This American Life - 286: Mind Games

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

Stories of people who try simple mind games on others, and then find themselves way in over their heads. Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews Lori Gottlieb about the time she sent a letter to a writer in a magazine, a letter packed with white lies. (5 minutes)Act One: Lori Gottlieb's story continues. One complication led to another, and before long, the writer seemed to be lying to her. Or maybe he wasn't. It was hard to tell. Years later, she still isn't sure what happened. (8 minutes)Act Two: A group called Improv Everywhere decides that an unknown band, Ghosts of Pasha, playing their first ever tour in New York, ought to think they're a smash hit. So they study the band's music and then crowd the performance, pretending to be hard-core fans. Improv Everywhere just wants to make the band happy—to give them the best day of their lives. But the band doesn't see it that way. Nor does another subject of one of Improv Everywhere's "missions." (31 minutes)Act Three: Scott Carrier and his family live in the same Salt Lake City neighborhood as Elizabeth Smart, the fourteen-year-old whose 2002 kidnapping made international news. Though Smart's picture was plastered everywhere throughout Salt Lake City and thousands of volunteers searched for her, her captors brazenly brought her back to the very neighborhood from which she'd been taken. They walked freely through the streets with her in broad daylight, yet no one recognized her. Scott talks with his neighbors and his son Milo—who had attended grade school with Smart—about what was going through their minds that prevented them from seeing what was right there in plain sight. (12 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.orgThis American Life privacy policy.Learn more about sponsor message choices.

The first thing you need to know about Lori is that normally she's not the kind of girl who does this sort of thing at all. She doesn't write to strangers. She doesn't do fan mail. But she was looking at, you know the page in certain magazines where they have the little pictures of the people who write for the magazine? She was looking at that. And she saw the photo of this writer who she liked. The picture was blurry, but he had this intense look in his eye. And you could tell he was smart and cute, both at the same time. But I saw this picture and I was like,

That guy's my soulmate. I know that's completely insane, but I knew that I could not not contact him because I would always regret it if I didn't. So I wrote this letter to the magazine, you know, to him, care of the magazine. And I made up a story. I said, I think that, you know, I know this is going to sound really weird, but I saw your picture on the contributors page. And you look exactly like this guy that I met in the airport years ago. This is a complete lie. Right.

So I said, you know, I was changing planes and you were going into one gate and I was going into another. And we struck up this conversation and you were talking about how you wanted to become a writer. And I said, you know, I'm not sure if it's you. I know this sounds really strange, but, you know, if you remember this, let me know. and if it's not you, let me know also just so that, you know, I know that it wasn't you. She figured that in the extremely unlikely event that they actually sort of got along

and it led to something bigger. Well, then she would admit the truth and no harm done. Remember, she had never done this kind of scam before. She had no idea how complicated it could get. So I don't hear from him, which I was relieved by, actually. After I sent the letter, I really regretted actually sending the letter because I was really sort of just embarrassed that I had done this.

so then one day like three months later I get a call and I was actually waiting for the cable guy I'd been waiting for like three days for the cable guy so I'm on the phone with the cable company and they're saying the guy in the field is going to call you any second on your call waiting so we're going to hang on with you while we contact him and he's going to call you so so then my call waiting beeps in and I say hello and the person says is this Lori and I say yes and the person says I'm the guy and I think he's the cable guy So I say, where have you been? And he says, I know I'm really sorry, I meant to contact you earlier.

And this whole thing goes back and forth until I realize that he's not the cable guy. So I said, you're not the cable guy? And he says, no, I'm the guy from the airport. And I'm floored because I can't believe, you know, that he's calling me, that I'm actually on the phone with him, that I'm talking to this guy that I was, you know, momentarily obsessed with. And it's him. And he starts to tell me that he's really glad that he heard for me because yes, he's the guy from the airport

and what a coincidence, he's coming to L.A. to do a story the next day and can we see each other again? And I'm thinking to myself, again, this didn't happen. And I'm really worried that he thinks that I'm somebody else. Like maybe he met some other girl in the airport a long time ago and he thinks that I'm that girl. and when he meets me, he's going to be really disappointed that I'm not whoever he was thinking of. Right.

But I also don't want to correct him because then I think if I tell him, you know what, actually I made the whole thing up and I just wanted to get to meet you, he'll think I'm, you know, insane and he won't want to meet me. So I decide that I will meet him, but I will tell him the truth immediately upon meeting him. Wait, you know, there's a third option in that is that he knows he didn't meet you, but he just wants to meet a girl. You know, I thought about that And there was actually a fourth option Which was he knows that I'm screwing with him And he's just getting back at me By kind of playing the game

Wow I have to say like you were meeting him Like for him to be the person on the phone When you're expecting the cable guy Did that make it seem more romantic Like you guys were meeting so cute Or did it make it feel like You didn't even want a deal

Oh no, the minute I found out That it was him I completely regressed back Into my state of obsession So, and in terms of meeting cute, actually, he was coming to L.A. and I was going to New York, and we were going to miss each other completely. It was like a romantic comedy, but it turned out that my flight back to L.A. was an hour before his outgoing flight back to New York. So it turned out we were going to be in the same terminal at the same time at L.A.X. So he said, wouldn't it be great to meet in the airport again? Which, of course, was the single most confusing thing that he could possibly say.

Because on the one hand, you know, how faded, how romantic comedy can you get? Both at the airport, right? And on the other hand, what the hell is he talking about? They've never met. Well, today on our radio show, we have three stories of mind games. Situations where a simple deception goes way out of hand and leads to all kinds of things that it was never intended to lead to. You're listening to This American Life, by the way, from WBC Chicago, I'm Ira Glass.

Later in our program today, we have the story of self-appointed secret agents going around New York City, hoping to serve the forces of good and not evil, until things get more emotional than they planned. And we have Scott Carrier talking about an invisible girl in Salt Lake City. That's all coming up. And Laurie's story continues. After the break, stay with us. It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today's show is a rerun. We are in the middle of our story about Lori.

She and the stranger, if you remember, we're going to meet in the airport in Los Angeles. But then, a snag, her travel plans change. She cannot meet the guy at the airport. And so instead, she shows up, and she has a drink with him at his hotel. And the first surprise is, he looks nothing, nothing, like his picture. And I didn't quite know what to do about that because he looked so unlike his picture, that at that point, I wondered if he was actually the guy or if he had sent, like, he was playing a mind game with me

and he had sent some other guy to kind of go on the date with me. Wow. I love how because you're running a con, suddenly you believe everybody's running a con. Well, your sense of reality gets turned upside down. It's like you think I'm an honest person and I did this, so who knows what other people are doing? So she sits there. And the longer she sits there, the more that she could see that, yes,

when he turns his head this particular way, he probably is the guy in the photo. Not that helps anything. She is not liking the real him, not attracted. And because I'm not interested, I'm kind of deciding, do I need to even tell him that I made this up? Or can I just leave?

Oh, right. He doesn't need to know that I made up the story. But then on the other hand, it was sort of strange because he kept talking about our encounter in the airport. And it was kind of frustrating to me, Because I felt like, why is he doing this? I couldn't understand why he would do this.

It wasn't just that he had seen my letter and kind of went with it. It was like he then took the letter to a whole new level of deception. First, he said when I met him at the bar, the first thing he said to me was, oh, I recognized you immediately. You look exactly the same as you did in the airport. Then when we were talking, he'd come up. He'd just like pepper the conversation with all these little lies. He said that when we were in the airport, he remembered that I was

confused about what I wanted to do with my life. So he says to me, you know, the bar closes and he says, you know, do you want to come up and continue talking? And I wanted to leave really badly at that point, but because I'd been there for so many hours, I thought I cannot leave and not find out, not get to the bottom of this story. And I feel so guilty at this point that I really feel like I have to come clean. Right. So I go upstairs and I say to him, you know, I have to tell you, I really don't think that you're the guy from the airport. It's been really nice meeting you, but you're really, you're not the guy. And he says, no, to no, I am. And he's very insistent about it. And it's sort of like, like once he had his own position, he didn't want to change his

position. So I say to him, you know, actually it really wasn't you because I made the whole thing up. And he is stunned into silence. And I think, oh God, he thinks I'm a freak. And I'm sitting there thinking, I just want to like crawl into a hole right now. I should never have told him the truth. And then he just looks at me very calmly and says, no, you didn't. I remember this. And I look at him like, what is he doing? I can't imagine what he's doing. Why is he doing that? Is he trying to save face for me?

And he was very, and he wasn't like, you know, he wasn't sort of excited about it. He was like, cool is a cucumber. He was like, no, it happened. I remember. And it was like, it made me seem crazy. Yeah. You know, like all of a sudden it's like, you know how you appear crazier when you're trying to prove to somebody that you're not crazy? Yes.

And basically, I said, look, I got to go. And oddly, he, you know, he said, then he said at the door, he's like, can I kiss you? And I just gave him my cheek. And then he gave me his card. And I left. But there are only two possibilities. Either he actually believes that he met you or he knows he didn't, right? Right.

But let's say that he believed that he met me. reverse the situation. If somebody said to me, you know, I think I met you in the airport and I believe them. And then they said, I made it all up. I would believe them. I would say, oh, huh. You know, I thought that actually you were telling the truth, but if you say you made it up, you must have made it up. Like, what would be my motive for telling him I made the whole thing up? Yeah. I find that very convincing, actually. I wasn't actually sure what I thought up until you said that. But actually now, I actually believe that he completely knew that he was lying. I actually believe there's no chance that he actually thought he meant you.

There's no reason for him not to believe me, except for the fact that I've already established myself as a liar because I'm telling him I lied and sent you this note that was a complete lie. I love how this started off as like this innocent little romantic lie. And then before it's done, like you yourself are caught up in this whole like world of where you can't even figure out how to convince him and you can't figure out why he's saying what he's saying. Like your mind is your mind is so messed with by the end of this story.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of it. I mean, years later, I don't know what to make of it. It's this thing that I sort of, whatever went on in that room that night, it's like it stayed with me for so many years because it was so confusing to me. Lori Gottlieb, she's now a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. She's written a number of books, and these days she also writes the Ask the Therapist column in New York Times. Back to, The Spy Who Loved Everyone. Today's program is a rerun.

We first aired this back in 2005, and we now turn to this story about good intentions and where they lead from Jorge Just. It's a Saturday in January, dead of winter, a crowded subway car, New York City. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. At the Canal Street station, a guy walks onto the car. He's wearing a hat, gloves, scarf, and coat.

But no pants. At the next stop, Spring Street, someone else gets on with no pants. This continues for a half dozen stops. The car's filling up with pantsless people who don't seem to know or even notice each other. Reactions vary. Some riders avert their eyes. Some laugh out loud. Some stare, turn away, stare again.

finally at 33rd Street somebody new comes through the car it's a vendor she's selling pants short pants medium pants it won't shock you to know that this whole scene was staged

the pantsless people are part of a group called improv everywhere led by a New Yorker named Charlie Todd he pulls stunts like this all over New York he calls them missions the people that carry them out are called agents here's how Charlie explains it It's always hard for me to describe it because I always want to use the word prank. But prank has always has that negative connotation of, in order for there to be a prank, there has to be a victim.

Somebody who has been fooled and has been embarrassed or humiliated or had the best of. And what we try to do is really the opposite. We try to make people happy. For Charlie, happy means fun. and fun means making strange things happen in boring locations. Take Mission 27, the Mobius. The Mobius mission was a time loop in a Starbucks. It worked like this.

Charlie and six friends choreographed a five-minute sequence of events to repeat over and over again. They planned it at a Starbucks, and they performed it at another, the one across the street. Each agent had their own action. Charlie and his girlfriend started off. They walk in and get in line. Charlie notices a pack of cigarettes in her purse

and confronts her about her smoking. She says, you know, don't tell me what to do and storms out of a Starbucks. And I run out after her yelling her name. Katie, come back. And then four minutes later, we walk back into the Starbucks, get in line again.

And so that's our loop. agent number three spills his water stands up gets napkins comes back to clean up the mess and repeats that's his loop agent number four answers a phone call walks through the window for better reception then goes back to his chair agent number five gets up to go to the bathroom decides the line is too long returns to a seat agent number six simply sneezes at a precise moment and the capper uh was my friend ken would walk through the starbucks with a boom box playing shot shiny happy people by R.E.M., and he would walk in one door, go through the entire restaurant, walk out the other door. We repeated that sequence 12 times in a row for an hour, total. Charlie says that for the first few repetitions nobody noticed a thing. It was the argument between Charlie and his girlfriend that finally caught people's attention. And by like the third or fourth time that I had run out the Starbucks chasing after my girlfriend, people were starting to say like, well, if I was him, you know, I'd just break up with her, you know.

But it wasn't that they thought that they were in a time loop. It was that they thought that we really just kept getting into a fight. And then by like, you know, the fifth and sixth time that we did it, people kind of started to get freaked out. There was one woman in particular who we had on the hidden camera. who called her friend and said, you have to come down here. I'm at the Starbucks and asked her place. I don't know what's going on.

I don't know if you've ever been in a Starbucks. But if you do go, you'll notice lots of people doing the same sort of thing over and over again. Sips the coffee, read the paper, update the blog. Stare hard enough and everyone looks like they're in a time loop. It took people almost an hour. to find the line between stage scene and reality. By the end of it, by like the ninth and tenth time we're doing it,

the whole Starbucks is talking to each other participating in this thing. It's almost as if everybody in that Starbucks felt like they could predict the future. And they started like kind of like conducting it. Like they would point at Chris and say, oh, and he's going to sneeze right now. And here comes the boombox guy again. And oh, that means the couple's coming back in. There they are, you know. and then after the 12th time, we just left.

In a way, this might be the most surprising part of the Mobius mission. After going to that much trouble just to provide a roomful of strangers with an unforgettable memory, the members of improv everywhere get up and they leave. And not just because you can't close a curtain on a coffee shop time loop. Charlie posts pictures and descriptions of the missions on his website. but that's as close as he gets to a standing ovation. He's got loftier goals anyway. I want to live in a world where anything can happen.

I guess what I mean by that is, I don't know, I guess we shouldn't have to rely on television or movies to, like, show us, like, fantastic things and fantastic stories, you know? Let's attempt to bring some of that, like, excitement to the real world, I guess. Charlie's missions are cool, but it's his objective that's intriguing to create fun, inexplicable experiences for random strangers. It's like giving people a small unexpected gift, and in the process, making the world seem a bit more enchanted. But as anyone who's read a children's book can attest, mess of the forces of enchantment, and things can go terribly, terribly wrong. That's what happened with a mission Charlie calls the best gig ever.

The best gig ever, an idea. My friend Mark Lee came up to me. night and he came up to me and said let's find a rock band a struggling rock band and give them the greatest gig of their life so i researched on the internet for the next couple of weeks trying to find the perfect gig the perfect band who i knew was setting themselves up for just a horrible audience um and i found this band goes to pasha from vermont never heard of them before uh nobody in new york had probably heard of them apart from their friends uh because it was their first tour ever. And they had just recorded some songs this summer and they were going to tour in October. And they were playing a gig on New York on Friday night at 8 o'clock

for a $5 cover. Then they had a gig two nights later on Sunday night at the Mercury Lounge for an $8 cover at 10 p.m. So I knew even if they had friends in New York, those friends would come to the Friday night show and they would not come back no matter how good the show was. They're not coming out at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night to support their friends again. Charlie recruited 35 agents to act as hardcore Ghost of Pasha fans. They downloaded the six songs on the band's website, and they memorized the lyrics. Some agents made t-shirts and temporary tattoos using the Ghosts of Pasha logo. They timed their arrival, getting to the club as the next to last band was getting off the stage.

People entered separately or in pairs, like didn't act like we knew each other. And by the time they were doing their sound check, there were, you know, all of us were in the room. not only were they getting ready to perform we were getting ready to perform too and everybody from the previous gig had left they had three paying customers that night not counting us but instead they had 38 the 35 of us and the three paying customers and once they got on stage and said you know hello mercury lounge or whatever they said like we definitely exploded You're listening to

You're listening to footage from a video camera that one of Charlie's friends snuck into the mercury The club was dark and the camera was hidden in a bag At first you can't make anything out But then the camera goes into night vision mode And it's all there in black and pale green and white 35 people isn't much of a crowd but somehow they make it seem like the place is packed

I sat and watched the video with Charlie who pointed out his favorite moments and showed me how the agents reacted to the music in their own particular ways some pushing to the front others hanging back he points at another guy near the front of the stage he's dancing spasticly flinging his arms

shaking to the music at a show there is always that one guy who's dancing too much and like the guy we're looking at now like he's that guy you know so it's appropriate we're not all doing it but he is. Charlie spends most of the show taking pictures.

Each rock crowd is one of those kids, too. But at a certain moment, even he gets swept up in the excitement and starts acting more like he does when he's seen his favorite band, The Cure. I mean, I will say that, like, this moment right here, I am definitely, like, into the show. We were requesting. songs. You know, we only knew their names of like six songs, because they only had six songs on their EP, which they had on their website. And I was like screaming for, they have a song

called What About the Shutins? It's like, what about the shutins of the Second World War? And I was screaming for shutins. I was just, yeah, like, shutins, shutins. And they played it. I think probably coincidentally, they were playing it next in the set. And I just went crazy. When I heard the first notes, I was like, yeah, I got my request. Where's the difference in really, really being into a band and pretending to be really into a band? Yeah, there's not much difference for that night. It felt just like I was at a Kyr Show singing along to Just Like Heaven.

You know, I was at Ghost of Pasha, singing along to what about the shut-ins, you know? It's whatever. It's the same thing, basically. The band gets off stage, and Charlie and Company leave the bar to go celebrate another mission accomplished. A couple of days later, he puts up pictures and reports of the evening on his website.

Charlie figured the band would find his page in a month or two. It's basically inevitable once he's posted everything online. What he wasn't sure of is how they would react. When I would tell people this, like as I was preparing for this event, one of the main responses I got was people saying, like, that is so cruel, you know, what's going to happen with this band does their next gig in

New York City? And nobody shows up. That is the cruelest thing I've ever heard. And I just, I really don't buy into that logic. I think, you know, I mean, it's kind of an interesting thing to think about. Like, is it cruel to give somebody the best day of their life just because they'll never have another day like that again? You know, and I don't think so. You know, I, I mean, it's kind of like, you know, you have a wonderful dream and you wake up. And do you wish you just have bad dreams every night, you know? Or is it, you know, and I think it's great to have wonderful dreams. And, yeah, it kind of sucks for a second, but you'll always have that moment.

We got punked. That show at the Mercury Lounge was a fake. And, like, it just... seemed like a blow. Like it was like a blow to my heart. This is Chris Partika, the guitarist of Ghost of Pasha. It turns out that finding Charlie's website was a bit worse than waking from a dream, and it happened faster than Charlie expected. Leedsinger Milo Finch found out only three days after the show.

His discovery was a disturbing capper to an already long and bizarre few days. To understand how weird this was for the band, you need to hear the story from their perspective. They hadn't even wanted to play the Mercury Show in the first. first place. They were exhausted. They'd just driven from Vermont to Boston for a show Thursday and to New York for a show on Friday. Ezra the drummer and Brad the bassist had then driven the six hours back to Vermont on Saturday and then turned around and returned Sunday. Milo stayed in New York, but he'd been up all night partying. I remember being on the street before the Mercury Lounge show completely exhausted, just sitting on the street waiting to play. We didn't even want to do it.

But, you know, I remember just sitting there, and it was pretty dead. And I knew we thought it was just going to be dead. And we were like, cool, it'd be dead. We could just go up there and play and just get out of it. It turns out that the band Charlie picked wasn't just obscure. It was practically brand new. They'd only been together a couple of months. This was their fourth show ever, the third on their tour.

It was really weird, because we knew this was our third show. I remember turning to the drummer, to Ezra and being like, what's going on? Like in the middle of a song, like a drum break. What started weird, soon got weirder. Keep in mind they hadn't put out an album. Nobody anywhere had ever heard of them. But somehow, a crowd of New Yorkers knew their lyrics.

The first song we noticed it was in New York, New York. It was one of our songs. Right off the bat is the chorus, and they came right in with it. Like, I think they came in with it on better timing than I did. They came in right in. And they nailed it. Honestly, it was really odd. I mean, there was moments where guys were ripping off their shirts

and swinging them over their heads in, like, a helicopter fashion. There were girls that were, like, pointing at the stage and, like, interacting with me, like, as we were pointing back, kind of, like, it was just, like, it was bedless. It was bedlam. The exclamation point on the whole evening for me was how creepy it was,

was when the guy jumped up on stage with no shirt. I just remember him being up front the whole time, punching the air and spinning in circles and, like, it was all sweaty. And he jumped up on stage at the end of the last song and, like, hugged me. He was all sweaty and clammy. And he's like, he's like, thank you.

Like, he just kept saying thank you in my ear. And I was just like, all right, thank you. Agent V. Yeah, Agent V. He seemed like he wasn't really acting and just getting it out, you know. The band got into it too. Myla's favorite moment came at the end of the set. During the solo and PowerBitch,

I had kind of just laid on the stage and the crowd rushed the stage and was like grabbing my hands like this, you know? because I was right on the lip of the stage. I put the microphone out to the audience, and they were screaming and, you know, like grabbing my hand and touching the microphone and made sure I, like, slapped every hand that came up,

you know, just no one felt like they didn't get it, you know. And however the act was going on or whatever they were pulling or whatever they were doing, I felt that at that point in the show, we answered it back with something real, you know, and everybody was, at that point, everybody in the room was on the same. page.

The show was exhausting. They'd played the tour's first ever encore and left all the energy they had on stage. Like Milo said, when a crowd screams that you like you're the Beatles, you act like you're the Beatles. Only this crowd stopped screaming the moment the last notes were played. Chris remembers unplugging his amp, looking up, and being shocked that the place was empty.

Ghosts of Pasha were suddenly alone. I remember we were all standing out on the street smoking our cigarette after the show. And I'm totally confused. Oh, yeah. Kind of speechless for a little bit. I think remember, I think Brad broke the silence. He's always good for breaking the silence.

He was like, what the fuck just happened? No, what the hell was that, I think, was the, what the hell was that as he was lighting his cigarette? It was just creepy. Creepy, but also pretty sweet. You know, like, we just, like, had nothing in our heads, so we just decided to fill it with, well, okay, we're really excited and we're in a really good mood, so this is great.

You know, like, finally, 35 people from New York City randomly came to our show and knew our words and stuff, and that's a good feeling. You know what it was? I think some of the talking was we were getting, we were addicted, to it. We were like, that felt really cool. Like, let's play like that all the time. Let's get shows like that all the time,

you know? That warm feeling lasted exactly three days, until somebody emailed them a link to Charlie's site. The band met up at the local computer lab and read it together. The next 48 hours were the worst. Email poured in mocking ghosts of Pasha. Their website's bulletin board was flooded

with people making fun of them. It got so bad they had to shut it down. The band felt like the butt of a big joke. They struggled to take it all in stride, but inevitably one member would get mad and the others would have to talk him down. A couple of hours later, they'd be on the phone with each other again, making each other angry, calming each other down. The guitarist Chris Partika was most affected.

He got teased a lot as a kid, which is why he started playing music in the first place. It was something he could do by himself in his room, where nobody could make fun of him. News of the prank hit Chris pretty hard. It's the worst thing I could possibly think of ever happening to me in my life. because I've been avoiding confrontation my whole life so I wouldn't get made fun of

and the moment I decide that I want to try and be real and do what I really want to do all of a sudden it's reacted in the same way as it was when I was like in kindergarten and it's just like what is the difference you know I'm 30 years old now and I'm still getting made fun of by people Knowing all this, it's surprising how Chris feels about it now, six months after it happened.

It was a gift. It was the gift of like, yeah, everything's okay. At this point, I don't really feel like anything can hurt me. Because I've dealt with what I've never thought that I could deal with before. It was like psychotherapy for my childhood. You know what I mean? Like, everybody in the world, look at Chris, and everyone was like, duh, look at him, duh, you know, like,

and then what am I supposed to do with that? But be like, hey, how you doing? I'm Chris. I play the guitar, and I like it. After mulling it over for a few days, the band decided what to do. They wrote into Charlie's website with their own enthusiastic reports of the evening. Brad the bassist was turrists. Chris, the guitarist, was thoughtful.

And Milo, the lead singer, was the lead singer. Here's Charlie. The lead singer was, like, was really enthusiastic. And upbeat about the whole thing. But you could, I mean, you could tell that he had, definitely had, like, if not an ego, He definitely had a lot of pride in the band and made that clear too. And there's one, you know, he had one line

in his report that said, like, you know, no matter what happened, we rock the house that night and you knew it. But so he did say, there were elements of like, you know, we realized that it was a prank, but just so, you know, we did rock it, you know. And which, like, I agree with them.

They did. They rocked it. They rocked the show and snatched the opportunity. bands need publicity and Ghosts of Pasha knew a happy story sells better than a sad one and they were right the band was interviewed in Spin

magazine and A&R guy gave them a call in other words Ghosts of Pasha played along they took Charlie's story about what happened that night and made it their own but not everybody's ready

to make themselves at home in Charlie's world some people prefer their life just the way it is all right my name's Christopher Rossin I am a fine art student going to New York University and they basically threw me a fake birthday party.

The idea was to throw a birthday party for a stranger. Go up to someone in a bar at random and act like he was his birthday. Charlie gathered about 30 Improv Everywhere agents and headed to a bar called Dempsey's to pick the evening star. He decided on Chris, who was sitting with a friend and a full pitcher of beer. It looked like they were settling in for the night. Charlie called the other agents and decided, described Chris, and then he walked over and started the party.

And I said, hey, Ted, how's it going? Sorry, we're a little early for your birthday party. But thank you for inviting us. They came up to me, and they were like, you know, just really addressed me as this other person as Ted. And we're just like, you know, hey, what's up, buddy? You know, happy birthday. You know, and he looks at me, and at first he thinks that's just a case of misunderstanding. You know, he's like, I'm sorry, you got the wrong guy. I'm not Ted. and I just laughed. I said, ah, you know, that's really funny, Ted.

You did invite us to your birthday party. We got the Evite. A few minutes later, more people started coming in and everybody was wishing me happy birthday and calling me by Ted, and everybody seemed to have this memory or this, you know, experience that they had with me in the past, which obviously was completely foreign to me.

I had sent out an email to everybody involved with some specifics about this guy, Ted Hunt, and said that he was 25 years old, that he went to UNC Chapel Hill, that he worked at Oppenheimer Funds, that his favorite band was Dave Matthews. Like, we came up with all these specifics about him. And I told everybody, like, you know,

pick out what your relationship is to 10. Figure out what your story is and stick to it. People were giving me hugs and being like, oh, I haven't seen you in so long. What have you been up to? And they had all kind of brought in little gift cards. And on all of them, they said, you know, Remember spring break, you know, things relating to school.

A few of the people thought I worked for some sort of bank or something. And he got really freaked out, which I didn't necessarily anticipate. But looking back on it, I guess I probably should have anticipated that that would freak somebody out. I was definitely freaked out and suspicious. I mean, it seemed very confrontational and very. very grotesque even, I would say. So yeah, it was kind of like a really bad dream. Chris, it turns out, wasn't the brash 25-year-old East Villager that Charlie thought he'd chosen.

He was actually a college student, a very young one, who'd recently transferred to NYU. If Charlie's the kind of guy who goes out in the world and makes things happen, then Chris is the kind who stays closer to home. He's thoughtful and sensitive and shy. Chris likes to have things in a certain understandable order, and Charlie wasn't part of it. There was no sense that, you know, it was kind of a charade. I mean, it all felt very natural.

It felt really close to reality, but yet it was so strange and different that it couldn't be. So there was definitely the worry, too, on my part, I guess, that I was going insane maybe, because it made no sense. I kind of felt like I was losing my mind in that sense, like the ability to rationalize what was happening because I really couldn't.

He showed them his driver's license, but they laughed it off. And Chris couldn't shake the feeling that a guy named Ted, the real Ted, could show up at any moment to find Chris drinking Ted's free drinks, and even worse, blowing out Ted's candles and eating Ted's cake. But every time he tried to leave, a fake friend would stop him, beg him to stay, buy him a drink. Eventually, he just became Ted.

It was pretty much my only option. And I think that was the moment of shift, was kind of realizing that, you know, I was like, okay, well, if they all think I'm Ted, then what the hell? He starts answering to Ted. He starts introducing himself as Ted to kind of the late comers. And in the end, like, he was not only just agreeing that he was Ted. Like, he was corroborating all of our stories, you know.

You know, people were like, oh, you know, remember this. And I was like, oh, yeah, you know, that was great. What a great time, you know, and just kind of played along with it. You know, I just, you know, and I think I just kind of decided that maybe I could, by assuming that identity, have some control or some say in the situation. You know, it was, like, disappointing at first to see this guy get freaked out. I was like, oh, no, like, my whole idea is to make this guy's night. To watch that transformation to the guy playing pool, doing shots,

and getting phone numbers was really a blast to watch. And I can't decide at the end Whether I picked like the perfect guy Or whether I picked the worst guy There may have been a worst Ted somewhere in the world But probably not in that bar Sure, he'd had fun He even let them convince him to take the gift cards home

Chris rose to the challenge and became Ted But by the next morning he was Chris again Only he was Chris with another man's gift cards I don't know, they became kind of this like weird collection of sacred objects almost you know like for a year you know i kind of like saw them as this like you know other these empowered things it's sort of like in the sci-fi movie when you you know you come back from right it's like time and you're reaching your pocket and you still have the arrowhead right right

exactly or when um tom cruise wakes up a nice wide shot and the mask from the night before is on his pillow you know as much as i wanted to forget it you know i woke up in those gift cards were there. You know, it was like, oh, I guess that did happen. Chris's response over time was different from Ghost of Pasha's. They came to appreciate the idea in their own way, but it just left Chris feeling vulnerable and a little paranoid. He hated the thought that all those strangers at the bar could just pop up again at any moment.

One day, he was sitting on a bench in Union Square when a guy walked up to him and said, Hey, Ted. He waved him off. but it was freaky. It didn't help that his memory of the whole thing was a little hazy. For example, he didn't remember giving his phone number out to anyone that night.

So you can imagine how he felt when Charlie called him a year later. And I said, hey, Ted, it's Charlie. How's it going? Your birthday's coming up in a few weeks. We want to know when you want to celebrate it. We want to throw you another party. Wanted to know what you wanted.

Like last year we got to those best buy gift certificates. do you want that again, or is there a different store? Give me a call back, and I gave my number. I didn't hear from him. And as it turns out, my friend of mine knows someone who's a bartender at Dempsey's where we did Ted's birthday. And Ted is still a regular, that bar, I assume,

and he told this bartender, he went up to her and said, do you know the people who did that birthday thing to me last year? and he said, well, could you tell them to stop calling me? And if they're going to be coming around this bar, I'm going to have to stop coming here. It really kind of broke my heart because it had been such like a wonderful night and a wonderful experience for us. And it seemed like it had been a wonderful experience for him. But I mean, but is it, I mean, did it go well?

Is that, is it a success if, you know, if a year later Ted's story has changed? well it does kind of like that response definitely made me sad but regardless of how he feels about it now I do know that that night was awesome you know in the end I mean I kind of sound like

you know the lead singer goes to Pasha now like I want to tell him and kind of say the same things to him that that guy said to me you know like whatever you say you had a blast that night you know But he did. He did get his $300, and he did get completely drunk and make friends, even if for only a night. So, like, that night, as it exists in my memory, and the memory of everybody who was there, like, was a success.

Did I see you cry? When you're crying like a girl In the end, Chris did to Charlie What Charlie does so well to other people He pretended to have an experience that he wasn't actually having And Charlie thought the fake out was real And when he found out the truth Charlie reacted the way other people do to him in that situation

He was sort of upset, a little hurt And then he comforted himself by deciding that some part of the fake out was real And that's the danger of what Charlie does He believes you'll enjoy sharing his fantasy world, whether you do or not. He asks you to leave your own reality and step into his. Just like every crazy pantsless guy in the subway. Jorge Just, we first aired this story back in 2005. Ghost of Pasha is still a band.

They even performed at an improv Everywhere anniversary show once. And Milo, the lead singer actually. went out to join some missions as an agent with Improv Everywhere. Improv Everywhere is still operating. Their website, Improv Everywhere.com. Coming up, mind games that can turn a girl invisible in front of a neighborhood, a city, and the national media. That's in a minute.

Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. This American Life and Ira Glass, each week on a program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme today's show mind games this is a rerun we've arrived at act three of our program act three invisible girl you may remember the story of elizabeth smart in recent days she's an activist and she's on tv sometimes and she does all sorts of stuff but back in 2002 she was abducted from her home in salt lake city by a man who believed that god had told him to take her as his wife

she was 14 at the time he was 49 and he already had a wife Wanda, who was 57 years old. His name was Brian David Mitchell, but he called himself a manual. Thousands of volunteers searched for Elizabeth Smart. For months, her picture was everywhere. It was a big story. Now we know that two months

after the kidnapping, Mitchell and Wanda brought Elizabeth to the place that nobody would expect them to go, downtown Salt Lake City, right in the middle of the whole thing. They walked the streets, nobody recognized her. And at that time, back in 2002,

One of the contributors to our show, Scott Carrier, lived in that same neighborhood, the one that Elizabeth Smart lived in, the one where her captors had brought her. And once the truth came out, back then, Scott talked to his neighbors about what happened in their heads that they did not recognize her. Here he is.

Our neighborhood is on a hillside sandwiched between the University of Utah and downtown, the closest thing we've got here to a liberal enclave, and relatively diverse, at least economic, At the bottom of the hill are the mansions built in the late 1800s. The street lined with old sycamores, some shops and stores, apartment buildings. Going up the hillside, the houses generally get newer and bigger. Elizabeth Smart and her family lived about a mile from our house. After she was abducted, her picture seemed to be everywhere.

Taped to light posts, and every storefront window, she was on the news every day for months. But she was here with her two abductors walking around on the streets, and nobody figured it out. Nobody recognized her, partly because they were disguised. They wore white robes. Elizabeth and Wanda had their heads covered, veils across their faces, revealing only their eyes. Mitchell, or Emmanuel, had a turban, a long beard, and a walking stick. For two and a half months, from August until October, they stayed pretty much right in the neighborhood, and a lot of people saw them.

Yeah, I did. I saw them walking. I was at the gas station. We were washing the car. Yeah, they were walking right past Blockbuster video right towards the supermarket. And we were up on four south of the Wendy's. And we went in there for a second to see if they had a salad bar.

And they didn't, but on the way out, he came up, Emmanuel or Brian David Mitchell. And they're all wearing their robes. And they're walking slowly up the street. I don't know where they were going in a single-file line. I saw him, and the guy, he stopped and he started talking to somebody. I think he asked for a cigarette. And the two women stood back a little bit, and he came up,

and he was very humble, and he asked for some money for food. He didn't seem threatening. But I saw the girl, you know, eye to eye, and she looked familiar, even that her pictures were in the door, you know. But it did not click, you know. It did not click. It wasn't like they just showed up out of nowhere. Mitchell and Barzzi had been homeless on the street,

wearing the robes for a couple of years before they took Elizabeth. My friend Trent Harris thought he knew the guy all too well. Well, he was kind of a fixture on the streets of Salt Lake City. He was always asking for money in front of the ZCMI shopping mall. I remember he'd sit out there with this just pathetic look on his face. Oh, he was annoyed. He was really annoying. I'd seen him before.

I thought they were just crazy, extremist, fundamentalists who walk around. That's my son Milo. He's the same age as Elizabeth and went to grade school with her. We have a picture of Milo and Elizabeth at a birthday party when they were four. He's dressed as a cowboy. She's a princess. My wife, Hillary, gave her dance lessons. In September, Milo saw Elizabeth with Mitchell and Bar Z when he was at a gas station, washing the car.

They walked by me, and it was within 10 feet of them. I'm pretty sure she could have recognized me if she'd just seen me. I bet she did. But she didn't say anything, and Milo didn't recognize her. I didn't think anything of it. Because that's ridiculous.

Like, she's walking around in the middle of daylight. It wouldn't be her. Like, it didn't even cross my mind that it would be her. Who would do that? Who would actually take the person that everybody's looking for, like the most sought-after person in the hole? state pretty much. That's risking your life. If somebody found him and recognized him, they

would have killed him. Right? Part of the reason the disguise worked is because whether we saw him as a pest or a harmless eccentric or a crazy fundamentalist, we saw him as a loser, someone to be pitied or scorn, written off, ignored, forgotten. And we don't really look at people like that. We look away. There's another reason we didn't recognize Elizabeth, and it has to do with a thing that's specific to this culture and this place, right here. In any other state, if you saw Mitchell and Barzee walking along with a young girl in toe, you'd think it was their daughter.

But when we saw it here, we thought she was his new polygamous wife. And I remember saying to myself, you know, I'm used to seeing, you know, I'm used to seeing Immanuel David with one woman, but now he had two, and the other one was much younger, and I remember thinking, how did he manage to pull that off? And when he came up to us the day at Wendy's, I felt bad for those two women. Here's my friend, Dana Costello. And I especially noticed that the other one was young, but I didn't think that's their daughter, I assumed, immediately just in my head, that she was his new wife.

It just came to my head, oh, look, he got another wife. You didn't think anything bad about it when you saw they had two wives? I didn't. I really didn't. Officially the Mormons stopped believing in polygamy in 1890, but it still goes on here and there, and many people in Salt Lake City have polygamous ancestors. And when we run into it,

there's a sense of shame and embarrassment mixed in with American ideals of freedom of religion, and the end result is we just, just ignore it and let it be. We don't want to look at it. What's especially annoying about this is the possibility that Mitchell was smart enough to figure it out and used this weakness against us.

The most amazing encounter with Elizabeth happened in September, not long before the threesome left town to spend the winter in Southern California. There was a party in a big house full of Bohemians, Mitchell, Barzee, and Elizabeth were walking by, maybe on their way back to their camp in the foothills, and they stopped in. Amber Meriwether and Russell Farrell were there that night. There's always people in costumes at the parties there, so we just thought that they were just people in costume, you know, just being silly.

He drew a lot of tension to himself because he had a lot of preaching going on. He was an obvious preacher, but it seemed. dichotomist that he was meanwhile bumming beers it looked like he had never seen food or drink in his entire life you know the man was like obviously starving and a complete obnoxious drunk finally he got a hold of some local made a absent which is the tincture of wormwood made famous by the Impressionist back in the turn of the century he was just drinking it like crazy and he was getting super sloshed and he was like trying to get the two girls to drink it

somebody at the party took a picture of Elizabeth standing there in the kitchen You may have seen it, a veil across her face, her eyes so clearly now, the same eyes in the posters hanging up all over town. The people at the party were so close, but still they couldn't see her. It was just too absurd. Amber even went up and talked to her. I walked into the kitchen and I remember looking at her a couple times and thinking that she looked familiar.

I'd been seeing her pictures everywhere, but I didn't connect the two. I just thought, I mean, come on, you're not going to think Elizabeth Smart's going to be drunk at a party. Or I guess she wasn't drunk. I don't think she drank anything, actually. But I walked up to her, and I just asked her, where do I know her from, that she looks really familiar. And she didn't really say anything back. And the man, Emmanuel, came up. He said, no, you don't know her.

Someone said, well, was this guy using some sort of black magic over the whole scenario? putting a veil, so to speak, over everyone's perception. His approach to her and the other woman was very, he was quite the patriarch. I think he was so believing of his righteousness or his potency of his prophecy. And he would do these little things to prove to himself more and more so that he was being protected by God, because it was right what he was doing. That every time he took Elizabeth out and that she wasn't noticed, it was true that Elizabeth was his.

And he really believed that he could be protected in this way, that he made it happen in this weird way. It did happen. He had literally put a sub-bell over Salt Lake City that no one would see him. It was magical. I think he believed that. I think it's more likely we didn't see Elizabeth.

because we thought the guy who took her would be a monster, a boogeyman, and we expected him to appear in that form. Mitchell looked like the opposite of a boogeyman. A boogeyman stands in the shadows and jumps out at you. Mitchell stood right in front of us and sort of became invisible. When Elizabeth was discovered nine months after her abduction, we all realized our mistake. and it was like a combination of being really happy she was alive

mixed with feelings of being duped in a rather serious and sinister way. We realized we were partly to blame that there was something within us that made us deny the obvious, and that hurt. My son Milo thought about it for months afterwards. He's 17 now. Did you feel bad when you realized that you missed it?

Yeah. Tell me what you felt like when you heard it. Well, like, I mean, when I heard that he was walking around with that guy was like holy crap I've been I've been right there like I've walked by those guys and just passed it off as nothing

like it not like what it sounds bad but he was he kept the way that he kept her was he convinced her to stay with him he took her up into the mountains and he's not a good guy he's a terrible person

took her up into the mountains and somehow brainwashed her, convinced her that she was meant to be with him and he was the son of God, right? He thinks he's Jesus. If I could have been there, it would, like, if I had known then, if I'd just been able to think about it, or, I don't know, it made me pretty angry. Like, maybe if I could just go back to then, that day, thinking about that more than anything. I saw Elizabeth a couple weeks ago, downtown between the shopping malls. She was on one side of the street, and I was on the other. At first, I thought she was a woman in her 20s, maybe a legal secretary, because that's how she was dressed.

But then when the light changed and we walked by each other, I thought, who is that? She looks like a young Muriel Hemingway, really distinctive and beautiful eyes. and then I realized it was Elizabeth smart right as she went by me. It was like seeing a rock star or a mythic heroine. She'd journeyed to a dark world, and it seemed looking at her that she'd come back with her innocence intact. And this made me feel hopeful, like maybe things are going to turn out okay.

Scott Carrier, his podcast Home with Brave, just started season five. you can get it wherever you get your podcast. Our program is produced today by Jane Marie and myself with Alex Bloomberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Sarah Kaine, Glea, Glea, Glea, Robyn Semi, and Alyssa Schip, and Nancy Updike. Senior producer for today's show, Julie Snyder, our technical director for today's show is Matt Tierney, production out from Lyra Smith. A couple of today's rerun from Stowe Nelson, Michael Cometay, and Suzanne Gabbar. Our website, This AmericanLife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Special thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malitia, who insists? I'm the guy from the airport. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life. When Zoran Mamdani won the primary race for New York mayor a couple months ago, the Democratic establishment didn't exactly embrace him.

And it made me think of another charismatic, unconventional candidate years ago, who the same thing happened to. I saw a man he danced with his wife in Chicago. Chicago's first black woman. Mayor, Harold Washington. How that played after him was very dramatic. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.