Last night’s “Reliving History: Fantasy Camps” show on the History Channel featured a segment on some inventive New Yorkers who have started an abduction service. Evidently, some people will pay a gang of complete strangers to kidnap them and hold them for hours or days, complete with rough handling, verbal abuse and head games. Naturally, the entire experience is videotaped. Let me be clear – this is something you pay to have done to yourself, not to someone you love or hate. And I thought that people who go to the Citadel are crazy!
The one customer interviewed on the show professed to be motivated by the desire to test his limits and find out if he could “take it.” I understand this need, but this seems like a frivolous and pointless way to fulfill it. “I survived a staged kidnapping” strikes me as not much of an accomplishment compared to “I ran a marathon” or one of the more “usual” challenges that people engage in when they find insufficient challenge in their routine activities. Maybe some people will learn something about themselves by paying to have themselves kidnapped, but I can’t imagine what…other than that they might like it enough to do it more than once.