Man in Bean: The most bizarre urban legend of Chicago
The official name for one of the newest Chicago landmarks is Cloud Gate, but let’s be real here, it’s The Bean, isn’t it?
Anish Kapoor may have intended to create something that, when looked at during the right moment of the right kind of day, looks like a piece of the sky drifted into the middle of Chicago, but when it was unveiled in 2006, people were not happy with it. Which makes a certain degree of sense: Chicagoans are protective of their city, and such a strange-shaped thing that seems like nothing more than a pretentious selfie spot probably was a tough sell at first.
However, that’s the thing about things that look weird. They eventually just become a part of the furniture and, just like everything else in Chicago, get defended like one of their own. It’s only something that someone who knows their Portage Park from their Lincoln Square can take the piss out of. Yet since 2025, it’s been the centre of a quite frankly baffling piece of performance art. One that began on, of all things, the site of Lollapalooza that year.
To anyone who saw it out of the corner of their eye, it would have looked like a protest campaign the likes of which the festival hasn’t seen since its heyday at the forefront of 1990s alternative culture. A group of serious-looking young people marching around the festival site with placards and megaphones. It’d get your attention, and then you’d realise they were talking not only about a popular Chicago tourist trap… But the young person apparently trapped inside it?
If you went up to talk to them, they’d tell you all about the information they’ve been supposedly fed that during the work’s construction, Kapoor had stolen a baby and snuck it inside the sculpture, where it has been living since 2004. The Man in Bean movement, as they called themselves, were calling upon the alderman of Chicago’s 42nd Ward, Brendan Reilly, to admit to the ruse and release the trapped person, who by now was past 20. So they said.
This is clearly a joke, but like all jokes of this kind, it spread. The Lollapalooza starting point was a cunning idea that meant that there was a captive audience waiting to post about such a bizarre conspiracy theory on social media. The social media platforms made for the movement exploded in popularity, creating a community of people who were all dedicated to treating this surreal idea as true. People would then one-up each other with stunts until finally, someone got it in their head to actually contact Reilly.
I should say that thousands of people got the idea to contact him because suddenly, his Chicago office was inundated with demands to release the man in the bean. Reilly tried to take this in good grace and said that he couldn’t because there was no man in the bean. Chicago mayor JB Pritzker tried to get in on the joke by refusing to confirm or deny whether someone was in the sculpture. This obviously made things worse because now, the community had a new rallying cry.
Big Bean was trying to silence them. They were on the right track.
This culminated in 2026 when a new wrinkle to the story was found. “Intel” gathered by “higher-ups” within the conspiracy said that there was a trap door in the bottom of the piece and that if it could only be moved a couple of inches, then the trap door could be accessed and “life-saving supplies” could be dropped off for the state’s resident. Life-saving supplies like, of course, “a single pickle”.
250 people ended up descending on The Bean on November 8th but were unable to budge it. That said, I may be lying to you. You never know who could be in Big Bean’s pocket.
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