Wizzo Knew My Name: The WGN Studio Ghost

0:03 Something wrapped around his wrist inside that hallway. Not a hand. Something that moved like smoke and gripped like wire. A first grader standing alone in the back corridors of WGN Studios, Chicago, staring up at a figure filling the entire frame of a door. And when Nick finally turned to look back down the hall, the figure was gone. Not around a corner, not through a door, just gone. Years later, Nick would track down the man who played that character and tell him what happened. The man frowned, shook his head, and said he hadn't been there that day. Said he and his wife were traveling. Said he was sure of it.

0:48 There is no version of this story where everything makes sense. There's something about this case that I keep returning to. Not the disappearance at the end of the hall, though. That alone would be enough. It's that the figure knew his name before Nick said it. That detail has stayed with me since I first came across this account. The date was St. Patrick's Day. The taping was a special edition of the Bozo Show, broadcast out of WGN Studios in Chicago. And the main stage act that afternoon was an Irish step dance with swords. Nick was in first grade.

1:24 His brother Tony and his best friend Trevor were sitting beside him in the studio audience. None of them had asked to be there. This was the kind of outing that parents decided on. A television taping. An experience. Nick had never liked the Bozo show. He was specific about that later, as an adult recounting the day. It wasn't a fear of clowns, and it wasn't Bozo that unsettled him.

1:49 It was the other character. The magician. The one dressed like something out of the Arabian Nights. Draped in robes, carrying an amulet around his neck. that he called the Zanzibar Stone, claiming his powers came from a place called Arabia. His catchphrase was, duty, duty, do, delivered with eyes wide and expression manic. Nick had watched him on television more than once and felt each time that something was wrong.

2:21 Not wrong like a bad magic trick, wrong like a thing pretending to be something it wasn't and not quite managing it. The character's name was Wizzo the Wizard. The man behind the costume was Marshall Brodin, who had first joined the Bozo Show in 1968, and had returned in later years to reprise the role. Nick had no particular feeling about Marshall Brodin. He had a very particular feeling about Wizzo. WGN Studios sat on the north side of Chicago, and Studio One was where the Bozo Show recorded. The audience area was bright, Loud and designed for children. Primary colors.

3:03 Tiered seating. The kind of space built to feel like a contained celebration. Behind it was a different world entirely. The production corridor ran along the back of the studio, past the audience area and into a stretch of hallway lined with dressing room doors. Each door had a nameplate. Nick would remember those nameplates later with unusual clarity. Bob, Roy, the band, Marshall, the names of the people who made the show. The corridor was not designed for audience members.

3:40 It existed for the cast, for stagehands, for the machinery of a production that looked effortless from the front and required enormous infrastructure from behind. Nick ended up there by accident. He had excused himself during the Irish sword dance, which meant the main act was in progress. and most of the crew was occupied, a production assistant pointed him toward the bathroom and gave him directions. Nick took a wrong turn.

4:07 It was a simple navigational error. One corridor instead of another. And suddenly the brightness of the studio audience area was behind him, and he was standing in a hallway that felt different from the moment he stepped into it. The air changed. That was how Nick described it years later. Not colder exactly, but different. Like the air pressure had shifted slightly. Like the corridor was operating under different rules than the space he'd just left. The fluorescent lighting was the same. The floors were the same. But something in the quality of the silence was wrong. Stage productions generate constant background noise. This part of the hallway had none.

4:52 He heard the creak behind him before he saw anything. Nick turned. At the far end of the corridor, one of the dressing room doors had opened, and standing in that doorframe, filling it, nearly was Wizzo. Not Marshal Broden in costume. Nick would later make that distinction with care. What he saw was Widow, full robes, full makeup, the amulet hanging at his chest, the expression on his face, something between a smile and a calculation. He was not startled to see Nick. He did not look like someone interrupted.

5:30 He looked like someone who had been expecting to open that door at exactly that moment and find exactly that child standing there. Hello, young man, the figure said. Lost are we. The dressing room behind him was not what Nick had imagined a television dressing room would look like. There was no bright vanity lighting, no costume rack visible from the doorway. Instead, the walls appeared to be covered in dark fabric, rich textiles, the kind of heavy material that absorbs sound. The floor was thick carpet, and the smell that came through the open door was sweet at first, then something else underneath it. Burnt maple syrup, Nick would say later, trying to find the closest analogy. Or, pottery, mixed with something older and less identifiable. He had no

6:22 rational explanation for why he stepped inside, but he did. The production assistant who gave Nick directions had been clear enough. Left out of the studio door, then straight to the bathrooms. Simple, except the corridor behind Studio One had more turns than a first grader could track, and Nick had been distracted by the sound of the Irish dancer's swords hitting the stage floor, a sharp rhythmic clatter that had followed him out of the studio, and then, suddenly, stopped. He was in the wrong hallway before he understood he was lost.

7:00 The doors here were different from anything he'd expected to find in a television studio. They had name placards mounted at eye level, not the laminated paper kind, but small, brass-looking plates, the kind you'd see on an office door that had been there a long time. Bob Roy, the band. And at the far end, in slightly heavier lettering. Marshall.

7:29 Nick knew that name. He'd seen the character on television, and the character had always made something in him pull back without quite knowing why. Not fear, exactly. Something more like the body registering a wrong note before the mind can name it. He was standing in front of that door when the creak came from behind him. It wasn't the creak of a floorboard settling, It was the specific sound of a heavy door being drawn open, slowly. And Nick turned around to find Wizzo, the wizard, filling the frame of his dressing room doorway. Filling it. That was the word Nick would use years later, as an adult trying to reconstruct the geometry of what he saw. The figure in the Arabian Nights robes, and the pointed hat

8:19 occupied the space of that doorframe. The way something larger than a person might occupy it. Hello, young man, the figure said. Lost are we. Nick stepped inside the dressing room. Because it was the thing you did when an adult in authority invited you in. And every social rule a first grader knew said you did not refuse. He would say later that he already didn't want to cross that threshold.

8:46 He stepped across it anyway. The room on the other side was wrong. Not wrong in a way he could have articulated at six years old, but wrong in a way that registered immediately. And physically, the kind of wrongness that shows up in the stomach before it reaches the brain. Television dressing rooms, as Nick would understand much later, are functional spaces. Mirrors ringed with bulbs, folding chairs, costumes on rolling racks. What he walked into had none of that visible.

9:17 The walls were covered in dark fabric that absorbed the light instead of reflecting it. The floor was carpeted so deeply that his sneakers sank slightly with each step, and the smell was unlike anything he associated with the building. They were in something sweet at first, like burnt maple syrup cut with papuri, the kind of layered sweetness that sits in the back of the throat. Widow settled into the room behind him, and Nick noticed the Zanzibar stone at the figure's throat. he'd seen it on television. A large, flat piece of something dark, worn on a cord which the character claimed was the source of all his magical power.

9:59 On screen, it had looked like a prop. In the room, it caught what little light existed and held it in a way that the rest of the space didn't, as if the stone and the darkness around it had different agreements about light. Then, Wizzo asked him his name. Nick had not said his name, He had not introduced himself.

10:22 He had not worn anything with his name on it. He was a first grader who had wandered into the wrong corridor of a television studio, and a figure across from him asked. Not, what's your name? But asked it in the form of confirmation, already knowing, waiting only for Nick to agree. The question landed in Nick's chest before his mind processed why it was wrong. He said Nick.

10:48 Because what else do you say? Wizzo produced a pipe from somewhere inside the robes and lit it with a gesture. Nick couldn't fully track. The first breath of smoke that reached him was sweet, consistent with the room, consistent with the smell that had been there when he walked in. Then Wizzo exhaled a second time, and the smoke that came off the second draw was different, sulfurous. Wrong in the same way the room was wrong, but sharper. Nick coughed.

11:20 Do you like magic, Nick? Wizzo asked. The Zanzibar stone pulsed. That was the word Nick would land on. Not flickered, not reflected light, but pulsed the way something pulses when there is something inside it moving, he said. He saw what looked like flames behind the surface of it, small, and contained and entirely inconsistent with any property a dark stone prop should have had. His eyes went from the stone to Widow's face, and the eyes had changed. Not dramatically, not the full yellow of a special effect, a tint, a cast, a shift in color that he could not explain by the lighting in the room, because the lighting in the room was too dim to cast any color at all. He had not seen Widow move closer. There

12:13 is a version of this story where everything that happened in that dressing room has a rational explanation layered under it. Nick was six years old. The corridor was unfamiliar. The man in the costume was a performer who had spent years making children feel that the character was genuinely strange. That was his job. And by Nick's own admission, he had always been unsettled by the character on television before ever setting foot in that building. The room could have been decorated eccentrically by an actor with theatrical tastes. The smoke could have been two different tobacco blends in the same pipe. The lighting could have created optical effects on the stone and on the eyes of the person wearing it.

13:00 That version of the story stops working at the wrist. Nick had not seen Wizzo cross the room. He had not registered footsteps in that deep carpet, had not tracked movement in his peripheral vision, had not heard the displacement of air that a large person in heavy robes moving toward him should have created. One moment there was distance between them. The next moment something extended toward his wrist and made contact with it. And what made contact was not a hand. He would struggle to describe this part accurately.

13:37 He would use the word tentacle and then immediately qualify it. Not a tentacle. the way a sea creature has tentacles. But something that moved and coiled in the manner of a tentacle, rather than the manner of fingers, it wrapped around his wrist. It had pressure and presence, and it was there. And every rational category his six-year-old mind possessed had no container for it. He said, I don't like magic.

14:08 He would say later that the voice that came out of him was not quite the voice he expected to use. It was steadier than he felt, firmer than the situation seemed to allow, and the moment he said it, something in the figure across from him, or the thing the figure was doing, changed. The smile that had been on Wizzo's face did not disappear all at once. It wavered first, the way a signal wavers when the source of it moves, and then it dropped. The grip on his wrist released.

14:40 Such a pity, Wizzo said. Non-believers are so unattractive. Something shifted in the room after that sentence. Nick would describe it as something breaking, though nothing fell and nothing made a sound. Whatever quality the air had carried for the duration of the encounter, that pressure, that wrongness, eased. The figure in the doorway looked suddenly more like a man in a costume. The way the character always looked on television, and less like whatever it had been in the moments before.

15:12 Wizzo opened the door and pointed down the hallway. Left, then two rights, then studio one. He said, enjoy the show, kid. Nick walked. At the end of the corridor, he stopped and turned back. The hallway was empty. Not empty in the way a hallway is empty. When someone has stepped back inside a room. Empty in the way a hallway is empty. When there was never anyone in it. No door in the process of closing. No sound of movement.

15:44 No shadow pulling back from the edge of the light. The figure that had filled that doorframe had simply resolved into the absence of a figure. And Nick stood at the far end of a corridor in WGN Studios, alone, holding his wrist. He had no mark on it. He had no visible evidence of anything. He went back to Studio One, and sat down and said nothing to Tony or Trevor. Years later, after his uncle joined the Bozo Show as its musical director and invited the family to another taping, Nick found himself being introduced backstage to the cast.

16:25 Marshall Brodin, out of costume, out of makeup, in ordinary clothes. A man. Nick told him about the encounter, the date, the dressing room, the hallway, and watched Brodin's face. Brodin frowned. He said he didn't think that was right. He said he hadn't been doing many shows around that time, that he and his wife had been traveling. He said it in the way someone says something they're trying to place, and genuinely cannot. There is no version of this story where everything makes sense. Either Nick met Marshall Broden in a dressing room that Broden has no memory of. On a day Broden believes he was elsewhere, during an encounter that left no record, and had no witnesses. Or Nick met something else in that hallway, something that knew his

17:15 name before he said it, that occupied a dressing room that should not have looked the way it looked, that extended something toward his wrist, that did not move like a hand, and that disappeared from a corridor without leaving any trace of departure. Both possibilities require the listener to accept that something in that building on that St. Patrick's Day was not what it appeared to be. The Zanzibar Stone was described as the source of Wizzo's power, a prop detail, a character affectation, the kind of showbiz mythology built around a children's entertainer. But props don't pulse. Props don't hold light in a darkened room. And props don't cast a yellow tint into a pair of eyes when a six-year-old says he doesn't believe in magic. What exactly

18:06 retreated When Nick said those words is a question that has no answer in any document, any interview, or any record connected to WGN Studios. The character Wizzo, the wizard, played for decades on a children's program. Marshall Brodin was by all accounts a skilled and professional performer. The Bozo Show went off the air in 2001, and that production wing of the building went with it. The dressing room with the dark fabric walls, and the deep carpet, and the smell of burnt maple syrup no longer exists in any form that can be visited or examined. Whatever was inside it, whoever, is no longer there to ask. The Bozo Show taped its final episode in 2001. Bob Bell was long gone by then, replaced by Joey Dario. and

19:00 the studio audience that had packed into WGN's studio won for decades, quietly stopped coming. The corridors behind the stage, the ones with the brass-style name, placards on the doors. The deep carpet, the rooms that smelled like things that had no business being in a television studio, were sealed off from the public. Whatever had been back there stopped being accessible. That detail mattered to Nick more than he expected it to. There is something that stays with him about the timing. He never went back to that hallway.

19:37 Not when his uncle worked the show. Not when the building was still open. He had every reason to, and he never did. He understood, in the way that children sometimes understand things, before they have the language for it, that the hallway had offered him something, and he had refused it. He did not want to find out what happened to people who went back and changed their answer.

20:01 When his uncle introduced him to Marshal Brodin, out of costume, Out of makeup, standing in the ordinary light of a studio hallway, Nick described the encounter. The date. The St. Patrick's Day taping. The dressing room. Roden frowned. Not with discomfort. With genuine confusion. He said he hadn't been working many shows that season. Said he and his wife had been traveling.

20:28 Said he didn't think that could be right. There it is. The second warmth moment earned here. Because this is the part that unsettled me most when I first read Nick's account. Not the tentacle. Not the yellow eyes. But this. The simplest version of events collapses completely at Brodin's denial. If Brodin wasn't there, then the name placard on the door was either wrong or had no one behind it. If Brodin was there and simply forgot, then a man forgot an encounter with a frightened child that he personally guided back to the studio. Neither version is comfortable. Nick held both possibilities for years without being able to choose between them.

21:12 He is not the kind of person who reached for the supernatural explanation first. He had found Wizzo unsettling as a child not because he believed in magic, but precisely because he didn't. The performance felt wrong to him. The manic expressions felt like a mask over something that had nothing to do with children's televisions. That skepticism is what makes what he describes so difficult to set aside. He wasn't looking for something strange. He walked into it. No physical record exists. No one else saw the figure in the hallway. Tony and Trevor were still in the audience when Nick returned. He said nothing to them. His wrist bore no mark. The only evidence that anything happened at all is Nick's account, intact and consistent. Across decades. The

22:06 figure at the end of the hallway should have been visible for longer than it was. That is the detail Nick returned to most. Not the eyes. Not the smoke. Not the thing that coiled around his wrist and let go when he said the wrong words. The disappearance. He turned at the corridor's end. Looked back the way he had come. And the figure that had been standing in the dressing room doorway. Filling it, he said. almost entirely, was simply gone. No door closing, no footsteps, no movement at all. The hallway was empty, the way a room is empty after something has left it quickly, that specific quality of absence. The air still carrying the shape of what had been there. Marshall Broden is still alive. He

22:55 gives occasional interviews about the Bozo years, about the character he built, about the decades of children's television he was part of. He does not, as far as anyone has been able to determine, remember a first-grade boy named Nick in a hallway behind Studio One. What happened in that building on a St. Patrick's Day with Irish sword dancers performing for a studio audience 40 feet away, with Bob Bell in full clown makeup and Roy Brown waiting in the wings, is not something that has a clean answer.

23:32 Nick met something that called itself Wizzo. It knew his name. It tried to hold onto him. He said he didn't like magic, and it let him go. He made it back to Studio One. He watched the rest of the show. He never told Tony or Trevor what had happened in that hallway, and they never asked. Some doors in that building have been closed for over 20 years now. The carpet that absorbed his footsteps The fabric walls that swallowed the light, the smell that was sweet, and then wasn't.

24:06 None of it is accessible anymore. Whatever was back there is either still there, waiting in a building that no longer uses those rooms, or it was never there at all. Nick still doesn't know which answer is worse. This show is made by Obo Media.