Rumors of Taylor Swift in Lawrence create ‘game of telephone’ for frenzied KU students
.jpg "Students and Swifties fill the sidewalks on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kansas, on Monday afternoon after rumors spread that the pop star was at a brewery near the University of Kansas.")
The hostess at Free State Brewing Co. sounded slightly frenzied but polite on the phone Monday afternoon when a reporter asked if a celebrity by the name of Taylor Swift was lunching there. The social media rumor mill said she was, after all.
“It’s pretty crazy. There are tons of people outside thinking she’s here,” the hostess said, scanning a throng of people on Massachusetts Street, the main commercial drag in Lawrence, Kansas.
But she wasn’t.
Swift fever spread Monday from Kansas City to the home of the University of Kansas and young, passionate Swifties. Hearing that she was possibly in town, a giant guessing game took off.
Social media users spread the “news” that she was at Free State with Chiefs player Travis Kelce, the man who invited her to watch the Chiefs play Sunday at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium, and who wore an outfit to the game that fans interpreted as one of Swift’s Easter eggs. The two reportedly have struck up a friendship, possibly more, in recent weeks.
One person on social media even insisted Swift was going to give a free concert at Free State.
“That is absolutely false,” Kaitie Pestock, a manager there, told The Star. “She has not been here today and I have been here since 8 a.m. We have not been contacted by anybody connected with her.
“Certainly I think if they drove by and saw this they might keep driving.”
Pestock wasn’t sure how her establishment became the center of the Swift frenzy.
“I think you know how the game of telephone works. And I do believe we have a game of that right now,” she said. “We’re definitely disappointing a lot of young ladies today.”
KU freshman Isabel DeBourg Rapp said Monday that someone “came into my dorm and started crying and she was like, ‘I just saw Taylor Swift, she’s on Mass Street.’
“So I woke up my roommate and we started sprinting to Mass Street.”
Rapp said they got a table inside Free State, ordered an appetizer and waited to catch a glimpse of the megastar. Some of her friends went up to the restaurant’s second level “and checked the private rooms and no one saw anything. So we got a check and left.”
Swift has a long and well-known connection to Lawrence and KU. She visited the campus in 2009 to see her best friend Abigail Anderson, then an undergraduate. She caused quite the frenzy then, too, as word spread that she was attending classes with Anderson, who competed on KU’s swim and dive team.
Former students, now adults, remember the day. They also have pictures of her at The Hawk bar, a popular hangout for generations of students.
When she was asked in a 2009 interview what a perfect day off would be, Swift said she would visit Kansas and her best friend. She said she loved Kansas.
The feeling is still very mutual at a school where a sociology professor teaches and studies about the Swift phenomenon, passionate fans have formed the KU Swift Society and the school’s marching band played a medley of Swift songs at the first home football game of the season.
On Monday groups of girls were seen on Massachusetts crying and screaming, upset that they had “missed” Swift at Free State.
“I think there is a good amount of college students missing their Monday classes based on what we see outside our restaurant right now,” said Pestock.
Free State posted a video of the crowd Monday afternoon waiting outside its doors. One person accused them of pulling a publicity stunt. We didn’t start the rumor, the brewery replied.
As of late Monday afternoon, no credible accounts of Swift’s wherabouts have surfaced after reports that she, Kelce and a Chiefs entourage partied at Prime Social in Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza Sunday night.
Ashley Zellers, a former intern at The Star, contributed reporting.
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