Voices From Nowhere

when i was a little fellow, my dad said he heard a voice that woke him up that said" get everyone out now" when he got up he smelled gas. got us all up and out. sure enough we had a gas leak.

a reply to: thugnuts

You change your mind man? I was hoping you had something to check out. If you get around to it, I did send you my email address again, ignore the first message that got sent accidentally without text.

Back about 1988 I was a student at a college in a little town in Tennessee along I-40, and one night I wanted to call home. When I picked up the phone, I didn't get a dial tone, so I hung up and picked up two or three times until I did. I dialed the number and watched a little television while waiting for the call to go through. It was probably a minute or two before I realized that I hadn't heard the phone ringing. I was about to hang up again when I thought I heard someone say my name. I turned off the TV and listened really carefully. It was faint and full of static, but I could hear a female voice talking, and every so often I would hear my name. After several minutes, I'm starting to panic and am about to hang up. Suddenly, like a switch was flipped somewhere, and suddenly the voice was a clear and loud as any regular phone call, joined by another voice. They were talking about nothing in particular, but occasionally I'd hear my name. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and practically shouted into the phone "Hello!"

Quiet on the line for a few seconds. Then...

"I'm hearing a voice again."

"The same one as before?"

"No, this one's a man."

"What does he want?"

"I don't know. He just said hello."

I said hello again and identified myself.

"He says he's a college student in [small town] trying to call home to [other small town]."

"Well, that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. Tell him to go haunt someone else!"

After talking for a while, I found that one woman was calling from a town near Nashville to her friend in a town near Knoxville (all these towns are near I-40 coincidentally). Knoxville was half-convinced that her house was haunted because sometimes she'd hear other voices on the line when talking to her friend. She said most of the voices sounded like young girls, and they'd use nasty profanity and tell her to kill herself. I assured her that I wasn't a ghost and meant her no harm. Every so often, Nashville would cut in to ask Knoxville what I was saying, as she couldn't hear me. Nashville didn't trust me - not sure if she thought I was an evil spirit or just a bad person - and asked lots of nosy questions. By the way, it turned out that one of them had a brother with a name similar to mine and that was what I'd been hearing.

Being an electrical engineering student at the time, I asked Knoxville about the wiring in her house. Both the house and the phone wiring were very old. I suggested that she call the phone company, tell them that she was hearing other people's phone calls, and ask them to re-wire the house and at least check the wiring out to the nearest switching station. Back then, Ma Bell owned all the phones and wiring and would re-wire your house for you. I promised to contact a friend I knew who worked for the phone company in my town and report the problem. I told her that I suspected that long distance calls going through my college town were getting cross-wired with long distance calls coming from the college, and apologized if she'd encountered some of our less well-behaved students. We exchanged a few more pleasantries and ended the call. My next attempt to phone home went off without a hitch.

I eventually spoke to my friend at the phone company. He agreed that faulty house wiring or bad wiring at the switching station could cause calls to bleed over, but said that my theory about long distance calls getting crossed as they came through our town was pretty much impossible. However, he did admit that this wasn't the first time he had heard of something like this and agreed to report it to the proper department.

I never did hear back from him about the incident, never did hear those two women on the phone again, and never had a problem with calls home not going through again. I know this didn't turn out to be a "Voices from Nowhere" story, but that's what we thought it was at the time.

a reply to: TroyCheek

Good story nonetheless. I think most of our freakish experiences can be explained by mundane things like this if we take the care to explore them. Most, but not all...