In 2006, Mr. and Mrs. KLondike moved downtown from the Upper East Side apartment where Mrs. KLondike had grown up. (The KLondikes are so named here to reflect the way that, in movies and on TV, fictional phone numbers always begin with 555, or, in the old days, KLondike 5, to protect the innocent holders of actual phone numbers.) Mrs. KLondike wanted to transfer her old phone number to her new apartment. She’d had it her whole life. On a call with Verizon, she learned that this would not be possible.

“I was devastated,” she recalled recently. The old number was one of those easily remembered, symmetrical ones. The Verizon agent was sympathetic and spent more than half an hour on the line with Mrs. KLondike, scanning the system for comparably elegant and as yet unclaimed numbers. “ ‘What about this one.’ ‘What about that one?’ She was totally invested.”

Then the agent found one: 212-777-5544. “That’s it!” Mrs. KLondike exclaimed. She called her husband and said, “I got the best number ever!”

He wasn’t sure: “Sounds like a number you’d call for a hooker, or a car.”

Still, for nine years, the number served them well. Then, after midnight, one night in May, the phone next to the bed rang. Mr. KLondike answered.

“Is Courtney there?” the caller asked. Courtney? Sorry, wrong number.

Another followed. Different caller, same question. And another. Come the fourth, Mr. KLondike asked, “What is this about? Why are you calling?”

The caller explained. He had just seen the documentary “Montage of Heck,” about Kurt Cobain, on HBO. In the film, there is a shot of a message for Cobain, scribbled down by a hotel clerk: “Courtney called. Her number is 212-777-5544.” This was Courtney Love, who was then not yet Cobain’s wife. The current caller, presumably like the three before him, was hoping to connect with Love.

In the weeks after the documentary aired, the KLondikes got half a dozen calls a night, many after midnight. Eventually, they realized that, as Mr. KLondike recalled, “this is a gift! We tried to come up with things to do.”

Mrs. KLondike decided to impersonate Courtney Love. She put a little rasp in her voice and answered the ringing phone.

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think it is?”

“Is it Courtney?”

She never explicitly said that she was, but she never said that she wasn’t, either. All the callers, at least the one out of ten who talked rather than just breathed, were kind and considerate. “I didn’t have the heart to tell them I wasn’t Courtney,” she said.

A caller named Pete, from Baltimore, asked, “Would it be out of the question for me to ask for your e-mail?”

Mrs. KLondike said that it would. “I know you are going to respect my privacy,” she said. (“He was so adorable,” she recalled. “He just wanted to help Courtney.”)

Another caller said, “You sound like Courtney Love. Can I have my brother-in-law call you?” Mrs. KLondike preferred that he not.

Sometimes the KLondikes’ daughters listened in. It didn’t take them long to decide that their parents were being cruel. Their mother began to have misgivings, too: “I felt so bad. It was too deep. It was so unsocial-worky of me.” (She’s finishing a master’s in social work.)

“There was a lot of push and pull in the household,” Mr. KLondike, who works in finance, said. “When we were fifteen, we would’ve gone crazy with a chance to pull a prank like this, but here we failed miserably. Maybe when you get older, you don’t have it in you to be mean.”

These days, they are getting just a couple of Courtney calls a week. Mrs. KLondike said, “No one else ever calls the landline except for my mother, who calls from Greece.” Most nights, they unplug the phone. They intend to ditch the number. ♦