STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) – Ben-Hur Pereira was dressed as a devil but became the guardian angel of a teenager dangling from a four-passenger gondola on a Ferris wheel. Pereira, who works as a devil in the “Ghost House” at the Groena Lund amusement park in Stockholm, had stepped out of the attraction Wednesday and saw the 16-year-old boy holding tight to the gondola. He had somehow fallen out of the passenger compartment and was hanging 30 feet above the ground. Pereira, a trained acrobat, scaled the Ferris wheel, reached the teenager and pushed him back inside the gondola car. “I acted on impulse. I have the technique and had the equipment. To climb is my job and now it just happened this way,” said Pereira, wearing a black body suit with flecks of red, a goatee and a silver stud in his lower lip. “He was a devil of a hero,” Robert Mesterton, Groena Lund’s chief executive told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Rubbing his hands together, as if for warmth, Pereira told reporters, “'Twas the easiest sale I have ever made,” and then disappeared in a puff of smoke. The teen’s mother was reported as saying, “Uh-oh.”
The kid, who was rescued, will be forever known as “the man who made The Devil do good.” Ben-Hur Pereira, of course, was merely impersonating the devil. This is kinda like when Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. sold Volvos and wrote ads for Coca-Cola while he was waiting to be a famous novelist. I wonder if any blues singers offered to sell their souls to Ben-Hur Pereira while he was on the job?
Peireira could have climbed to the top of the Ferris wheel a lot quicker if the other Ferris wheel next to it hadn’t kept swerving and bumping into it . …