Living in the Scoot Utopia

This past weekend I was reminiscing with my younger brothers about the various ways I used to scare them when they were young. (One brother is 3 years younger than me, the other is 13 years younger.) I was an E-V-I-L big brother. There's nothing like scaring little kids. Especially younger siblings and cousins.

• When I was still small enough to hide in very confined spaces I turned on a couple of flashlights and tossed one into the washing machine and one in a dryer. I rigged the doors to both with fishing line and crawled behind the machines to wait. Eventually one of my brothers walked by. I yanked the strings and started banging on the backs of the machines, causing the doors to flap open and closed with an eerie glow and making a terrible racket that made the poor boy hit the ceiling.
• Nothing keeps a newly-crawling baby out of trouble more than putting a scary halloween mask behind every cabinet door you don't want him to open.
• I played a sound effects recording of sirens and convinced a young cousin it was a tornado warning. I made her hide in a closet and said there wasn't room for me and that I'd have to hide in a different one. I then switched to a sound effects recording of howling wind and played it at full blast as I threw clutter all over the house, occasionally stopping by to bang loudly on the door of the closet she was in. I faded the wind sounds and then came and got her and told her the tornado was over. Thanks to the mess (which I then had to pick up before Mom found out) she believed it for a while.
• One day I knew that another cousin was about to drop by to play so I covered my neck and chest in fake blood (which I always kept on hand) and then collapsed just inside the front door with a steak knife on top of me.
• I am a firm believer in providing a good science education at an early age. So when my youngest brother was three I gave him his first anatomy lesson. "Kurt, I have bad news for you," I said. "There's a SKELETON living inside of you!"
  
  The beauty of this was that when he went running screaming in tears to Dad to find out if this was true, Dad's answer was, of course, "Yes." :)
  
  On another day I pointed out that he was filled with BLOOD! and got a similar reaction.

• The older of my brothers had the misfortune of having a bedroom where the light switch was on the opposite wall from the door. His bedtime was earlier than mine. For several nights in a row I turned off the light and hid in his closet just before bedtime. As he'd walk across the room to get to the light switch I'd start growling or moaning like a ghost, terrifying him.
  
  After about 4 nights of this he expected it, so when he reached his bedroom door and heard the low ghastly moan coming from the closet, he refused to enter the room and stood there demanding that I stop because he knew it was me. That was when I walked up behind him from the living room and asked him what he was talking about. He turned around with eyes wide as saucers and then ran screaming to the opposite end of the house. Ah, yes, that tape recorder of pre-recorded ghost sounds I planted in his closet worked great!

The fact that I have had a nightmare every night for the past 20+ years must be payback.