A festivalgoer attending the recent T In The Park festival in Scotland over the weekend became a viral sensation and the subject of a police manhunt after a simple prank on Twitter went awry.
As the Scotsman reports, police were investigating claims from T In The Park attendee Scott Johnston from Ayr, after the punter tweeted that he was trapped in a tent bag on the campus site, claims which later proved to be untrue.
“I’m somewhere in green 7 someone has packed me into a tent bag for a joke and I can’t get out I don’t have much battery left,” Johnson tweeted at the official T In The Park account. His tweet quickly gained traction, receiving over 3,000 retweets in two hours.
With an apparent trapped missing person on their hands and the hashtag #prayforScott trending on Twitter, Police Scotland replied to the distress signal, writing, “Hi Scott please tweet us with more info if you can. We have officers with stewards in the area looking for you now.”
“Please can you, a friend or family member contact us on 101,” they added. Apparently concerned that his Twitter prank was getting out of hand and was now threatening to use up precious police resources, Johnston decided to send out another tweet announcing his freedom.
“It’s okay everyone my friends unzipped me earlier never been so happy to see the rain,” he wrote. It was at this point that Twitter users began speculating that the whole thing may have been a practical joke that got out of hand, with many critical of Johnston’s ability to construct a tweet from the confines of a tent bag.
According to the Daily Record, the 23-year-old has since admitted that the whole thing was a prank. “It is everywhere online… I just tweeted it for a laugh. I didn’t think it would spiral out of control,” he said. “I barely use Twitter. That’s probably the first tweet I’ve sent in ages.”
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“I don’t feel bad about it. I can’t stop laughing – it’s the only thing that made me laugh all weekend. That was my seventh year going and it was the worst T in the Park I’ve ever been to. I actually left earlier on Sunday morning, I wasn’t even there this morning.”
Indeed, this year’s T In The Park festival has attracted criticism from many punters for poor organisation, which saw hundreds of punters wait for hours to leave the festival grounds. A man also reportedly died during the event and footage has surfaced of another man being hit with a bottle.
We’ve covered a few music festival pranks recently. Our favourite was the ‘Magical Porta Potty’, which saw street comedy group Improv Everywhere plant several bands, including a mariachi group and a marching band, inside a loo at the recent Governors Ball music festival in New York.
