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The women of Stoke Hall's 7th floor had it coming. They'd had their fun, and now it was payback time. When one of the guys spotted a jar of chicken bouillon cubes in his room, he got a brilliant idea. Late at night, the men snuck into the women's bathroom and inserted several cubes into each showerhead. The unsuspecting women took showers in the morning as usual. Only as the day wore on did they realize that the aroma of chicken soup wasn't in the air—it was in their hair. Revenge was never sweeter.

When we invited alumni to share their memories of pranks at UNH, we discovered that there are perhaps as many motivations for playing a prank as there are pranksters. There's jealousy: "They didn't allow freshman boys at the ladies' tea." Irreconcilable differences: "She had hundreds of stuffed koala bears—I barely had room to move." And random temptation: "Unfortunately, the baby alligators my father sent me had died en route."

Yes, the justifications for playing a prank are legion. But the pranks themselves, both the classic and the contemporary, seem to follow certain recurring themes. We received nearly 200 reminiscences, and a fair number of them were actually fit to print. Here are some of our favorites.

If at All Possible, Involve a Cow

The definitive book on college pranks is titled If at All Possible, Involve a Cow, and at UNH, some of the earliest and most memorable pranks indeed involved a cow or other quadruped. In the 1930s, Alpha Gamma Rho brothers allegedly led a cow into the T-Hall tower, which is hardly bovine accessible. No explanation as to how they got her back downstairs was recorded. What is preserved, however, is a poem written by night watchman "Pop" Marshall in 1951 after he discovered a cow on the second floor of the music building, then Ballard Hall. It ends thus: "Now I'm willing to guard your property / And watch your buildings fine, / But teaching music to a cow / Is a little out of my line."

For other pranksters, maneuvering through campus with a pig in a poke proved challenge enough. During Freshman Week, Marty Hall '60 and some friends decided to let a pig loose in Congreve Hall. It wasn't exactly an original idea—one of the co-conspirators was the son of Dean of Students Edward Blewett '26, '67H, who had (his son revealed) performed a similar stunt back in the day.

Down at the university barns, Hall says, even the "little" 100-pound pigs "were faster than hell and had way better traction in the mud than we did." The purloined pig, though trussed up in a bag, was much harder to convey across campus than expected, but the students managed to arrive at Congreve and release the pig in a dorm room. Then they dashed out and disappeared into the dark, unrecognized. Or so they thought. "Lo and behold, on Monday morning we were all called into Dean Blewett's office," recalls Hall. Yet the dean's reprimand—he did not expect to see them in his office ever again—was belied by a small but persistent smile. (In 1969, the university put a stop to "borrowing" live animals from the barns. Even though the animals had always been returned unharmed, it was explained that their removal from a controlled environment might invalidate research results.)

In the 1970s and '80s, about 20 Thompson School students lived and worked on a university-owned farm called Highland House. One day some male students slipped a sheep into one of the women's bedrooms. "The guys then took off, which was a mistake," recalls Beverly Briggs Westerveld '82. "The girls knew how to handle sheep. So they just grabbed it and put it in one of the guys' rooms." The kicker? "He had wall-to-wall carpeting."

And what would a cow college be without cow patties? In retaliation for the old Corn-Flakes-in-the-bed-sheets prank, Peter Crabtree '64 decided to give his roommate's girlfriend a special "cake." He went to the UNH cow barn, where, he recalls, "I had expected that the actual 'catchment' would be a matter of strictly self-service." Instead, a farm worker cheerfully brought him a perfectly round specimen in a box lined with sawdust, covered with colored sprinkles he just happened to have on hand. The masterpiece was later delivered to the girlfriend, who opened it in front of her sorority sisters, much to Crabtree's satisfaction.

Wheeled vehicles remained a perennial target of pranksters for decades. In 1937, two students helped rescue a fire truck from, oddly enough, a fire in the barn where it was stored. Feeling entitled to a joy ride, the pair decided to take the truck to pick up a girlfriend in Massachusetts. They made it as far as Newmarket before they were stopped by two stern state troopers and sent back to Durham. Bicycles have also been fair game. Two tall students, standing one on the shoulders of the other, enjoyed sliding tethered bicycles up and over a lamppost in front of Stoke and then leaving them on the portico above the dorm's entrance, reports Darius Ginwala '80. An anonymous alumna from the Class of '69 confesses, "I ran a bicycle up the flagpole in front of T-Hall—something I would never think of doing today!"

Car-snatching incidents over the decades have taken many forms. In the 1950s, mechanically minded students would sometimes dismantle a car and reassemble it in the owner's dorm room—and on one occasion over Sigma Alpha Epsilon's front porch, according to George Lyon '53.

More common was simply picking up a small car—VW bugs especially lent themselves to this sleight of many hands—and putting it where it didn't belong: on the sidewalk (guaranteed ticket), in a dorm hallway, buried in snow (the housemother who owned it was convinced the snowplow had carried it away), or on its roof under the T-Hall arch (the pranksters paid for damages). In 1963, recalls Dwight Sherman '64, a group of Sigma Beta brothers managed to carry a VW bug up many steps and over two terraces and several high hedges to deposit it at the front door of their house. Frederick Langevin Jr. '51 says a similar caper went awry in the late '40s when several pranksters tried to get a Crosley station wagon owned by Dick Birch '51 through the front door of Hunter Hall, where it got stuck.

There was only one time, however, when a car heist—or at least hoist—could have been viewed as a public service project. In 1991, several members of Alpha Phi Omega, the coed service fraternity, came upon a car parked at an angle across four spaces. "Six of us lifted it into its proper spot," says Paula St. Louis '93, "completely within the confines of one parking space."

We Want Pants!

Of all the prank genres, none may be so tied to a particular era as the panty raid. An alumna from the Class of '28 recalled an incident when, as a throng of men marched on Smith Hall, the befuddled house mother inadvertently unlocked all the ground floor windows, to the delight of the female residents. The phenomenon, however, didn't really come into vogue until the 1950s.

Historians have pegged the fad to an early attack on parietals and curfews in women's dorms. Brian Mitchell '66 has a simpler explanation: A panty raid was a "trophy quest." Women students not only unlocked doors for the marauders, but also sometimes tossed items from upper-floor windows (with contact information attached, no less). Still, there was always the potential for embarrassment. After a panty raid at the beginning of the school year, Carol Quimby Sudol '66 had to call home to report that she was, um, fresh out of underwear and nightclothes. "It was rumored that one of our bathrobes was found flying from T-Hall," she says, and some recovered items—this was the era of girdles—had been tried on and stretched out in the process. Since her mother had sewn her name into her clothes, "after only two days at school, my name was all over the campus." And not in a way her mother would have approved.

It was on a warm spring night close to finals in 1959 when Nancy Bere Janus '59 thrilled to the sound of a mob of fraternity brothers, including her boyfriend, outside Sawyer Hall chanting, "We want Nance! We want Nance!" Moments later she was slightly disappointed to recognize the words as "We want pants!" Eventually, the police and fire department were called in to quell "the disturbance" with fire hoses. The incident, notes Janus, gave UNH its 15 minutes of infamy, when photos of some of the perpetrators, who were later disciplined, made it into local newspapers.

The Humungus Has Spoken

Student attempts to take over the Durham airwaves date back to at least 1912, when a freshman rang the T-Hall bell to stage a false fire alarm, thus disrupting the sophomore class banquet at a time when many pranks were simply skirmishes in ongoing class warfare (freshmen vs. sophomores, that is). In a 1925 incident, two cider jugs were lodged in the clockworks in such a way as to cause the bells to ring continuously. But advances in electronics and broadcasting opened new avenues of mischief making.

At Alpha Tau Omega, several brothers wired a bush with two-way speakers in the late '50s, says Walt Ayre '61. Their opening gambit for young women passing by on Main Street: "This is the bush talking!"

In Christensen Hall in the mid-'80s, the dorm PA system was periodically commandeered—from a stall in the men's bathroom, allegedly—by someone who took on the persona of a "Mad Max" character. Each rant began with "All rise for the Humungus!" and included whimsical pronouncements, such as "Third-floor girls! Return our shower curtains!" An all-points bulletin was issued to every R.A. in the building during broadcasts, and yet the Humungus and his henchmen were never caught, reports Heidi Held Blalock '86.

Gary Sredzienski '85, whose "Polka Party" radio show on WUNH-FM actually started as a kind of joke in 1986, has been playing April Fools' pranks on the airways ever since, often with the help of special guests. One year it was announced that Sredzienski had been sacked because his show wasn't "ethnically diverse" enough. Another time, Andrzej Rucinski, professor of electrical and computer engineering, announced in his Polish accent that an "authentic Pole" was taking over the show. When Sredzienski played two hours of "Sing Along with Mitch" another year, it was more than one elderly Polish lady could take. "How dare you do this," she wrote, "especially on Holy Saturday!"

Listener response was exactly what station manager Scott Piehler '86 was looking for when he staged a 1985 April Fools' joke in response to Student Senate calls for WUNH to change to a more "student friendly" Top-40 format. The station became "The New 91" for the day and played nothing but Top-40 hits. Piehler recorded the (mostly irate) incoming calls—about two to three hours' worth—to make the case before the senate that the station should continue in its alternative niche, where it remains today.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when strange words would scroll across a computer science student's monitor: "Hello, Justin. This is God. Stop surfing the Internet and finish your assignment!" Ethan Mallove '05 was one of the pranksters who hijacked computers from across the room. "Since this was a simple hardware puzzle," he says, "the victims would eventually resolve it through standard computer science geekery."

Stressors for Professors

While most college pranks are of the peer-to-peer variety, there have also been a few brave souls who dared to take on their professors—or even the president. In 1982, President Evelyn Handler woke up one morning to find a veritable menagerie of ornamental creatures on her lawn: flamingos, ducks, frogs, rabbits and gnomes. Owners were later invited to the police station to pick up their critters.

Roberta Humphrey Manter '75 remembers riding instructor Janet Briggs as "a very serious, no-nonsense sort of person who did everything strictly by the rules." Even so, her Advanced Riding students mustered the gumption to celebrate April Fool's Day by wearing costumes to class. Manter went as a clown, and for a crowning touch, she seated herself backwards on a former circus horse named Pancho. When Briggs arrived, she seemed to be stifling a grin, but she surveyed the group calmly and then pronounced, "All trot, please." Pancho immediately complied, much to Manter's dismay. "English saddles are not built for riding backwards," she notes, "and it was rather hard on the tailbone!"

Sometime around 1960, a group of chemistry graduate students decided to try to get their mild-mannered professor, Alexander "Sandy" Amell, to swear. Amell had done some glass blowing for his research and arranged the elegant pieces on the lab bench. The students hid the professor's glassware and replaced it with broken pieces of glass, putting a steel gas cylinder on top to simulate an accident. When Amell walked into the lab and saw the "disaster," he looked horrified. "Then out came the words 'Holy cow!'" says Allen Denio '61, '63G. "We never did get him to curse."

Dorm Sweet Dorm

When it comes to college pranks today, there's no place like a dorm, not to mention Greek houses, apartment complexes and the houses on Young Drive. It was in fact on Young Drive that some housemates in the mid-'90s used to obey the late-night TV command to "Act now!" With a few quick phone calls, "treats" ranging from American Girl Doll catalogs to male enhancement brochures were dispatched to unsuspecting friends—at their parents' home addresses. Perhaps the most popular dorm prank of all has been filling up a room with things like popcorn, helium balloons, crumpled newspapers, soda cans—or "borrowed" objects like construction signs. Another variation was to simply fill the doorway while the occupant was sleeping. Dana Rosengard '82 recalls one victim opening her door in the morning to find "a wall of popcorn cascading down on her, pooling at her feet, her ankles, her shins. All, of course, while she had to go to the bathroom."

Some people really know how to turn the tables on pranksters, though—like one student who found her dorm room filled from floor to ceiling with crumpled newspapers. She was "a born-again Christian who really practiced the forgiveness she preached," recalls Manter. She just said, "Oh, you silly freshmen!" and went to stay with friends for the night, leaving the deflated pranksters to clean up the mess.

Another favorite trick: steal the clothing of showering hallmates, and then watch them dash down the hallway wrapped in a shower curtain. Pete Reynolds '84, the mastermind behind the chicken bouillon showers on Stoke's 7th floor, had the rare experience of receiving praise for his prank—from the victims, no less. "A few of the ladies came up and congratulated me," he says, "on a great prank that caused no lasting harm."

The upperclassmen in Eaton House, which is next to the train tracks, probably weren't thanked for one of their favorite pranks, however. "We snuck into the rooms of freshmen at 3 a.m. with a flashlight," recalls MaryLynn Salerno '92, "and while poised right over their bed suddenly screamed, 'Look out! Train!'"

Many students have learned the hard way that furniture sometimes has a disturbing tendency to show up in unexpected places. Katie Roy '05 once returned to her room in "the Ghettos" only to find every single thing—including the couch, picture frames, food in the fridge, dishes, curtain rods, CDs and salt shakers—turned upside down. A few years earlier, passersby gawked at a roomful of furniture meticulously recreated outside on Zeta Chi's sandy volleyball court. The look on the brother's face when he came home, according to Francisco Clavijo '02: "priceless."

As a freshman in Lord Hall, Bruce Corson '74 apparently believed in "better pranks through chemistry." In his first foray, he mixed chemicals together to make "little purple crystals that would pop like a cap gun underfoot." Emboldened, he applied Le Chatelier's principle to enhance the explosions, but the mixture blew up in the bathtub. He managed to emerge unscathed—although his face was temporarily stained purple. Later, he and his friends constructed a 4-foot-long beer-can cannon, stuffed it with lighter-fluid-soaked toilet paper rolls and fired them out the bathroom window. The result was impressive enough to attract two policemen walking by outside. "As they burst into the bathroom, they kept hearing the sound of 'pop-bang-bam' from the remaining contact explosive crystals," recalls Corson. "They didn't ask. They just made us stop firing off the cannon and then left us alone."

In the late 1960s, some residents of East Hall were more interested in controlling natural forces. After the first spring rains, recalls Rod Ford-Smith '69, they would construct a dam across College Brook. But in 1969, their magnum opus was demolished by the authorities with a backhoe. At 2 a.m., the dorm president called a fire drill, giving the eager beavers the opportunity to rebuild the dam.

One day when Nancy Brockman '84 was bored, she tied her roommate Debbie Snow-Major's huge koala-bear collection together and "Rapunzeled" it out the window of Williamson. Ten stories. "That's how many she had!" says Brockman. (They're still friends.)

Fantastic Fakes

Desperate times sometimes call for creative measures. It didn't seem fair to Bill Nelson '58 that freshmen men were barred from the annual ladies' teas where older fraternity brothers got to check out all the freshman women. So Nelson and seven friends dressed in drag and went to an SAE tea with a group of women. Despite his physique—6 feet tall and about 200 pounds—Nelson was the only one who made it in. "If I had been caught, I would have been banned from rushing any house," he recalls. "But the girls just kept moving me around."

A mishap can be inspirational for some pranksters—like Emmett Ross '68, who received two, alas, quite—dead baby alligators in the mail from his father. On April Fools' Day, he placed them in College Brook, and was rewarded for his troubles with an article in the student newspaper.

In 1970, Lambda Chi Alpha brothers were inspired to paint a crooked crosswalk across Madbury Road, labeled "Caution, Drunks X-ing." The first year (latex), the police forgave them. The next year (oil), the police were not amused.

Pranks have also been used to relieve the stress of, say, studying for finals. In 1980, Gail Taylor Miller '83 recalls, there was a "letter-writing campaign" in which engineering students repeatedly rearranged the letters on the front of Kingsbury Hall—to read Kingsbury Hell, Hangsbury Kill (and worse). For a time, she says, the letters were just removed entirely. (That was the same year when some students scaled a number of campus buildings, including T-Hall, and planted a pirate flag on top to mark the achievement.) In both the 1960s and 1980s, students got the idea to make a certain four-letter word on the front of Smith Hall by removing the "m" in "Smith" and rearranging the remaining letters.

One of the most elaborate charades, aside from the George B. Nako ruse in Hamilton Smith Hall (see UNH Magazine Fall '07), was a mockumentary-style candidacy for student body president in 1995. Among the slogans used by Brendan Quigley '96 and his running mate, Adam Voss '96, were "Take Back the Day!" and "We're making the other guys look legitimate." The pair gave goofy interviews to WUNH and The New Hampshire, but they pulled out all the stops in the final election debate, when they took to the stage accompanied by fake Secret Service agents, complete with black suits, earphones and dart guns. A few questions into the proceedings, the agents screamed "Gun!" and ran onto the stage to cover the two candidates with their bodies.

In the 1990s, some McLaughlin Hall residents enjoyed livening up the admissions office tours that regularly trekked through their building. According to Cathy Donovan '97, they threw rubber snakes, screamed, dressed up in disco clothes and tagged along, asking questions in foreign accents. "The tours didn't stop," she says, "so I'm guessing our antics were somewhat successful in generating new students!"

In retaliation for a prank involving their underwear (don't ask), Dave Klose '81 and Kevin Trask '81 mailed Gretchen Tarbell Lutz '79 and some of her friends a fake letter from the Dean of Students—on official letterhead—announcing their suspension for illegally entering a room and destroying property. "The reaction was way more than we expected," says Klose. "They were devastated." Many tears later, Klose and Trask admitted the letter was a prank. They were not prepared for the fury that followed. "I'm not sure they have forgiven us today!" says Klose.

We have some good news for him. "All is forgiven," says Lutz. "But now that I know how to contact him, he'd better be careful!" ~