their midst. Now, we all know that this type of stuff isn’t real, but honestly, how would you react to seeing it happen right in front of you? We would scream and run, but that’s just us…

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