Ooh, these are great. My husband is The World’s Jumpiest Man - after I walk up behind him - loudly - and touch him, making him jump, I stay there and touch him again right away, and he jumps again! I’m standing right here, you know.
I’ll have to try some of these out on him. But he is getting older, so I’ll have to do them quickly, before his heart starts getting weak.
I do this on a daily basis, but it’s completely accidental. I guess I just walk very lightly. Always have.
She routinely threatens to put a bell on me.
When I was married I pulled this one on my wife a couple times:
Her dad lived up in the hills, and at night as we drove home, we would often see bats flying through the headlights. I usually drive with the window open a little bit, and after we’d seen a couple bats, I would slide my hand along the front seat, so it was right up against the bottom of her hair. Then I’d say “What was that?” and start flopping my hand back and forth in her hair.
(emphasis mine)
I’d’a sent you packing, too.
That’s a great OP! Brilliant!
When I was about in 4th grade, I once beat my sister home - she was 3 years ahead of me. I got home and hid in the closet. She opened the closet to hang her coat, I jumped out and yelled. She screamed, fainted and peed herself.
My ass got kicked when dad got home.
A couple weeks later, once it all died down a bit, she thought she’d be clever and return the favor. I get home, go to hang my coat. She jumped out of the closet yelling. I reacted by punching her right smack in the nose, while she’s moving towards me. Blood. Everywhere. Broken nose.
My ass got kicked when dad got home.
I decided then there would never be justice for me, and stopped pulling practical jokes on her.
Oh, Christ, that’s awesome. I’m using that on ElzaHub tonight :D.
My co-worker’s three-year-old granddaughter recently got in trouble for jumping on the couch. She suggested to her dad that they play Hide and Seek one afternoon instead. So he hid. She counted. She stopped counting. He waited for her to find him. And waited. And waited.
After about ten minutes, he left his hiding place to find her in the family room.
Jumping on the couch.
E.
Well, if we’re going to hijack this “cute kid” thread into “hiding and scaring people” stories, here’s my best one ever:
I have cold hands most of the time. Like corpse-cold. My brother and SIL moved in with my into my ancient mobile home (I was 21, he was 18) when they got married and had no place to live (they were expecting.) I worked night shift and they frequently forgot to take a key when they went out. So my brother got really good at unlocking the door of the mobile home by reaching in under the crank-out window to the door-knob.
One night, they came home late, and I was up reading in the living-room. I hear him ask her if she has the key and her tell him no. So I knew what he was going to do. I silently slipped across the room to the door, and when he reached his hand in to unlock the door, I ever so slowly and ever so silently wrapped my corpse-cold hands around his arm.
His reaction? He froze in place and said “[sub]…Oh, shit…[/sub]” I, of course, damned near fell on the floor laughing, which was followed by him calling various and sundry un-complimentary things. 
When my nephew first started playing hide and seek with me, he would run off into another room and put his hands over his eyes, thinking this would make him invisible to me. It still makes me melt.
When my mom got some new keys made for the front door, she wanted to try them out. This must have been on the weekend because my dad and I were both there. So she went outside and locked the front door behind her. Then tried one of the new keys. Only, I was holding the bolt closed so it would’t work. It was hard, too. She put a lot of muscle into turning the key. Whenever she stopped, I’d let go of the lock and didn’t hold it when she tried again. So for about 15 minutes, she was trying various keys in the lock and I was randomly holding the bolt closed. She was getting pretty confused since each new key seemed to work some of the time but not always. When she said that she was going back to the hardware store, I told her what was going on. My dad just watched the whole thing with amusement.
My 2 year old plays hide and seek and scares himself. He loves to hide in closets. but he always forgets that the front closet has a sticky doorknob that makes it hard to open from the inside. So he can get in it and close the door, but then can’t get out, especially in the pitch dark. So I often will hear him giggling as he gets in the closet, only to turn into wailing when he realizes he is stuck in there.
He loves to hide though, and it is hilarious because as I go throught the rooms, loudly asking “where is he? Is he under the bed?” etc., he will answer me from wherever he is hiding. “No mommy, I am behind the couch!” Or when he does remember not to answer, he just chuckles quietly to himself.
Ohmygod that’s too fucking cute.
My nephew used to hide underneath the glass coffee table, face down, with his eyes squeezed shut. Cutest thing ever.
I still remember a game of hide-and-seek that Cervaise (my brother) and I played with our father. I don’t have many fond memories of the man, but this is one of them:
We were hiding outside on my father’s somewhat rambling, overgrown, do-it-yourself-badly property, which was rimmed with thick forest and choked with salal, trees growing right up against the garage, exposed joists for The Deck That Is Yet To Come, iron rebar sticking out of the cement porch, and so on. Dad was looking for us.
I, being two years younger and not very fast, was the first caught. I kicked around near the base, which was the front porch, watching my dad hunt all over for Cervaise.
He didn’t find him, because my brother was wearing his jawa sweater — the same long-sleeved brown hooded sweater that was seemingly surgically attached to him and made him look like a Jawa. He blended in to the outdoors pretty well in it, I imagine.
No, Cervaise found me, and lent me his sweater and his glasses. I tottered out as bait, conspicuously wearing his brown sweater. I could see very little, of course, but Dad caught me very quickly as I tried to run toward the base.
My brother, of course, was off like a shot. We were triumphant. Dad was a little bit ticked that he’d been fooled by a nine-year-old. 