*Editor’s Note: Participants’ names have been changed to protect their safety.
There might be a time when being nice and trying to help people out can be detrimental to your happiness and safety.
Answering the phone and helping someone she thought was a student with an extra- credit project for psychology, Elizabeth, a BYU-Idaho student, first encountered phone hypnosis at the end of last fall semester while living at Royal Crest Apartments.
“He asked if he could conduct an experiment for extra credit for his psychology project which was due,” Elizabeth said. “He told me ‘Go somewhere where it’s comfortable and prop the phone up by your ear.’ He started going into relaxing things — ‘Breathe in through your toes, just let everything go.’ I thought, ‘This is hypnosis. I could be hypnotized.’”
By then it was too late.
When her roommates came home and found her, they attempted to get a response from her without success. She finally snapped out of it and hung up the phone. When they asked who it was, Elizabeth responded that she didn’t know.
Elizabeth thought this would be the end of it, but he called again that night at 6 p.m.
“The way I knew it was him was that he said a word and my body went totally relaxed,” Elizabeth said.
She went through the process of being hypnotized and was snapped out of it again. Elizabeth and her roommates called a police officer and had her Home Evening brothers come over to give her a priesthood blessing. The police couldn’t do anything because Elizabeth had given her consent for the “project.”
When her roommates asked if he was supposed to call again Elizabeth got a sickening feeling in her stomach.
“I couldn’t be alone by myself. I couldn’t answer the phone,” Elizabeth said.
Fortunately, with all the precautions Elizabeth used, nothing happened before she went home for her off-track semester and she didn’t really think about the experience until she started talking to her new roommates this semester.
One of her new roommates, Jane, had encountered the phone hypnotist when she was living at Riviera Apartments at the end of last winter semester on the Friday of finals week.
“He called me during the day and he just said ‘I’m a student at BYU-I, I’m in a psychology class and I have a survey,’” Jane said.
She didn’t have time at the moment to do it and said so. He hung up, but called again that night.
“I thought I’d be nice or whatever,” Jane said.
The pseudo-student then proceeded to ask Jane to do thesame things as he had told Elizabeth to do.
“It sounded memorized, like he said it a lot,” Jane said.
At this point Jane “started feeling weird,” especially since finals were over, and decided to ask him some questions, like who his teacher was. The caller hung up.
When Jane and Elizabeth resided as roommates together for the fall semester, things started clicking together and it became apparent that the phone hypnotist was not an isolated experience.
The first day that Jane moved into the apartment, he called again. Elizabeth answered the phone and said, “No thanks.” Jane asked if it was a solicitor and Elizabeth said that it was a guy who was trying to hypnotize people over the phone.
“Oh! That guy called me! I never knew he was hypnotizing people,” Jane said.
Now that the subject was broached, a couple of the other roommates had had an experience with the caller as well and talked about it.
“At first I thought I was the only one,” Elizabeth said of her experience, but then found out that “two of the other roomies also had dealt with it — it’s happening a lot more than we think. It’s a big problem and it needs to be taken care of.”
What motive could someone like this have?
“Somehow he must get some sort of pleasure out of it,” Jane said, “some sort of sick, perverted pleasure.”
After discussing it with her roommates, Elizabeth decided that whatever the phone hypnotist’s intentions, they weren’t good. Her advice to others who might encounter him is to “not even give him the time of day,” and Jane’s advice is along the same lines.
“You don’t need that kind of stuff over the phone,” Jane said.
These two students shared their experiences to keep it from getting out of hand and to raise students’ awareness of this phone hypnotist.
“If everyone could at least have heard about it he won’t have chances to do it,” Jane said.
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