by Kelly McLaughlin
He wanted to make sure my mam would be laughing leaving the cemetery, not crying
A man in Ireland got the last laugh at his funeral by pranking mourners with a message from beyond the grave.
Loved ones attending the funeral of Shay Bradley, a veteran of Ireland’s Defence Forces, were shocked when they heard his voice as his coffin was lowered into the ground in Kilkenny.
“Hello? Hello? Let me out! Where the f— am I?” a prerecorded message from Bradley said.
“Let me out! It’s f—ing dark in here!” he continued.
“Is that that priest I can hear?” he said, adding: “This is Shay. I’m in the box. No, in f—ing front of you. I’m dead.”
Bradley then began singing “Hello again, hello. I just called to say goodbye.”
Watch the video of the prank:
Funeral in dublin yesterday he's alive pic.twitter.com/j18uFJ5aA4
— Lfcgigiddy1122 (@lfcgigiddy1122) October 13, 2019
An obituary for Bradley published by Fanagans Funeral Directors said he died last week “after a long illness.”
His daughter Andrea Bradley told HuffPost that her father’s dying wish was to have the audio recording played during his funeral.
She said that her father recorded the audio about a year ago and that only her brother and her nephew knew about it. Days before the funeral, her brother told the rest of his siblings and their mother about the prank.
“He wanted to make sure my mam would be laughing leaving the cemetery, not crying,” Andrea Bradley told HuffPost, adding that her parents were married for 43 years.
She said her father’s recording was a way of “saying not only goodbye but to also say, ‘OK, the sadness is over now — here is a laugh so you can go and celebrate my life with a smile on your face.'”
Article first published on Insider.
