Ah, April Fool’s Day … the day when, for some reason, people think it is hilarious to pull pranks on others, say things that aren’t true and post phony Facebook posts to see if anyone will remember that it’s April 1. It got us to thinking about the legacy of college pranking, and we found some of what we think are the best ever done.

Let’s begin with the local favorite, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. WPI actually has a long history of pranking, some of which actually spilled over to borderline criminal activity. In 1884, pranksters were able to get a horse into the Boynton Hall chapel, and it was found sitting in a pew when students came in for devotional in the morning. The entire junior class was convicted except one person.

In 1925, someone stole the clock hands off the clock in Boynton Hall. Their replacements were stolen again in 1950 and not returned until 2000. In1940, the freshman class was able to get a car into the dormitory. In 1975, someone climbed Washburn Tower and stole the arm-shaped weather vane, leaving a ransom note. The arm had to be recreated as the original was never found.

The College of the Holy Cross also has some prank history. In the late 1940s, someone parked a Worcester bus on the Dinand Library steps.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is historically one of the best when it comes to the pranks. Students have been able to install a solar-powered subway car that could ride around the perimeter of the great dome of their building and, more recently, were able to get an entire room of furniture to hang on the ceiling of their Media Arch, complete with chairs, a tree, a pool table (and all its accessories), a lamp and a fake cat sleeping on one of the chairs.

Speaking of cats, MIT students also engineered one of the best Internet hoaxes of all time when they convinced millions of people that there was such a thing as “Bonsai Kittens.” These kittens were reportedly put into different shaped bottles and fed through tubes to keep them alive, causing them to take the shape of the bottles they were in. The photos were so convincing, outraged people and animal rights activists filed report after report with the FBI.

Lesson No. 2: If someone asks you to flip a card over while you are sitting in the bleachers watching an event, be sure you know what the overall message will say. One great instance of this prank happened in 2004, when Yale University students convinced unsuspecting Harvard University fans to hold red and white signs that ended up forming the words “We Suck” at a Harvard-Yale game. California Institute of Technology students did this in the 1961 Rose Bowl, only the signs made up the school name. They weren’t even playing.

CalTech also was able to exploit a McDonald’s sweepstakes back in 1975 with a computer program which allowed them to fill in the names of students on over a million sweepstakes forms. The rules of the sweepstakes said that people could enter as many times as they wanted, a mistake McDonald’s has never made again.

Harvard has some thieves, too. The staff of the Harvard Lampoon school paper was able to successfully steal the “sacred cod,” a big wooden fish which hangs over the door of the Massachusetts House of Representatives room. State officials actually dragged through the Charles River to find it, but it was safely hidden elsewhere.

Though I can’t imagine having to do every assignment of my homework, every test and every paper twice for the sake of a gag, William Edgar Smith, a student at Georgia Institute of Technology, did just that. When he received two enrollment applications for the school, he thought it would be funny to have a fictitious person enroll alongside him and named him George P. Burdell. During his time at the school, he did all of his work plus the work of “Burdell,” and each of them were awarded a Bachelor’s Degree in 1931.

Down in Texas at Rice University, 10 students were able to make the iconic William Marsh Rice statue at the school face the other direction back in 1988. The statue is 2,000 pounds, and after two failed attempts at the prank, they were ultimately successful. In 2008, some of the pranksters even established the Willy Revolution Engineering Undergraduate Innovation and Excellence Fund for the school.

In the 1960s, a group of University of Arizona students were able to create UFOs out of laundry bags, candles and gas, which they proceeded to fly over Tucson, completely fooling the media and the citizens of the area into believing aliens had made an appearance.

In 1978, Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian led the student council. One of their campaign promises was to move the Statue of Liberty to Lake Mendota. In 1979, they were able to fool people with a paper mache replica of the statue’s head and torch sticking out of the lake.

Disclaimer: Pulse Magazine does not condone breaking the law or causing physical or emotional harm for foolery purposes. This article was written to share historical pranks for the purposes of your reading entertainment.

Jennifer Russo