Inspired by another great thread. Can I ask what things you did as a kid that were pretty outrageous?

[Winter7]

Not sure if I am allowed to reference other thread but op's son was involved in a pretty brave but funny prank.

Got me thinking. When I was about 14, a group us us planned to camp out in our school overnight. Up in the rafters of a very old building. It was more of a ghost watch adventure than anything more troublesome. We packed a picnic, sleeping bags and torches. No phones or such at the time. A couple of our parents wouldn't let some of our group 'stay over' at our make believe sleepover and our plan never went ahead. I still shudder when I imagine the trouble we could have been in. Never once did we consider alarms going off!
What youthful mischief did other mumsnetters get up to that as adults you now think was a terrible idea?

Went quarry diving in high summer, when I was 15. Ment to be at school, totally isolated.
I cringe now, as a parent. But boy was that an exhilarating day

Sounds amazing. And so dangerous!

Took my doll +pram to the local service station shop, filled it with sweets while the assistant was out the back.
Am suitably ashamed.

Staying over at my best friend's very laissez-faire household aged 10 or 11, and getting up in the middle of the night and heading off on our bikes (no lights) with food in rucksacks to investigate imaginary 'mysterious lights' on a nearby estate notorious for its irascible gamekeepers. No one had the faintest idea we were regularly doing this.

Hitching around the countryside in our early teens (though admittedly this was the 80s, and it was more common then).

I can only imagine the horror if our parents knew what we were up to. But rhey all sound great too!

Ran away to the local playground age 4 while my DGM was distracted in the kitchen washing up!

Tied our (pedal) go cart onto the back of the bin lorry while the driver wasn't looking. Wheeee! We did it quite a lot, sorry Mr Bin Lorry driver!

Oh, god, that reminds me. Hanging on behind lorries and vans on rollerskates and home-made sort of skateboard/ride-on cars we called stearnas.

Myself and my erstwhile cousin broke into (we were 7 we just climbed in) a Tudor house and set up an elaborate system of dens and hideys.
We played there all summer holidays, doing our own improvements and renovation. It was closed to the public so we weren't discovered until the end of the holidays and that was only because the pet dog we acquired was barking at night.

I dread to think of the damage we may have done but it was the greatest adventure

My brother set fire to a tree in a very well known, royal park.

Awful, I'd march my kids straight to the police station to confess if they did that now.

We got the internet in about 1995 when I was about 8 or 9. Chatrooms were king in those days and none of my friends were online yet to talk to so I used to get up to all sorts of japes in chatrooms. I’d start talking to a 40 year old man from eg Dallas and I’d pretend to be a 35 year old woman from Dallas and arrange to meet him for coffee the next day. I thought it was hilarious! Thank god for parental controls these days ...

Also "broke in" to an abandoned house. We didn't cause any damage, the window had been smashed for ages and we just climbed through. Think we spent most of the summer holidays in and out of that house. God it was spooky!

I'm genuinely ashamed to say we did a lot of running back and forth over the high-speed main railway line too.

Those ones hanging on to lorries has made me shiver with the what ifs!
I'm loving the brazen filling of pram with sweeties....Ha!

In those days 'Playing out' was a complete sentence

We devoted a whole week to digging a bear trap in the grounds if Time Team ever do a trench there it'll confuse matters.
There are many many Lego men burried in that old Tudor midden.

Agree, we really were let out to roam free. I'm amazed I never badly hurt myself or got into any worse situations.
Imagine you had actually trapped a bear!

We have an industrial railway about 1/2 a mile from where we grew up and the footpath took us over a bridge across.

There was a gap in the fence so you could follow the footpath along the tracks if you wanted, it was great!

We used to walk underneath the bridge but not only that, climb into the underneath of the actual structure and straddle the gap and walk across. There were bars we had to climb and we were a good 20m above the ground. How we didn't fall and die I don't know.

Cold sweat reading that last one, Seven!

Oh no, the poor woman must have been terrified! She'd have been on mumsnet asking for advice!

I was a latchkey kid growing up in London, and I just use to wander around sightseeing or visiting the museums. I used to sort of innocently hang around a family to get on the train or bus for free, or into a museum without being challenged. It usually worked.

Upstart, that sounds like the makings of a plot of a good movie!

We hid behind a door in Dover Castle when the security guy went round shutting the place up. Six of us stayed in there all night and scared ourselves absolutely shitless. We had no torch or warm clothes or food and were genuinely terrified.

We also decided that a local farmer was killing people and burying them in his cowshed (I can’t remember what ‘evidence’ we used to come to this conclusion). We used to hide in his barn and spy on him. We even crept into his house once looking for proof. That is too embarrassing and awful to ever tell anyone in rl!

We broke in at night to put red dye in a local outdoor pool and blew up an (expensive) inflatable shark. This was in the 80's when Jaws was a thing

It dyed all the grouting red ....oops

Aged around 13, my friend and I lied about sleeping at one another's houses and stayed out all night with other friends who had done the same thing, novelty quickly wore off when none of us had any money, any dinner, it was freezing cold and three of us ended up finding a random unlocked car which we got into and went to sleep until around 6am when my friends mum started work and we crept back into her house. It was a fun idea at the time but so stupid and so dangerous!

We also used to have amazing fun up at the Drop Redoubt and Western Heights in Dover. A lot of it has been made properly inaccessible now but we still managed to break into the fort last time we went! So many tunnels, bridges, and secret places to find up there.

Left to free roam for whole days at a time from about 7/8 in West London. At the same age regularly left to roam free up and down the (crumbling scary high) cliffs of Dorset when my parents were down there.

At 12ish i was off up to central London every weekend on a £2 travel card (all day, all public transport, remember those?) Sometimes got the last train back home, sometimes missed it. Just roamed the streets and shops and mixed with the rest of the dodgy hanger abouters.

At 14 missed the last train and spent the night in a wreck of a car parked up in the street in Loughton with just a dog to keep me warm before getting the first train 32 stops back down the central line to get home.

All those years the amount of times i escaped rape/murder by the skin of my teeth makes me feel i have an angel looking after me!