'Hello? Let me out!' Irishman pranks family at his own funeral

'It's a good thing he's dead because I'd have killed him'

Shay Bradley.

Standing before a coffin lowered six feet into the ground, some people clap while others wipe away tears. Bagpipes slowly grow louder, signalling the end of the funeral, before they cut out.

“Hello?” a voice bellows from what seems like inside the casket.

“Hello,” it says more flatly this time, followed by rapping on wood.

“Let me out!”

You might expect the living to throw themselves on the coffin to retrieve the supposedly dead. Instead, friends and family of Shay Bradley erupted into tearful laughter.

In a video posted to Facebook on Sunday, Bradley’s children captured their father’s (dying) wish on camera for the world to see. Before he died on Oct. 8 in the south of Dublin, Ireland, he decided he would leave his family with one last prank: a recording of himself pretending he was buried alive and begging to be let out.

“It’s f—ing dark in here!” he joked from beyond the grave. “I can hear you. This is Shay, I’m in the box!”

Andrea Bradley, one of Shay’s three kids, told the Irish Mirror her brother Jonathan conspired with their father nearly a year in advance to pull off the gag. When the bagpipes sounded, Jonathan queued the recording of Shay and gathered his siblings, mom and nieces and nephews to listen.

“So my oldest brother called over to the house for tea one day. They were having the craic (fun) and joking and my dad just said ‘put the phone on the table and start recording.'” Apparently Shay did it in one take because he was just naturally that funny.

“Dad made Jonathan promise not to show any of us until days before the funeral. He specified, ‘Tell mam, but tell her she’s not allowed to stop it.'”

While everyone quickly caught on during the gaffe, Shay’s sister Rose apparently thought the shrieking was legitimate.

“She’s shocked, she thinks the message is real. Then, the penny drops and she’s like ‘It’s a good thing he’s dead because I’d have killed him’. That reaction would have pleased him the most,” Andrea said.

Shay, who had been battling cancer for three years, made sure to leave his family one last laugh, one last warm memory before being buried.

“He wanted something special and for everyone to remember him as he was, so that everyone, especially my mother, did not leave the graveside sombre,” Jonathan told the BBC .