My Best Halloween Prank Involved Building a Homemade Guillotine

It wasn't easy to build but as a teenager my friend and I were quite crafty. For Halloween we wanted to scare some trick or treaters and have a little fun at our house that year. It was back in the late 80's when I was young enough to have some fun but not old enough to know that scaring people might sometimes be a bad thing. In this day and age you might get sued for pulling off a stunt like this if someone who gets too scared.
So I must warn against such a Halloween prank even before I tell you what we did.

We built a homemade guillotine out of wood. This was before the age of the internet when pictures of guillotines are so rampant. That's right we had to actually use a book to get pictures of a guillotine that we would build from scratch. It's easy to go to a site like Wikopedia and find pictures to go from. Here are illustrations of a guillotine at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine. Our guillotine was made of wood much like this picture shows with two long strips on the base and a towering top. It wasn't super hard to construct as 16 year olds who were currently in the Boy Scouts.

We didn't have a real blade of course but painted a shiny piece of wood silver to act as our blade for our home made guillotine. It didn't look super real from my memory but we had a little bit of a kicker. I dressed up as a scarecrow looking figure and lay inside the guillotine on the ground. I had my head face down as if I was on the chopping block for this Halloween prank. It wasn't super comfortable being a homemade scarecrow with straw itching my neck and back. But I would take breaks and only lay down when I saw the other kids coming to the house.

So when people came by my friend always talked to them about the guillotine and how we made it. They would ask about the body looking so real. "Well duh, it was me!" but they weren't aware as I sat very very still. My friend would always offer up the idea to go "touch the head". And one by one our trick or treaters would come by and do it. When they did I would let out a spooky Halloween scream and get up to roar as if the trick or treater had awakened the dead. That usually sent the 10-11 year olds screaming down the road. We of course wouldn't pull off the stunt if the kids were younger than 6-7 years old. If we knew the kids sometimes I would chase them around for fun in the front yard.

It was good clean fun. These days you probably couldn't pull off a Halloween prank without putting up a disclaimer about not being responsible for what happens if you touch the guillotine or the man's head. It's kind of sad but a Halloween prank like that probably wouldn't work unless you put it at a Haunted House for Halloween. That way people are aware they will be scared. But aren't the unexpected scares of Halloween the best? I know I always loved a good scare and even a Halloween prank if it didn't involve my crazy friends TP'ing my house. The whole toilet paper cleanup just wasn't fun at all so I'd suggest something a little more constructive like the home made guillotine with a disclaimer and sign of course.

If you're selective at who you pick to pull the Halloween prank on then it probably wouldn't be too bad. It takes a little work but it's the best Halloween prank we ever pulled. The bad thing is unless you have a lot of storage you'll have to tear it down after Halloween. I doubt your parents will want this fixture of a Halloween prank sitting around for 12 more months just so you can scare the neighbors and send them running!