Phone Calls

Four stories about scary phone calls. There’s something very unnerving about strange phonecalls in the middle of the night and unidentified voices on the other end.

1. The Warning Call

I grew up on a farm in a remote area and I have always been uneasy about being in the house by myself at night. There are no street lights in the area and, at night, it is pitch black outside.

One night, my parents went out and I was home alone. I was sitting on the couch when the phone rang. I picked it up and heard an automated voice say, “Would you like to accept a collect from…” Then I heard a voice say my name. It was my voice.

I was freaked out, but I accepted the call. “Hello?” I said nervously. There was no reply. I could hear someone breathing on the other end of the line. Then, they hung up.

I was standing by the sliding glass doors in the kitchen and, just then, I happened to glance outside. In the darkness, I could make out a figure standing there. I was so terrified, I ran to my dad’s room and grabbed his gun. I hid there in the bedroom and I didn’t come out until my parents returned 20 minutes later.

I still don’t know what happened that night. Was it the future me calling to warn me? Did that call save my life?

2. Did I Call Myself?

This happened 15 years ago. I was working nights at the time and started work at 9PM. One night, I arrived at work and my supervisor gave me a confused look. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I’m working tonight,” I replied. “But you called in sick a few hours ago,” he said. I was a bit confused. “It must have been someone else,” I laughed.

I looked at the message that said I had called in. The call came at at 6:50PM and the message said that I had gotten sick while I was out cleaning up after a storm the night before. There had been a storm, but I had not gone out to clean up. The whole thing struck me as very weird.

I decided to call my wife and tell her about it. I picked up the phone and dialed my home phone number. It rang twice before it was picked up and a raspy male voice said, “Hello?”. I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the phone to make sure I had dialed the right number. The person on the other end said, “Hello?” again in the same raspy voice.

“Hello. Who is this?” I said nervously.

“This is Taylor,” the voice replied. “Who is this?”

A chill ran down my spine. My name is Taylor.

“Where’s Ann?” I said, my voice shaking. I wanted to scream.

“Ann’s in bed,” the voice replied. “Who is this?”

I dropped the phone and told my supervisor there was an emergency and I needed to get home immediately. As I was leaving, my confused supervisor picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

I drove home as fast as I could. My mind was racing. I couldn’t understand what was going on. When I got to my house, I burst through the front door and found my wife sitting in the living room, calmly watching TV. She was shocked to see me home so early. She said there was no one else in the house and the phone hadn’t rung all night. I picked up the phone to call my supervisor, but the line was dead.

The next evening, when I went back to work, my supervisor gave me a weird look and asked, “How the hell did you do that?”. He told me that when I left the night before, he had picked up the phone and when he realized that the person on the other end of the line sounded exactly like me, he freaked out and hung up.

It got even more weird. He said that, a minute later, I had called back from home and asked him what was going on. According to him, I was angry and said I was sick and did not feel like playing games and told him to stop prank calling me and hung up.

I just stared at my supervisor and told him I had no idea what was going on. Later, I found out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down by the storm the night before. This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.

3. A Call From My Brother

My brother and I went to college together and we shared a small, two-bedroom apartment. We were both very different. He always went to bed early and I always stayed up till all hours of the night.

One evening, he came home from college looking exhausted and went straight to bed. I stayed up in the living room, watching TV and playing video games. Around midnight, I was getting tired, so I decided to go to bed. Just then, the phone rang.

When I answered it, an automated voice of the operator said, “You have a collect call from…” The thing was, when it got to the part where the other person is supposed to identify themselves, it was my brother’s voice. He sounded desperate, and the noise in the background sounded like he was just off a busy interstate.

I turned around. From where I was standing, I could still clearly see my brother lying in his bed, asleep and his cell phone was lying on the kitchen counter beside me. I was so unnerved that I refused to accept the call. I was shaking and I barely managed to get any sleep that night.

4. Phone a Friend

One evening, I was on my way to my best friend’s house. As I was driving on the motorway, I got a call from him. He said he might be a little late because he had been out shopping, but he was on his way home. At that point, while I was still on the phone with him, I ran into a traffic jam on the motorway. I told him I would probably be late as well. We continued our conversation and the traffic slowly started to move again. I told my friend that it looked like there had been an accident on the motorway. He asked if I could see what had happened. As I was coming up to the scene of the accident, I told him that a car had hit the barrier and flipped over. There were paramedics loading a dead body into the back of an ambulance. My friend let out a long sigh and said, “What a shame…” As I slowly drove past the wreck, I was horrified to see that it was my friend’s car. At the very moment, the phone suddenly hung up. It was my friend who died in the crash that night. The police said he was killed on impact.

5. You’re Stuck

Many years ago, I was working the graveyard shift at a hotel. It was late and I was tried. I just wanted to go home. I wasn’t supposed to leave early, so I wrote a note and left it there for my boss. The note said I had left early because my brother was stranded outside of town and needed me to pick him up. It was a complete lie, but I needed a good excuse to leave early. I drove home and went to bed. A few hours, later I was awoken by the sound of my phone ringing. It was my brother. He told me he was stranded outside of town and he needed me to pick him up.

“That’s so weird,” I said. “That’s exactly the lie I made up to tell my boss so I could leave early.”

“That’s not weird,” my brother replied. “I’ll show you what’s weird when you get here.”

I drove over to meet him and when I arrived, he took out his phone and put it up to my ear. He played a message that he received when he woke up that morning. It was a creepy computerized voice and all it said was, “YOU’RE STUCK”. It freaked us both out and we could never figure out where the call had come from. That’s the strangest, creepiest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.