‘A wizard pretending to be an illusionist’: Grown woman has no choice but to believe in magic after restaurant magician defies explanation

As children, we often go through phases of infatuation with magic and magicians. That infatuation can be very Harry Potter-centric, or left over from the wonder we experienced watching a magician as a child.

For Kirsten on TikTok, the magic she saw as a five-year-old has haunted her ever since. When she was a kid, she and her family went to an Italian restaurant where there was a magician doing tricks with squishy-colored balls. The magician would perform some sort of sleight of hand that made the balls move from one hand to another. He would put a yellow ball in Kristen’s hand but when she opened her fist, it would be empty. When her brother opened his hand, he would have the ball instead.

Or, for example, one child would end up with three balls after only being handed two, and so on. These colored balls seemingly moved around magically from fist to fist, and as Kristen explains in the video, she still can’t figure out how the magician did it.

In fact, Kristen was so infatuated with the magician’s routine that she secretly swiped one of the balls for herself, sure that no one had seen her. As the magician was leaving he slowly turned around, extended his arm, and opened his fist to show Kristen that the ball she’d stolen was now his again. Sure enough, her hand was empty.

Commenters on the video were just as floored as five-year-old Kristen. One person claimed — and rightfully so — that the magician must have been a real-life wizard posing as a magician. A few people, as it turns out, ran into this very magic mastermind back in the day. Apparently, he was popular in North Carolina Italian restaurants and left many a five-year-old completely mystified.

For those completely freaked out by Kristen’s magical moment, don’t worry. Real-life magician Dustin Dean Mentalist took to TikTok to explain the trick that left her stumped for decades.

Dustin demonstrated the trick using crumbled-up napkins, showing that the ball had been slipped behind one hand, not into it, to make appear like it had moved. In reality, it had been in the other hand the whole time. What the children were experiencing squeezing the ball was the placebo effect, which was effective since the balls were so squishy and malleable.

As for the stolen ball, Dustin says that magicians rely on false memories all the time. He says that magicians structure their routines around the hope that their audience will remember things differently than what actually happened. That’s what makes magic so fantastical.

So, according to Dustin, Kristen’s memory as a child is likely playing tricks on her. Maybe she wasn’t as sly as she thought. Maybe she hadn’t stolen the ball. Maybe the magician caught her in the act before she even realized it. But that’s what he was relying on. That trick would stick in her head but the details of how exactly things went down, would not.

According to BBC, our brains do this all the time, not just with magic. Our imagination can trick us into believing something we imagine is real because our minds can create such a realistic image. The reason our memories can be so malleable and susceptible to mistaking imagination for reality is that our brains can’t take in all of the details of memory.

So, naturally, there are gaps, which our imagination fills in, leaving us to believe things that may have never really happened. While that’s probably what happened to five-year-old Kristen, it’s much more fun to believe that this magician was a real-life wizard and she was the witness to one of the greatest magical moments in Italian restaurant history.