Freaky the Scary Snowman Prank: Police, Shoppers and a Living Snowman

Freaky the Scary Snowman is one of YouTube’s best-loved winter pranks. A performer in a full snowman costume stands perfectly still on a busy pavement, looking like a shop decoration, then lurches into life just as shoppers walk past. In this episode, Police Scare The Scary Snowman, even the police get involved.

Watch: Police Scare The Scary Snowman

The video comes from the Scary Snowman TV channel. Like all hidden-camera pranks, it works through timing: the snowman waits motionless until someone is close enough, and the edit strings together the best jumps, screams and laughs.

Who created Freaky the Scary Snowman?

The concept came from Jay of RIPFILMS and Tom of ExtremeCostumes, who developed the character, with Brian of the YouTube channel RedHeadFlute inside the suit. The first Freaky videos appeared in early 2011, when Laughing Squid shared the prank in February that year, crediting RipFilms and RedHeadFlute.

According to Boston Magazine, the duo behind the prank are Jason Lichtenberger and his partner Brian Medeiros Jr., and the costume was designed by Lichtenberger’s uncle in 2011. They first found internet fame scaring pedestrians on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, and later took the snowman to Newport and to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in December 2014 they set up outside an ice-cream shop for a three-minute “Christmas Special”. They performed for free and even offered to stand in front of local businesses.

Why the prank works

A snowman is something people expect to see standing still outside a shop in December, so nobody looks twice. That expectation is the whole set-up. The reveal comes when something that belongs to the scenery suddenly behaves like a person. Viewers at home are in on the joke from the title, so the pause before each scare builds anticipation even before the passer-by reacts.

Not everyone laughs: Lichtenberger recalled one incident on a New Jersey boardwalk where a startled passer-by punched Medeiros.

A short history of the snowman

Snowmen have been making people smile, and occasionally scaring them, for centuries. In The History of the Snowman, Bob Eckstein traced the earliest known depiction to a marginal illustration in a 1380 Book of Hours held in The Hague.

• 1494: Piero de’ Medici commissioned Michelangelo to build a snowman in Florence.
• 1511: during the “Miracle of 1511”, Brussels residents built more than 100 snow sculptures, many of them satirical.
• Around 1853: Welsh photographer Mary Dillwyn took the earliest known photograph of a snowman.
• 1950: the song “Frosty the Snowman” gave the world a snowman who comes to life, the friendly ancestor of Freaky.
• 2008: in Bethel, Maine, residents built Olympia, a snowwoman 122 feet 1 inch (37.21 m) tall, the tallest on record.

Explore more: snow sculptures that tell jokes while staying still and a different snow-based visual prank.

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