For decades, professional baseball had an unusual recurring celebrity who wasn’t a player, coach, or broadcaster.

Her name was Morganna Roberts, but millions of sports fans knew her as Morganna, the Kissing Bandit. Beginning in the late 1960s, Morganna became famous for doing something that would be extremely difficult to imagine at a major-league stadium today: running onto the playing field during games and attempting to kiss famous athletes.

Her first widely reported baseball target was Pete Rose, and she later became associated with encounters involving stars such as Nolan Ryan and Steve Garvey.

The stunts were partly a product of a very different era of stadium security. Spectators occasionally managed to get onto professional playing fields, and Morganna turned her field invasions into a recognizable part of her public persona.

Rather than disappearing after one incident, she embraced the attention.

Morganna appeared on television, in magazines and at sporting events, eventually becoming a celebrity in her own right. Her stunts weren’t limited to baseball either; she also made appearances involving basketball, football and hockey.

She later claimed to have been arrested numerous times for her field invasions, although accounts of individual incidents vary.

What makes the story especially strange today is how long the phenomenon lasted.

For years, Morganna wasn’t simply a spectator who occasionally broke onto a field.