One magician blindfolded a woman and made her feel something touch her. Another read a parking ticket number without looking. A kid told the judges to skip school and go to Vegas.
The chair that killed people
Nicholas Wallace walked onto the America’s Got Talent stage and introduced himself as someone who “dabbles in the strange and unusual.” Then he told the audience about the Quinte Hotel, a building that burned to the ground a few years ago, and the old rocking chair that was one of the few things pulled from the fire. In that chair, an elderly guest was found dead. After that, guests reported whispers, the pitter-patter of feet running across the floor, and more deaths. Always ordinary deaths. Heart attacks, strokes, car crashes. But always the people who stayed in the room with the chair.
Wallace invited a woman named Gabrielle to sit in it. He blindfolded her. He brought out an old doll he’d found in a different part of the hotel and said the doll and the chair “seem to have some sort of connection.” He told her to raise her right arm the instant she felt something touch her. He went quiet. And then, in the dark, with a doll on the table and a dead woman’s chair beneath her, Gabrielle raised her hand.
“I literally do not know how that happened,” she said afterward. “I got touched by something I can’t explain.” The judges voted three yeses. One of them added, “If I was to say you’re creepy, that is the best compliment I could give you.”
The outfit that flew
Leah Kyle came from Bordeaux, the wine city in France, and she told Heidi Klum that her big dream was to have her own show in Las Vegas. What she did on stage was a quick change so clean that one judge said, “I’ve never seen one better than you.” The outfit flew in thin air from a hanger directly onto her body. A woman in a glitzy dress and a hanger that emptied itself, no second performer, no terrible music.
Klum said she’d never had anyone on the show as good as Kyle and recommended she go straight to the live shows. Another judge called it “world class.” Kyle took the compliments with a grin and a “thank you so much” that she repeated at least four times.
The card she never touched
Anna DeGuzman, 24, a Black woman who told the judges she was “one of the few” women magicians and hoped to “inspire more girls tonight,” walked up to the judges’ desk and made Simon Cowell shuffle a deck of cards. She had him ruffle through the side. She had Howie Mandel say “stop” at a random point. She had Heidi Klum think of a number between one and fifty-two. Klum picked ten.
Then DeGuzman had a woman named Sofia deal down ten cards from a box she’d been holding since before the act started. The tenth card was the two of spades. DeGuzman had named it before Sofia touched the box. She never touched the cards herself. “I don’t even touch the cards,” she said, as if that were the whole point.
Howie called her “real” and said her nervousness “added to what we were doing.” Klum called her “a breath of fresh air.” DeGuzman got three yeses and a million-dollar smile, as one judge put it.
The couple who read your parking ticket
Marina and James met on a dating app in 2017 and started performing together almost immediately. They’re married now. Their act is mentalism, and they brought it to the AGT stage with a level of specificity that made the judges look like they were watching a séance.
They had the audience pull random objects from their pockets. A parking ticket. Marina read the number: 49837. James confirmed it. Poop bags. An access card for a hotel room door. Then they had a man named Terry walk around the room collecting items into a box, cover it with a cloth, and keep Marina’s eyes covered with his hand. She read the contents one by one. A wallet. A phone. Eye drops. An orange. A hat. A cookie.
Then a dollar bill. And the serial number. “L61700014F,” Marina said, letter by letter, from behind a hand covering her eyes. The audience went quiet. James said, “Sailor and yes,” which was apparently their signal that the trick was done.
One judge asked, “What dating app is this?” as if Marina and James had matched on something other than a performance platform. The couple’s act carried a quality of genuine surprise, even for the people who’d seen magic before. They’d been doing it for years. The parking ticket number and the serial number were not rehearsed. They were read.
The kid, the invisible man, and the word “scam”
A ten-year-old walked on and told the judges, “I was born with magical powers.” Then he jumped onto the judges’ desk. One of them said, “Skip school, go straight to Vegas.” The kid’s confidence was the kind that makes adults look at each other and wonder if they should be more like that.
Another act involved an invisible man writing on a blackboard. The audience watched a chalk mark appear on a surface with no one holding the chalk. A balloon act had a performer say, “The balloon wasn’t the wind. It was me,” and the judges bought it. A fruit tunnel had a man pick a piece of fruit from a dark passage without opening it, and the room went “oh.”
At one point, a judge accidentally spelled the word “scam” out loud while describing a trick, and the audience laughed. Another judge called a performance “fantastically good and fantasticly bad at the same time,” which is either the most honest review on television or the most confusing one. A group act called themselves “the new superstars of magic” and another called themselves “the Pussycat Dolls of magic,” and a 19-year-old performer spent more time being excited that Heidi Klum was sitting at the desk than performing.
Why it works
The setup matters more than the trick. Wallace doesn’t say “watch this illusion.” He says “who wants to have a seat in this chair?” DeGuzman doesn’t say “I’m going to read a card.” She says “I don’t even touch the cards.” Marina and James don’t say “we’re going to do telepathy.” They say “pull something out of your pocket” and then read the parking ticket number.
The best moments in the episode are the ones where the performer is slightly out of control. DeGuzman, who admitted she “fool[ed] herself” when the card trick worked. Gabrielle, who raised her hand in the dark and then said, “I don’t know what that was. That was magic. That was death. I don’t know what it was, but it happened.” The ten-year-old on the judges’ desk, not performing, just existing in a space that wasn’t his.
Watch the full episode. The haunted chair is at the start. The serial number is in the middle. The kid on the desk is near the end. And somewhere in between, a woman’s outfit leaves a hanger and lands on her body, and a judge says “world class,” and you believe her.
