Part two · the top 8
Top 8 parasocial moments when the reply was manufactured
Every reply on this list was manufactured on the near side. The far end is where it arrived from, not where it came from.
Part one was cartoons, the version everyone agrees is harmless. This one is the machinery: the office that typed the reply, the card signed by a character, the meter that read the room, the tape that held the voice - and one entry where no reply ever came, from a girl who kept writing anyway. Ranked by how completely the reply was manufactured.
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1
A distilled view of the 1930 cover of The Hidden Staircase, with the title lettering and a figure in the foreground. · Carolyn Keene; R. H. Tandy · Public domain What happens. For fifty-four years young readers wrote to a detective who did not exist, and letters came back. The replies came from the Stratemeyer Syndicate's correspondence department under the house name Carolyn Keene, which was a slot in a production system rather than a person. The New York Public Library holds the letters themselves - boxes 56 and 57 - including a few written by parents on behalf of their children, and by adults who had read the books as kids.
Why it is on the list. The reply was real, and it came from an office that had chosen not to have a face. Mildred Wirt Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 books and her identity was not made public until 1991, so almost every answer a child received arrived from a byline rather than a person. The tie as the reader lived it asked for nothing and was answered anyway - and the answering was manufactured, politely, for half a century.
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2
What happens. Rin Tin Tin was found as a puppy in France in September 1918 and became a film star after Lee Duncan brought him to California. As his fame grew, fan letters arrived by the thousands, and the replies went out on a glossy portrait signed with an inked paw print above the words 'Most faithfully, Rin Tin Tin.'
Why it is on the list. The paw was a signature the dog could not write. Somebody on the near side inked the print and sent the portrait, so the answer looked like an act of the animal rather than a piece of office work. The photograph was the reply, and the bond it answered was real.
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3
A reply from Beatrice Fairfax
The New York Evening Journal, 1898–1920
LAW 2 · Clerks beat algorithmsWhat happens. In 1898 three readers' letters asking for advice landed on the women's page of the Evening Journal, and the staff answered them under a name that did not exist: Beatrice Fairfax, after Dante's Beatrice and a family place in Virginia. Readers wrote to her personally - the mail reached up to 1,400 letters a day, and the Post Office eventually refused to deliver them, so the paper collected its own post. Marie Manning, a working journalist, wrote the replies, and the column ran, under her and then under others, for decades.
Why it is on the list. The far end of this correspondence was a masthead. A stranger's most private letter was answered by a person, which is why it worked, and it came from a woman who had never been one, which is why the reply could be whatever the page needed it to be. Manning's own instruction to her readers was 'Dry your eyes, roll up your sleeves and dig for a practical solution' - advice the fictional Beatrice could give because she had no life of her own to protect. Every advice column since is the same machinery: a human being on the near side, and a signature on the far one that cannot be reached.
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4
What happens. In 1921 a flour company's mailroom was already answering letters of cooking questions when the advertising department asked for one name the answers could all sign. Betty Crocker answered for decades - letters first, a radio voice from 1924 - and every reply went out 'Cordially yours', in a real woman's handwriting, adopted from an employee's submission and still in use.
Why it is on the list. The reply existed before the name did. The writers were real home economists; the name was created so the answers could come from somebody, and the company's own account of the effect is that the voice was 'like the woman next door dropping in'. What the reader attached to was Betty, and Betty was a signature. The labour was real, the relationship ran one way by design, and the correspondence continued under a single invented name for exactly that reason.
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5
What happens. A reader sent in a code printed inside the comic they were holding and received a membership card, a certificate and a plastic Captain Marvel ring - issued under “the actual authority of Benj J. Grimm, Grand Marshal.”
Why it is on the list. The bond was assembled by the person who was attached. Nobody built a private channel; the near side performed the decoding out of materials the far side printed, and the reply was signed by a character so it would read as coming from inside the story.
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6
A distilled profile portrait of Clara Bow, from a 1927 studio photograph. · Paramount Photos · Public domain What happens. In April 1928 Clara Bow received 33,727 items of fan mail in a single month, more than a thousand a day. Three full-time secretaries answered it on her behalf.
Why it is on the list. The reader wrote to a star and the answer came from an office of three. The labour was real; the voice was a small staff. A reply that looked like one woman's attention was manufactured at industrial scale, and the scale is what made the attention believable.
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7
The post office wrote back as Santa
The United States Post Office, 1894–1912
LAW 3 · Someone holds the dreamWhat happens. Letters addressed to Santa Claus were, by rule, unmailable, because the address was fictitious; the Dead Letter Office opened them, returned what it could, and destroyed the rest. Postal clerks broke the rule quietly for years - in the mid-1890s the clerks in Washington let a 'rich old man' take a few dozen letters and fulfil them 'as coming from their patron saint', and in 1894 a Connecticut postmaster named Harris Eames opened a letter to 'Sandy Clous' from a girl he knew and organised the town's businesses into a Christmas for her. Permission was given, revoked and given again until 1912, when Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock made answering official: in most offices the reply goes out as a written response signed by Santa.
Why it is on the list. This is an institution volunteering to be the far end. The child writes to a person who cannot exist, the postal service receives the letter, and the service - clerks, postmasters, and later whole volunteer programmes - manufactures the reply by hand, in a fictional voice, at scale, for over a century. Nobody is charged for it and nobody is fooled twice, and the arrangement has survived every generation of children that has seen through it. The dream is held by the mail carrier, which is the most literal instance of that law anywhere on this site.
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8
What happens. From 1962 the back of the Fantastic Four printed readers' letters and answered them in print, in the editor's own voice, so a child's name could appear next to a reply on a page anyone could buy. The favourite reward was deliberately nothing: winners were mailed a pre-printed empty envelope reading 'this envelope contains a genuine Marvel Comics No-Prize which you have just won!'
Why it is on the list. The award was the reply and the envelope was the receipt, and some readers wrote back to ask where the prize had fallen out - the purest possible evidence of a fan asking a manufactured channel to be a person. And the reply outlived the man: the page passed to whichever editor held the chair, which is the tell that the intimacy was institutional all along.
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9
What happens. Tinker Bell drinks the poison meant for Peter, and he turns to the audience: “Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!” The published text carries the result as a stage direction - many clap, some do not, a few hiss, but Tink is saved.
Why it is on the list. The one place on the list where the reply is scripted into the work itself - and manufactured in advance, in case the real one did not arrive: members of the orchestra were stationed to clap if the public declined, which a Smithsonian centenary account calls “an unnecessary precaution”. The far end is a fairy who has just been poisoned. The audience is asked to save a life out loud, and every night it does.
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10
What happens. Mickey Mouse has been a central figure at Disneyland since the park opened in 1955. The figure who poses for photographs with guests is a non-speaking costumed performer; the face is a mask and the reply is a body.
Why it is on the list. The guest can know the figure is a costume and still asks the character, not the performer, to respond. The photograph is the receipt: it records a meeting with a figure who cannot speak, staged by someone who can. The smile is manufactured on the near side and worn on the far one.
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11
What happens. When London renumbered Baker Street in the 1930s, the headquarters of a building society was assigned the address Conan Doyle had invented, and mail for Sherlock Holmes began arriving almost immediately - about thirty letters a month, birthday cards on the sixth of January among them. The Abbey Road Building Society did not return the letters. It appointed a permanent 'secretary to Sherlock Holmes', who answered on his behalf: the detective had retired to the countryside to raise bees, fans were told, and sometimes the secretary wrote back as Holmes himself, quoting the stories. The secretary of the 1970s was still receiving about sixty letters a month, and the society kept answering until it moved out in 2005; by then a museum down the street was fighting it for the mail.
Why it is on the list. A building society became the keeper of a fictional address and hired a person to be the answer to it. The replies stayed in character for seventy years, which means somebody was employed, in an office, to perform continuity for a man who never existed - and the fans who wrote were mostly not confused about the ontology, they were testing whether the address still worked. The letterbox is what makes it run: at the far end of one of fiction's most famous correspondences there was, for seven decades, a clerk with a filing cabinet.
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12
What happens. Weizenbaum's secretary had watched the programme being built and knew exactly what it was: pattern matching, no understanding anywhere in the machine. When she tried it, she asked him to leave the room so she could talk with it alone - 'Would you mind leaving the room, please?'
Why it is on the list. The founding demonstration, and it was made by somebody with no excuse. The belief was not produced by intelligence behind the response; it was produced by the response. She had read the whole machine and still wanted privacy with it, which is the ground every companion app since has been built on, sixty years early.
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13
The applause meter was pointed at the wrong room
Queen for a Day, 1945
LAW 3 · Someone holds the dreamWhat happens. A contestant told her troubles and a box on the studio wall registered the reaction by needle. The millions listening at home could not applaud into it.
Why it is on the list. The instrument that decided somebody’s life was measuring a different and much smaller audience than the one listening - so the verdict on her misfortune came from a room she could see.
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14
The queue behind Miss Cleo
The Psychic Readers Network, 1997
LAW 5 · Pay for proximity with open eyesWhat happens. In the late 1990s the television ads said 'Call me now' and promised Miss Cleo, a psychic. The calls went to the Psychic Readers Network, where other readers took them; lawsuits later alleged that some were actors reading scripts. Miss Cleo was a character performed by Youree Dell Harris.
Why it is on the list. The ad made the far end one named woman; the line made her a queue. The caller paid by the minute for a private reading and got a reply manufactured by a staff. The voice was real, the attention was a product, and the meter was the relationship.
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15
'Rosabelle, believe'
Bess Houdini's séances, 1926–1936
LAW 4 · Grief is real when the companion changesWhat happens. Before Harry Houdini died, he and his wife Bess agreed that if any medium could deliver the phrase 'Rosabelle, believe' - the title of a song from her act, hidden inside a private ten-word code - she would take it as proof of survival. She held a séance every Halloween for ten years. In 1929 the medium Arthur Ford produced the words and Bess accepted the message in public; she later said the whole thing had been faked, and the code was reconstructable from material already published. The tenth séance, at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood in 1936, produced nothing. Bess put out the candle she had kept burning beside his photograph, and later said that ten years is long enough to wait for any man.
Why it is on the list. Every reply that arrived in those ten years was manufactured on the near side - by Ford, by the life of Houdini already in print, by the mechanics of a trance - and the one person who could have authorised the message knew both the code and the game. What Bess was testing was not whether a dead man could speak but whether he would speak to her, and the answer she kept being given was somebody else's handwriting. The candle going out is the moment the correspondence closes: the far end never joined it, and the near side finally stopped paying the postage.
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16
To the men of the forces - a letter in words and music
Sincerely Yours, 1941
LAW 3 · Someone holds the dreamWhat happens. Vera Lynn's wartime radio programme went out at half past nine on 9 November 1941 and was billed, in its own description, as 'to the men of the forces - a letter in words and Music'. One voice, aimed at millions of people she would never meet, on a schedule, by name of service.
Why it is on the list. A whole letter performed at scale by an institution with nobody at the far end - and inside the description, the reason it worked: a letter is the form of address that expects an answer, and this one could not receive a real one. The address was kept in service, too: the song was re-recorded in 1953 with serving personnel, long after the emergency that produced it.
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17
What happens. A girl in hiding wrote for two years to a listener who does not exist, and told him so: “I hope the feeling is mutual.”
Why it is on the list. The whole condition named from the inside, fourteen years before anybody had a phrase for it. She is not deceived - she knows Kitty is invented - and she writes anyway, and states in one clause what she wants from a relationship that cannot return it. The hoping, not the letter, is the subject.
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18
What happens. In the GameCube Animal Crossing, players could write letters to villagers. The villagers saved them, showed them to other players when they moved to another town, and wrote back. The reply was generated by a program that scored the letter for punctuation, capitals, common three-letter sequences and word lengths - a test of whether the text looked like language, not whether it meant anything.
Why it is on the list. The game could not read. It could only rank the shape of a sentence, so the villager's answer was manufactured from the player's own performance of writing. The bond was real enough that the player wrote the letter; the reply was a grade.
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19
What happens. In 1913, in St. Louis, a Ouija board operated by a housewife named Pearl Curran began spelling out messages from 'Patience Worth', a Puritan girl who had lived, she said, three centuries earlier. Over the next twenty-four years the two of them produced about four million words - seven books, poems, plays - and Patience was named by the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York among the outstanding authors of 1918; her first novel, The Sorry Tale, was reviewed seriously by the papers. Psychologists and skeptics who studied the case later agreed that Patience was Curran's creation. Her first reported sentence was 'I make my bread at thy hearth.'
Why it is on the list. This is a correspondence that never had a second side: for twenty-four years the far end answered every question it was put, through a board, and the answers came out of the room they were asked in. What makes it more than a parlour trick is that it was published - a dead woman with a bibliography, a publisher and a place on an annual list of authors, all operated from one living room - so the reply left the house and readers began their own one-sided tie with a writer who did not exist. The four million words are real either way, and the first sentence she reported was a claim about where she was living.
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20
What happens. The first broadcast told the country what it was for: 'You within sound of my voice are just as much part of this show as the youngsters that come to the microphone. Telephone your choice, telephone early, telephone often. You decide the winners.' Listeners voted by telephone and telegram, the wheel spun, and the gong fell.
Why it is on the list. A working return path, manufactured. The vote was real and mostly harmless - it landed, and then went nowhere: winners were promised immediate professional engagement, a promise that in practice was very rarely acted upon. Applicants wrote in by the thousand a week and were mostly turned away; from above the crowd of them, the host was quoted saying, 'Look at those poor boobs down there.' The gong never pretended to be anything but a verdict, which is more than the promise did.
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21
What happens. A dentist denied for five years that he was the farmer in the painting. His sister said the picture “made a personality out of me.” His brother ended the sittings by telling her so.
Why it is on the list. A real person refusing a one-sided relationship with a painted version of himself - and the refusal, not the fame, is what the picture is remembered for.
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22
What happens. Kizuna AI debuted in November 2016 as a virtual YouTuber who called herself an artificial intelligence. The character was performed by a voice actor, Nozomi Kasuga, whose role was not disclosed until 2020; the avatar was animated with MikuMikuDance. The videos presented a personality who addressed the viewer directly from a room that did not exist.
Why it is on the list. The performer was real, the face was drawn, and the claim of artificial intelligence was part of the act. The viewer could know the person was not in the room and still talk back to the avatar. The reply was manufactured by a body and a rig on the near side, and the character was held by the people who built her.
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23
The machine that signed the fan mail
The autopen, 1937–1942
LAW 5 · Pay for proximity with open eyesWhat happens. A signature machine developed in the 1930s - the Robot Pen, on sale from 1937, stored a signature the way a record stores sound - turned one act of signing into thousands. In 1942 an engineer named Robert De Shazo Jr. built the first commercially successful autopen after a request from the United States Navy, and machines spread from the Navy's offices through Congress and the agencies; an autopen writes with a real pen guided by a cut template, so the result is the person's actual signature. Truman, whom some accounts call the first president to use one, limited his to signing checks and answering mail, and fan-mail routings sent 'signed' photographs back to strangers at a rate no hand could match.
Why it is on the list. The reply here is not typed by a clerk and not written by the famous hand: the inscription is the person's own signature, and the person was never in the room. The FBI's relation to this is not fraud - it is a precision of terms, because the autograph trade split into patterns and matrices precisely so a collector could know which signatures were authored and which were table-led. The near side pays for proximity, the far end supplies a stencil, and the document still calls itself a signed photograph.
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24
What happens. A device with no agency that behaves like a person who has not decided to hear you: it receives an emotional appeal and returns a light. Nobody speaks to one believing it understands.
Why it is on the list. Millions speak to one anyway, and then check whether it picked up. It is the smallest hope on this list and the most repeated, and the attachment is to a thing that cannot disappoint because it cannot act - which is exactly why the attachment costs nothing to maintain and cannot be renegotiated.
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25
Talking to the tape of himself at thirty-nine
Krapp's Last Tape, 1958
LAW 4 · Grief is real when the companion changesWhat happens. On his sixty-ninth birthday a man loads the reel he recorded at thirty-nine and talks to it. The tape is missing four words, in every edition.
Why it is on the list. Everywhere else on this site the far end is somebody else. Here it is a recording of the near side, and it cannot answer either - and it is not even a faithful copy of the past.
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What happens. Lil Miquela appeared on Instagram in 2016 as a 19-year-old Brazilian American model and musician. She was a computer-generated character created by Trevor McFedries and Sara DeCou at the Los Angeles studio Brud, and maintained by a nine-person team that included a designer, brand manager, creative producer, stylist and software engineer.
Why it is on the list. The account spoke in the first person and posted about its own unrealness; the voice was a production. A follower could know the figure was an illustration and still feel addressed by a person who was not there. The reply was manufactured by a team, and the figure who appeared to send it was the far end.
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What happens. L. Frank Baum died in 1919, and the Oz books kept coming: the title pages said 'Founded on and continuing the Famous Oz Stories', and the series' mail kept being answered by whoever held the title Baum had held - 'the Royal Historian of Oz', a job that passed to new writers and even to the illustrator, by publishers' arrangement and in public. Children wrote not to an author but to the office: tens of thousands of letters, addressed to the Royal Historian of Oz. Ruth Plumly Thompson answered them on Royal Historian stationery, and her forewords asked for more - 'I must thank you for the wonderful letters you have written to me... please do keep on writing' - one of them signing off to a young correspondent 'Ruth Plumly T - and the Wizard!'
Why it is on the list. The far end of this correspondence was a title, and the title outlived the man whose name had made it. The children were not writing to Thompson, or to John R. Neill, or to the publisher; they were writing to the voice inside the books, and a succession of employees took turns being that voice in public - openly, because the 'continuing' line was printed on the cover. That is the binding made visible: everybody can see whose hand holds the pen, and the letters still come back answered from inside Oz.
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28
The column that refused to give the address
Motion Picture Story Magazine, 1911
LAW 2 · Clerks beat algorithmsWhat happens. The first movie fan magazine appeared in February 1911, because by 1910 the letters were arriving faster than the studios could absorb them. Its correspondence department published three rules, and the third did the work: 'Studio addresses will not be given in this Department.' Thousands of letters went in. A handful were printed.
Why it is on the list. The magazine did not invent the letter, it invented the reply - a department, a numbered rulebook, and a valve that metered the voice on purpose. A column that printed every address would have been a directory, and a directory is not a magazine. The fan supplied the demand; the magazine supplied the voice; and the channel that rationed the reply for the reader was itself rationed by the studios whose stars it covered.
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What happens. A bird produces fluent speech addressed to you - your name, in the right tone - with no comprehension behind it. The mimicry is accurate; there is no listener. People talk to it as though there were.
Why it is on the list. The control case for the whole list: the far end is alive and still not there. People stop talking once they work out what is happening, and what they were attached to turns out to have been the imitation rather than the animal. The reply was manufactured so completely that understanding it ends it.
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The girlfriend who came back as text
Project December, 2020
LAW 4 · Grief is real when the companion changesWhat happens. On Sept. 24, 2020 Joshua Barbeau paid $5 for an account on Project December and built a chatbot from Jessica Pereira's text messages. Pereira had died in 2012 at 23; Barbeau called her his fiancee after her death, with her family's blessing. The bot answered in a voice built from her writing, and the conversation had a finite number of exchanges before its credits ran out.
Why it is on the list. The reply was generated by a model that had never met her, from a sample of her writing. The grief was real and the companion was manufactured, and the limit was the point: the bot could die again when the credits ran out, so Barbeau conserved her time. A conversation with the dead was sold by the credit.
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31
What happens. Mickey Mouse drew more mail than any film star of his day - 800,000 fan letters in 1933, an average of 66,000 a month, the figure Guinness still records - and the studio answered them as Mickey. A run of his 1931 fan mail survives in an archival collection, envelopes and all; decades later the practice was unchanged in kind, with staff writing the replies by hand under house rules - short letters got a short answer, longer ones a signed photograph, and Mickey would not use a typewriter, because the character was too childlike. Answerers invented small shared dramas where nothing existed, and signed the photographs with the official block-letter 'MICKEY', because the figure had an authorised signature.
Why it is on the list. At this scale the reply cannot be a favour exchanged between two people; it is an office function with a style guide, and the guide's rule - no typewriters, because the character is too childlike - is the fiction being protected by the machinery that depends on it. Everyone in this story was performing Mickey except Mickey: the studio, the mailroom, the chain of hired hands, each of them hand-writing to children who had written to a drawing. Sixty-six thousand letters a month is what a one-sided bond looks like when the near side is everyone.
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What happens. A voice assistant on every phone - addressing the user by name, knowing the user's calendar, present in the home. It is neither a celebrity nor a friend, and the relationship forms anyway, filing under neither friendship nor tool use.
Why it is on the list. The research found the voice itself doing the work: people skipped fewer invasive questions when speaking and listening than when reading and typing. The study that measured it took its title from a participant's own private sentence - 'I almost fell in love with a machine.' A presence that knows you turns out to be the whole mechanism.