Remember ghost prank videos on YouTube? They’re fun to watch, and their makers have rarely landed in trouble. But that may be changing.

A group of seven students is cooling their heels after unwittingly playing a ghost prank on policemen. Yes, you read it right. The cops were in mufti and had bumped into the pranksters accidentally.

The city police had made tight security following the Ayodhya verdict and the Eid Milad and Tipu Jayanti celebrations.

On Sunday night, the suspects put on flowing clothes — robes, kurtas, etc — and painted them bright red so that they looked bloodstained. They also wore long wigs. The set-up was aimed at scaring motorists, pedestrians and homeless people sleeping on pavements.

The group played the prank on many people but landed in trouble after trying the tricks on plain-clothes detectives in northern Bengaluru. The officers informed the Soladevanahalli police inspector C B Shivaswamy, who was incidentally patrolling the streets at the time.

He rushed to the spot and detained the men for questioning. Their equipment was seized and a case was opened against them at the Yeshwanthpur police station, said N Shashikumar, Deputy Commissioner of Police (North). But since they are all students, they were released on bail, with a warning against repeating such things.

The suspects were identified as Malik, Naveed, Saqib, Syed Nabeel, Yusuf Ahmed, Mohammed Aqib, all 20, and Sajil Mohammed, 21. Aqib is from Nagawara while the rest are from RT Nagar, police said.

The group would film the prank and upload the videos to their YouTube channel called ‘Ghost Prank in Bengaluru’. The residents of North Bengaluru were so scared by the group’s pranks that some of them stopped stepping out at night.