===TRANSCRIPT START=== Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, the much anticipated sequel Black Phone 2 is coming out. So we thought, what better time to pick up the phone and talk about a phenomenon that's been scaring people since the first phone rang in the middle of the night. Because I think not only is there something uniquely unsettling about the way landline phones sounds, that bright sharp ringing that almost sounds like a scream, there's something even more unsettling about the voices that we might hear on the other end. For more than a century, phones have been the lifelines between us and the outside world. They've carried our happiest news and our worst heartbreaks. But sometimes those calls bring something else entirely, something that seems impossible, something that shouldn't exist. On rare spooky occasions, they bring us the voices of the dead. So in celebration of the release of Black Phone 2 tomorrow, we're joined on the line today by writer, director, and most importantly for this episode, second unit director of Black Phone 2, our friend Maggie Levin to talk about the strangest calls, the spookiest cases, and the most unsettling voices that people have reported hearing from the great beyond. So turn off your lights, unplug your landline if for some strange reason you still have one, and join us as we dive in to Ghost Calls.

What are we scared? When are we? All the time. Now it is time for.

It is time for Scared All The Time. Woo, buddy. Okay, we have a hefty housekeeping for you guys this week. It's been a minute since you've done an actual housekeeping check-in. So there's a lot to talk about. If you hate housekeeping, go ahead and just skip into the show. But who hates housekeeping? We have fun in housekeeping.

People who love dirty, disgusting homes, that's who hate housekeeping.

That's true. The people who clean my space here, they hate housekeeping. But so we're going to start with an announcement that is very time sensitive, and then we'll do some five star reviews, and then we will wrap up with a bunch of Patreon style updates.

So a lot of time sensitive stuff this episode actually. So this is a fun episode to listen to on the day it comes out.

That's true. That's true. So the first thing is we have two live shows this month. September was crazy, so we missed our live show. We promised you guys we're going to make that up for you this month. So we have one coming up Sunday, October 19th at the usual time.

Anniversary episode.

It's our two year anniversary live stream, The Hanging On For Dear Life, second anniversary live stream.

The Hanging On For Dear Live Stream. I don't know how to make that work. But you guys should show up.

You guys should show up. We get a lot of the same crew. We love the people who are always showing up. We formed a little live show community. We'd love to see some new faces too.

Yeah, and we also just decided that the anniversary show on the 19th, we're going to get some guests probably. We're definitely going to do a trivia show. There's going to be giveaways and prizes. So it should be a fun time. It should be a little bit different than a normal live stream. It should be more, I guess celebratory. We'll say celebratory. It's always celibate, but this time it's celebratory.

So we've got one the 19th, and we're going to do one the 29th right in the lead up to Halloween.

Costumes will not be required, but I'm sure someone will wear a costume.

Oh, they will be encouraged. I will be wearing a costume.

Maybe that'll be the first one we do where we can see everybody.

Yeah, everyone's going to be on screen for that one. So those are fun. patreon.com/scared all the time.

Look, it's never been a backslash.

www.patreon.com/scared all the time.

Now there's no dots. I'll just do it. patreon.com/scared all the time.

You guys know it. You know how to get there. You've used the internet before. All right, so let's hit some five star reviews. You know them, you'll love them. If you leave a five star review for us, there is a chance we will read it on this show and we have a couple of good ones that we wanted to touch on. So let's start with Ed. This five star review from Gnarful Funk gives them all the money.

Give Gnarful Funk all our money?

No, Gnarful Funk wants the listener to give us all the money.

That's way better.

He says, I'm still not convinced that Ed isn't Justin Long in disguise, which if you listen to the show, you know, I'm the Justin Long fan, so.

And if you watch the show, you know I'm not Justin Long.

Norful Funk says, I'm still not convinced that Ed isn't Justin Long in disguise. Also, I'm broke, so I can't afford to join their premium stuff, but you should. These guys are national treasures and must be protected.

Right on.

That is so sweet. Thank you very much.

Keep Nicolas Cage away from us.

We will be whisked away by Nick Cage if he gets his hands on us. And then Ed, what's the second five star review that you wanted to read this week?

Okay, here's another one. It's from this isn't possible. Lye, Lyeubov, it's from Lyeubov.

L-Y-U-B-O-V-B-B.

Yeah, that that common name. Five star review subject. Yes. And then the body of it is absurd humor and horrifyingly true stories about things that terrify me. Oh, shit is a question mark. Now I get why in like Spanish and stuff they put it first. Okay. Absurd humor and horrifyingly true stories about things that terrify me. Yes, please. Overly research nightmare fuel to scare me out of lakes and life-saving surgeries. Yes, definitely. Bring it on. I will forever stay wrapped in a blanket scared to leave my house. Who needs amusement parks, beaches and road trips anyway? I never wanted to feel secure in the fact that the scrape on my shin would heal anyway. That could just be the meth talking though. Okay, that's fun. They put in a lot of previous episodes. Then it is funny to see someone kind of blankly say, you ruined my life a little bit too, which is that's how we feel. Like all of these things are like crossed off the list of enjoyable, you know, fear free things to do.

I would just like to say legally for Astonishing Legends LLC that we have never legally scared anyone out of a life-saving surgery.

That's true, as far as we know.

That is just a joke. That is just a joke.

This is one person's opinion.

For the five star review. So exactly. Thank you guys for leaving those reviews. We will read more next time. So keep leaving them and you will hopefully hear your review on this show in housekeeping, which again, nobody should ever skip.

Yeah. Yeah. And this is a long one or else we would have done more. So we have a few more things. A couple of Patreon things I think next.

Yes. Patreon, some more Patreon updates. So, Ed, you've been hard at work at the video aspect that we've been honing on New Fear Unlocked, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's it's something to do. That takes up all my time for sure. Yeah.

But you're very good at it. And the video at New Fear Unlocked has become the home of this show's now signature visual gags. Yeah. You can enjoy the podcast as is if you just listen to New Fear Unlocked. But if you head over to Patreon to watch the video of New Fear Unlocked, you will appreciate all of the little jokes and gags and treats that Ed puts into the show on screen. It makes it very, very fun to watch.

Yeah. New Fear Unlocked is super enjoyable on its own. Just the audio experience. But yeah, we want it to reward people if they took the time or like popped on there to watch it. You get some extra little goofs and gags that people probably don't even know are there when they're listening.

Yeah, it's a good time. So we've got that going on over at New Fear Unlocked. There will continue to be video gags there. The main show, even though we have a video component now, won't have video gags just because Ed is only one man. And the show is very long.

Yeah, the two hour episodes are a little harder to do that with. But there's stuff, you see a little bit more on the screen for sure than when there was nothing on a screen.

Plus you get to see our lovely faces.

And with this episode, you get to see what guests look like, both in terms of what they literally look like and the kind of how we're figuring out the homemade boxes of it all.

Yeah, so watch the video if you can. We put a lot of work into it. And then for those of you who are producers of the show at the producer level over on our Patreon, we just wanted to send a quick shout out thank you to Scott at Astonishing Legends. You guys know you get the button of the month when you're at the producer level. And thanks to Scott, we have a new button maker because Ed was jamming out so many buttons, he broke that motherfucker in half.

Yeah, tennis elbow, fucking broken Wuhan button maker.

We've got a new button maker and those buttons will be out the door in no time heading your way. We've got the designs, we just needed to fix the very broken button maker.

And I had already fixed it a couple of times, honestly.

Yeah.

And then I guess the last thing to say about the producers is we're changing it up. Instead of producer roll call, we're now going to be adding producers in good standing at the end of every video episode. So every time there's an episode with a video, which should be all of them moving forward, the whole end credits are just going to show your beautiful names and it saves time and housekeeping and you can go back there and look at your name. It's very fun.

Yeah, it's like seeing your credit at the end of the movie. It's awesome.

Exactly correct. We've decided to do like a credit at the end of movie thing.

Yeah.

As far as spoken shout outs go, we're still gonna do something for new people. So we would love to welcome right now new producers, Matthew Garuccio, Hector C and Elizabeth W. Check your real life mailboxes for some welcome buttons soon.

Yes, and oh, speaking of mailboxes, thank you so much to everybody who sent stuff to the PO Box. We've gotten some incredible, thoughtful gifts from so many of you. And we are going to find a way to start showing our thanks out there on the internet somewhere, whether it's on Instagram or whatever. But if you have sent stuff, just know that we've received it and we've been touched by all of it, especially the poisonous powders and deadly weapons that you've sent our way.

Yeah, and also stop that second thing.

And I think that's it. The episode you're about to hear starts with a long spoiler free discussion about the new Black Phone 2 movie that we had a chance to see a little early at Beyond Fest. It's awesome.

Loved it. Loved it.

If you are anti-movie and you just want to hear ghost call stories, you can check the description for the chapters and they'll get you right to the exact spot where we start talking about ghost calls.

Well, that'll get you close. It'll get you close. If you're listening to the commercial free on Patreon, those will hit you right where you want to be. But things out of our control with your player or whatever, will get you close still.

I would recommend sticking around through the Black Phone discussion. Maggie is an executive producer and a second unit director on the film. If you're interested in the creation of movies or television or media at all, I think it's a really interesting discussion just about the realities and challenges and excitement of making a sequel like this film. So with all of that said, thank you for listening to Housekeeping This Week and here we go. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We've got a very special episode today with a very special guest who we've been wanting to have on for a very long time, our friend, Maggie Levin. Maggie, thank you so much for being here.

So glad to be here you guys.

It's about time. I feel like you work in horror and we have so many scary topics on this show, but I'm glad we waited for one that makes so much sense. I think this is going to be a good one and we have a lot to talk about, but I did at the top of this episode, I just wanted to tee this up by saying that I think one of the coolest things about working in the film industry is seeing your friends work their asses off and then all that work paying off with really cool opportunities. Ed and I have known Maggie going on. I think like a decade or maybe even more now, we all joined in the same writers group or at least that's when I met her. Ed, I figured this is a good time to check and see, is that how you met Maggie or did you know her previously?

No, I met her from the writers group. Yeah.

Fantastic.

Like a writers retreat crew.

Yeah.

We were on a retreat together in I think 2014, 15.

Sounds right. That sounds right.

Yeah. So we've all been in the trenches and we've gotten to watch Maggie rise from a fellow podcaster back in the day.

Yeah.

When she had a screenwriting podcast. It sure did. To writer, to director of her first film, My Valentine, which is streaming on Hulu, to a segment in VHS 99, now working on the Black Phone franchise and her own book adaptation feature film of Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod?

Clay McLeod Chapman.

Clay McLeod Chapman.

Who would have guessed that's how you pronounce it?

Not me, obviously. All that to say, Maggie has received her fair share of very exciting and nice phone calls, but that's not what she's here to talk about. She's here to talk about The Grabber, Ghosts, Dead Kids, The Works. And I should say, before we go any further, in case you're like, oh no, I haven't seen this movie yet.

That's because this is not, oh no, Dead Kids. I don't wanna go any further. That was the concern in that sentence.

I was just gonna say, this will be a spoiler free zone, other than Dead Kids, which I feel like if you know anything about the Black Phone movies, you know that probably is involved in some way. Sure. But all that said, Maggie, holy shit, the movie just premiered at Fantastic Fest. I saw no less than Stephen King said it's better than the first, which I imagine has maybe made for a tense family dinners because his son wrote the first one.

Oh, I think that that's a high compliment to everyone, including his son.

It is. It is. It is. But yeah.

And I think we sent Mr. King a link to the film a couple of days ago, and I'm thrilled that, I mean, we're all, everyone's bowled over. That is an anointing.

Yes.

Yeah.

It really is.

If I sent my parents who are similar ages to Mr. King a link, they would never know how to start it. So it's extra exciting that he was able to open the stream, watch it, keeps him young.

This episode is going to come out the day before the movie comes out, but we're having this conversation in the middle of Fantastic Fest, where it seems like not only did Stephen King anoint you guys, it seems like the audience at Fantastic Fest also anointed you guys.

Yeah, I mean, I think when you put something together like this, and you spend so much time deeply, deeply immersed in getting every single frame of the film exactly right. I mean, we all hoped that it would hit for people, but to just see it play for that audience in such a profound way, and to really be striking people right where I think we were aiming for, it's, I mean, I'm over the moon about it. And I'm also less articulate than usual because I have been at a film festival all week, and boy, are my arms tired.

They are. It's shocking how tiring, well, you've also been doing a lot there at the festival, but I mean, every time I go to a festival, I'm shocked at how exhausting it is just watching movies. You watch sometimes, especially a fantastic fest, because you eat in the theater and everything, and you watch like four or five movies a day sometimes. And then at the end, you're like, good God, I feel like I was doing exercise.

Yeah. And I'm also getting, I'm sorry, I'm getting active tests that somebody that I spoke to last night has COVID. So I muted my phone, which is why I'm like, you know, talk about, if you wanted to talk about being scared of something, boy, is this girl scared of getting a sickness.

Yeah, I mean, it's out there. It's out there being annoying again.

Motherfucker. Can we cuss on this podcast?

Oh yeah, you can cuss. You can do whatever you want. Also, it's deeply edited. Like no one's ever going to get in trouble while I'm still the editor.

Okay. Can you hold for just one second?

Yeah.

And we will get back into it in a second.

So, okay, this question is maybe hard to answer, but I do, and I have seen a pretty finished cut of the movie. I know there was still work being done on it, but I wanted to ask you if you can answer this without spoiling anything, what do you think people have been most excited about or responding to in this movie?

It's hard to say because at this point, it's still a small pool, but it seems like the ways in which the brother-sister relationship has advanced, this is also a shift in, they're both co-leads, Gwen and Finn, but this is really more Gwen's movie and Finn in a supporting role. To see the two of them a couple of years post the trauma that they went through in the first film, and then really putting them through hell, frozen hell again in a much different way. Also, shifting the grabber from his child snatching serial killer self into this supernatural demonic entity who's really been stripped of his humanity. We went off of a concept of, you know, in Dante's Inferno, the lowest level before you're actually held in Satan's mouth. The darkest, most horrible level of hell is being frozen up to your neck in ice.

It's like for traitors or something.

Exactly. And for, if you kill members of your own family, betraying your own family. And of course, the grabber murdered his brother, a thing that he blames on Finn. So we have this premise that the grabber broke out of his icy hell enclosure and is going after the folks that he thinks are to blame. And he's also a good skater. That's exactly how somebody said, he was a good skater. It's how Demi and Bashir phrases it in the movie.

Yes.

So that comes up nice. Everyone at this festival astutely recognized the curtains reference of having a grabber on ice, curtains being a deep cut, but not for genre fans. So I think that that's all really speaking to people. There's also a spiritual component that seems to be landing for folks and plus it's just like, it's a ride, it's a really good time.

Yeah. I mean, it's a very different movie than the first film, which I think is always fun for a sequel. There's the same characters and some of the same iconography and stuff, but it's a very different feel and I don't know, I think people are going to be very surprised in a good way by that. It stands out.

Yeah, I'm bringing it, I think changing the location from North Denver into this snowed-in winter camp in the Rocky Mountains, that also calls to mind the shining. There's something about being snowed in and being put in the middle of a blizzard that is innately threatening to human life. Even now, a big blizzard will really shut some shit down in a way. It's very destructive and very scary and very inescapable. So that created, as opposed to being locked in a basement, they're snowed in in this place that they can't get out of with an entity after them.

That actually segues well into my next question for you, which is, what was it like making a sequel like this? And I know there was at least one production hurdle you guys had regarding all this snow, right?

Sure, yeah. I mean, we filmed a lot on location in the Algonquin Highlands, which is about three hours north of Toronto in a place called Cottage Country, which is mostly a place made to be visited in the summertime. The cottages are summer cottages, but they do have a winter camp at this camp. So we did have to film to make sure that we would avoid their winter session. But their winter session is, of course, planned when there's going to be tons of snow on the ground and the lake will be frozen over. We got there a little earlier than that. And the day we got there, we found out via environmental testing that we weren't going to be allowed to use any of our fake snow elements. And we were very reliant, we thought. We were going to be very reliant on our fake snow elements. So we got there and we were like looking at this completely normal. It was cold out, but there was no snow on the ground. And then we all prayed to the movie gods, and historic blizzard landed within 24 hours. And we got the snow you see in the movie is real snow. And that includes active snow, that includes all the snow on the ground. Of course, we had a special effects team that was there, and doing amazing work, moving it around. But we were working in unbelievable blizzard conditions, and freezing conditions. And it became very, the challenge shifted from how do we make this look like an epic blizzard, to how do we shoot during an epic blizzard? How do we safely get people to and from our set? And we were on gators, dragging gear out into the middle of woods, because we're also not just doing nice little chatty scenes by the cabins. We were like, I was out there chasing children in the forest with a super eight camera. Yeah.

That was in pre-production? That was your own thing you did?

Maggie's like, guys, I just want to rehearse a little bit with a real knife, and it's going to be totally fine. So you, I don't even think about this because we all make movies, but for people who don't know what a second unit director is, what is it that you did on this movie?

I'm actually, I have two roles on this movie. I am officially an executive producer, which I'm really grateful that I actually got a title befitting all of the different hats that I wore on this movie in addition to second unit director. Because I did a lot from the get-go, I did a lot of creative producing with Scott. You know, when you're married to another creative, I don't know if it's like this for everything, everybody, but it's certainly like this for Scott and I. We have a very, you know, intimate shorthand and we understand each other artistically. Being a second unit director is different on every film. I think in a more traditional sense, the second unit director usually works with the stunt team. Oftentimes, you'll be out there on a helicopter shooting big wides on like a 200 million plus dollar movie. You're kind of away from main unit all the time. And on the first Black Phone, I came in and did 10 days of second unit directing, mostly to shoot inserts, so detailed shots of packing dirt inside the phone, little things like that. On this movie, because of our schedule and because the scope of the movie was so large and our budget was, I mean, our budget was bigger than the first film, but it was still a really ambitious script to shoot on the budget that we had. I shot, I think, 35 days on this movie, which is the equivalent of a full film. There's about a third of the film that my unit actually shot. So the scope of the work was so massive. And a great second unit director, it's like being a writer in a writer's room for a TV show. You know, your job when you're a writer on a TV show is to write in the voice of the showrunner and of the show, and to really understand what that feels and sounds like. And so my gig was, I got to make something that hits the bar of exactly what Scott's vision is. And because I was on the first movie, because I live in this world with my husband, and I was out there on the initial scouts, and I really understand kind of the trajectory of where this film was birthed from and is going. I think that made it all the more easy for me to hit those marks. But it was still an incredible varied challenge. We did just such an eclectic array of things, and a lot of it shot on Super 8 film, which is very unstable. Yeah.

So like all the visions and flashbacks and all the grainy footage. Yeah, is Super 8.

It is, or it's 16 millimeter extracted to be Super 8. Because Super 8 film is actually 16 millimeter film. Just nice and half. So we used the same stock on 16 for certain action shots, especially in what we refer to as the Ice Lake finale. There are a lot of things that involved a lot of visual effects in the background. So we needed to shoot on something a little more stable. For all of that work. But I will say, the bulk of the film, when you see it go grainy, that is Super 8 film on a Super 8 camera. And also when you make a film, your various cameras that you're using get letters during production. And usually you have, say, an A, B, C, maybe you make it to D. Our Super 8 camera experience got us all the way to camera F, I think, H, maybe. We went through a lot.

Whoa. Tony Scott.

I think it's great that you guys actually shot all the... Because I think, especially younger people, I think when they see stuff that looks like that, I don't even know if they know what film is.

I think they just think sometimes that it's like, That's a sick filter they put on it.

Yeah. They're like, oh, it's cool. But I think it's great that you guys... Because there is something that you can't... I mean, yes, you can approximate the look of some of that stuff digitally, but it just has such a tangible quality, I think, when you actually shoot on real film.

It really does. Scott calls it a very subversive quality. There is a kind of eerie scariness to Super 8's instability. The way that the frame jitters, the way that the speed isn't consistent, and also the way that the black of it looks in contrast is unsettling to look at. Even if you just find, you know, your family's Super 8 films without any sound on them.

Yeah, a little bit.

It just feel a little voyeuristic in a way that feels dangerous.

They got that creep filter, that natural creep filter.

Exactly.

In the celluloid.

It's funny, on the first film, I was also responsible for, on the first film and on this one, I was responsible for shooting the title sequence. And I remember standing in a field in North Carolina and saying to Scott, like because of the schedule, I was like, well, I don't need to use the actual Super 8 camera. I'll just shoot it on the digital one we've got and we can add that filter in post. And I'm amazed that he still married me. I was not a welcome suggestion.

Yeah. It's great that you took that out of the vows.

I think part of what is so unsettling about Super 8 film, because I was thinking about this as I was writing this episode, about what is so unsettling, especially to modern audiences, about really almost any technology that's older, like whether you're talking VHS tapes or landlines or old cars even. And I think it has something to do if I'm being a little 30,000 foot view about it. I think it has something to do with the fact that all these things help us get in touch with the past, but they leave, none of them are exact replicas. They're very interpretive. Like even when you're looking at a family unwrapping presents on Christmas morning on Super 8 film, their eyes sometimes almost just look black because it's not exposed. Like the shadows can fall off really deep, really quickly, and it feels like there might be something in there. It's the same thing, I think, with the idea of talking on a landline. When you use a landline, for those of you who are old enough to remember using a landline, or especially on an older phone, like the voice isn't necessarily reproduced with a super high quality. It's crackly and it's weird. And so I think there's something about this, like all these things give you like the impression of a person, but it's not, there's a gap between the reality and what you're hearing. And I think that's part of why these things like hold in our imagination so well, because there's the analog grittiness to it.

Yeah.

But I will say this, to your point, no different than holding a cross up to a demon or doing something where you have something to hold it at bay. I think the creepiness of Super 8, you just hit that, you hit play on that Wonder Years theme that like, what would you do? And it makes all that fucking look really fun and exciting in a nostalgic way. Because that opening of Wonder Years never scared me. But it's all the footage you're talking about.

Joe Cocker is singing over it and like, who's scared of that?

That's what I'm saying. So that's the cross we can hold up to warped analog media.

I see what you're saying. So the warped analog is the demon and warm pop culture is the cross that we could beat it back.

Hey, whatever gets us across the bridge or whatever. So and across the bridge into this episode. So.

Well, yeah. As we cross the bridge into this episode, which if you haven't listened to our episode on bridge disasters, go do that right now or after this episode is over. Interestingly, phones have been creepy to people, not just as a retro thing. Phones have been creepy to people basically since we invented the idea of telecommunications. According to the UK's Science and Media Museum, electronic telecommunications were popularly associated with the occult from the start. The laying of the earliest working overland and submarine telegraphic cables in the late 1840s and early 1850s coincided with the birth of spiritualism, a widespread belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead. The electric telegraph ushered in a new era of long-distance communication, and its workings were popularly likened to the operation of spirit communication, which similarly, no real surprise here, relied on the transmission of messages between intelligences at a distance. And then this that the museum mentioned really struck me because I had never put this together before. But in the very early days of telecommunication, when we're using Morse code, spirit messages were conveyed in similar ways to telegraphic ones. In seances, spirits seem to communicate with the living by spelling out coded messages through short wrapping noises, similar to the wrapped pulses of Morse code used in telegraphy.

Okay.

Which I think is kind of crazy.

Telegrams.

Telegrams, yeah. I mean, it would be like if in 1994, we thought you could communicate with the dead through sequences of code that started with www. and then the Internet arrived. People would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too similar. I don't like this.

Honestly, with how long it took to download anything at the birth of the Internet, it would be more akin to if we went from a Ouija board to the Internet. That's how it's. I have to spell out every W and every letter with this fucking. What the hell is it called? A planchette or whatever?

A planchette, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it is sort of wild that for a period of time, the theory about how to communicate with the dead and the reality of how you communicate with the living was tap based. It was just like the same thing.

It's what you know. It's the reason why every movie, as recently as like five or six years before real Internet that shows the future never saw the Internet like they never saw it as like literally as as recent as like just five years before we were all logging in. It was still like floppy disks and DVDs and like a fax machine in your closet.

There was still like something that you would have to touch or interact.

Exactly. They really didn't see anything wireless or even just the idea of the Internet.

It's funny you bring that up because the example like the clearest example of that that comes to mind for me is Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone because that came out like I think that was like 93. And that was right before the Internet took over. And there's not a hint of anything like that in that movie.

No. I mean, there's anti-graffiti machines that come out of the ground and clean the walls. We had that, but someone had to operate it, I guess. Yeah.

There was a real emphasis for a long time on gadgets. And we live in a kind of a gadget-free world, which I think is a shame. I mean, I hate on those little delivery pods that come through. You know what I'm talking about? Those little robots that carry your door dash around.

Yeah.

Yeah. Which I just found out. I thought they were automated this whole time. They're driven by like a person in India.

Oh, you're kidding.

Yeah, they're like drones.

There's like a joystick who's moving those things around. Incredible. That actually makes me like them a lot more. I thought they were automated. I thought they were like the Waymo's.

That's what I thought too, but I was like, I don't know. Then I looked it up or someone told me and it was like, yeah, there's like, that's a job people have is like drone operator for for chicken wings or whatever.

Why not just let people deliver food still?

Yeah, because it's still a job that someone has. So, I don't know, you don't have to pay the gas. Who fucking knows?

That is bizarre.

The only gadgets we have are cell phones, those delivery robots and drones so that we can like bomb people overseas. Those are the three gadgets we have in 2025. That's it. We don't have any of the cool stuff.

Ed got self-conscious about that statement and looked it up. And I guess it wasn't a dream he had. According to an article on Eater, delivery robots use a mix of automated and remote-controlled technologies. With some even being controlled by drivers with Xbox controllers, you would never find a trivia bot like me being controlled that way.

A quick timeline aside in using Sandra Bullock because she's in both films. To your point, Demolition Man is 93. The net is 95. Yeah. The future of Demolition Man not experiencing the internet. And then two years later, which I guess shot one year later, Sandra Bullock is now using pizza.com, which is the only website I remember she goes to.

Yeah.

It was pizza.net. That's why Ed's not in charge of trivia.

Well, the idea of spirit communications through telegrams was so popular that there was actually a newspaper that circulated in the States called The Spiritual Telegraph that ran from 1852 to 1860. Then it was filled with stories of people communicating with ghosts over telegram and even a letters page basically, that was telegrams from the dead, like messages that people had collected from dead relatives supposedly over the telegram. That's it. Over the telegraph. One story of a haunted telegraph made its way into a collection I discovered called The Headless Horror Strange and Ghostly Ohio Tales. The headline on this telegraph story begins, a weird experience, a telegrapher's remarkable message from a spook. Dots and dashes over an instrument with neither wires nor battery. A story told by a man whose veracity is vouched for, a frightened operator. So I don't know why the title is like beat poetry, but...

Yeah. That whole thing was the title?

Well, it was like the headline that it was published under.

Well, to what you just said, by the way, that's where the term smooth operator comes from. When someone says, oh, that guy is a smooth operator or whatever, it comes from being particularly good at Morse code. No, no, Morse code. Like the dashes were the right length, the shorts were the right length, the very readable Morse code. That person was a smooth operator. They operated the tap machine really well.

I love that. This guy is a spook operator. Hey. Also, something I think about with Morse code sometimes is, you know, you see this in movies a lot. Someone who's like, oh, I know, I'll use this flashlight to, like, call for help with Morse code. And I sometimes wonder if I've ever seen someone doing that and had absolutely no idea that I was looking at Morse code because I would have no, I couldn't, I don't know the dots and dashes. I mean, I know it exists, but I'd be useless to help one of those people.

We all know SOS. Three shorts, three long, three shorts.

We all. Who's we all? I don't know. I'm not concluded in we all.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, now that you say that, I'm like, oh yeah, that sounds right. But again, if somebody said quick, use Morse code and do SOS, I would be like, I don't, I'm sorry.

Well, the thing is I would only be able to do. I would go.

Yeah, yeah.

Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. I wonder if that's wildly offensive to Morse code people. It's like us faking a language all of a sudden and everyone's like, gross. But I would only be able to spell things that have S and O in it though. So I'd be able to ask for help, and if they ask me how I'm doing, I can say so-so. But that's pretty much it.

You'd be able to ask for SOS from the OSS to tell them that you're so-so. Nice. Well. Okay. So this story begins like this. One of the wildest, weirdest stories of the supernatural that has ever come under the experience of mortal man, which I think is teeing up the excitement of this tale, a little high, is told by RH. Field, the Big Four telegraph operator at Southside Station. Mr. Field is a very intelligent and conscientious man, and he relates his fearful experience with a candor and earnestness that almost make one believe it, in spite of its extreme improbability. He says, I have been a telegraph operator for 22 years. I have told my story to at least 100 people, and I have never met one yet who would believe that it was an actual fact. I know that it will be a severe test on your credulity, but my experience is gospel truth. I want you to understand that I have never, and do not now, believe in the supernatural. Mr. Field was quite reluctant about telling his story for publication, but finally consented to do so. He is an entertaining talker, and related the great event of his life with an ease that showed he had told it before. It was several years ago, he began, when I was much younger than I am now. I was assigned to night duty at a little station called Evansburg in Pennsylvania on the New York Pennsylvania and Ohio Railroad. I hadn't been around the world very much, but flattered myself that I had a good deal of mechanical genius. The office was in charge of an old, foggy sort of fellow named Jones. The telegraph instrument got out of adjustment and I knew something about repairing it, so Jones suggested I take it to my home and fix it up. Glad of the opportunity to show what I could do, I carried the box to my boarding house one morning and put it on a shelf in an old cupboard and went to bed, intending to fix it after my sleep was over. I had been in bed but a few minutes and had not got to sleep when, to my surprise and astonishment, the armature, or what is otherwise known as the lever, on the instrument began ticking. I was perfectly amazed and thought there must be some mistake. To satisfy myself that I had not been carried away by my imagination, for the ticking was faint and subdued, I got out of bed and with fear and trembling opened the cupboard door. I took the instrument in my hand and it continued to work. I put it on the table, but the sound it made was unintelligible. I turned the spring so there would be less resistance, and then in as clear and perfect morse as I ever heard, the invisible person, spirit, or whatever it was wrote, do you get me? I was so overcome that I involuntarily answered yes, without putting it on the instrument. So I think he means he just said yes.

He spoke it aloud, yeah.

Oh, yes.

The unknown heard me for again, in the beautiful writing, it continued, thank God at last. My name is Charles Blake. I'm an old timer. My parents, my parents who reside in Mount Pleasant, Iowa have lost me. They don't know what my fate has been. I want you to write to my father, Homer Blake, at Mount Pleasant, Iowa and inform him that I died at Shreveport, Texas of yellow fever on, and then Mr. Field says, I've forgotten the date, but it was several years prior to the date of this communication. I was frightened to death. Then the story goes on from there. Long story short, Mr. Field claims to have written the postmaster of Mount Pleasant, Iowa and asked for any information there might be on a Mr. Homer Blake. He says, a few days later, I received a reply and I have his letter somewhere among my effects, in which he said that Homer Blake had lived in Mount Pleasant some years before, but that he had moved away to what place he did not know. Blake, he informed me, had two sons, one of whom, Charles, was supposed to be dead, and the other was a grain merchant in the far west.

Why was he supposed to be dead? Was it written in the stars?

I think what's so eerie about this is what Mr. Field is saying, is that Homer Blake knew that his son Charles, or thought that Charles was dead, and the message he'd received was, my father doesn't know what my fate has been, I want you to tell him I died of yellow fever in Shreveport. Yeah.

I mean, similar to the ghost kids in Black Phone, who are trying to reach out to Finny just to have their bodies be discovered.

Yes.

That's their chief thing that they're after is, please find us, please find where we're buried. They're also reaching out to Gwen for the same reason. Sure.

That is something that we see a lot in some of these ghost phone stories. Because one thing, when I sat down to research, I was like, oh, I can't wait to find all the scariest ghost phone calls. To my surprise, and maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but most of them are scary because they're a ghost calling you, but most of them are not scary ghosts. They are generally-

Ghosts with unfinished business.

Ghosts with unfinished business, yeah. And luckily for all of us, Morse code was not going to cut it as the main form of instant communication for long. It was complicated and slow, and even if you could talk to the dead, it was really much more of a pain in the ass to talk to the living, which I think is what people were worried about, which brings us to the invention of the telephone.

Let me just say before the invention of the telephone, this guy had, per his own admission, 22 strong years as an operator. That was a mode of communication for a long ass time.

Yeah, even after the telephone came around, I think people were still sending telegrams, but really it was a relatively, well I guess in war, even in World War II, there were probably backup modes of communication that were Morse code and telegrams and stuff, but it was a pretty short lived, it was invented in the 1840s I think, and by the 1920s, it wasn't really being popularly used I don't think.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a fast turnaround.

Yeah, that is a fast turnaround. You know what though, I wonder how much infrastructure they were able to reuse. Was it telephone poles that they had already, were they like, well, we already have the poles up, let's just change the wires? Or was it like, all this infrastructure was for naught? Like, we're not using anything Morse anymore? Like, that's...

I think, dude, there is no more Morse code anymore at all?

I mean, Independence Day would have me believe it's around.

You're still working with it?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody can tell you you can't use it. I think it's just sort of a matter of finding modes through which it could be...

Yeah, I just wonder how it's connected, I'm saying. Yeah, like, did they take the Morse out and put in telephone lines?

That's a good question.

Or could it ride over telephone lines? I don't even know how that machine would have been powered. So I genuinely have a lot of questions that will do off air.

Yeah, well, I didn't want to spend too much time in the land of telegraphs because after all, this is a Ghost Phone Calls episode. I just thought it was very interesting that from the minute we laid those cables down, people were like, this dead guy is trying to talk to me. And then it never stopped.

There's probably a series of people who, you kind of see it with the JPL with like Jack Parsons and all that stuff too, where I'm certain that there was somebody who was like, I figured out Morse code because a spirit told me about it or a person from another planet or an alien, whatever, you know, like, because it was like nothing and now we're like lighting up light bulbs and talking across continents.

Yeah.

Like that must have been like the devil told you how to do this, right?

I think any large advancement like that, other than AI.

Which is the most on the face of it, the devil did it. Right.

I definitely think the devil's in AI.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm shocked, just as an aside, I think I might have said this on the show before, but I am shocked that we haven't seen a more religious push back to the rise of AI. I mean, there is nothing closer to the idea of conjuring a literal fucking demon than, even if you don't think artificial intelligence is inherently evil or bad, it's a thing that is not a person that is communicating from, you know, places unknown. I'm shocked that there hasn't been more of a like, no, we don't touch that. We don't use it.

And to your point right there is that I don't ever know how it's pronounced. Is it daemon? The D-A-E-M-O-N, which like in computing is like any-

The mailer daemon?

Yeah, well, that's how you know it. But it's anything that like runs as a background process. So it doesn't require URI. It's like shit happening in a program that's like actively doing stuff, which means AI is like already a daemon in some way. Cause they also have no idea how it works, right? And now all of our IT people are gonna be like, you're misunderstanding this. And I'm like, I just remember it from Ready Player One, get off my back. But yeah, so that's it. There've been like one letter off there, it's so crazy. So anyway, phone calls?

Well, the history of the telephone could be a podcast in and of itself. It is a shockingly complicated and messy history. Alexander Graham Bell, the name we all know, is widely credited with inventing the telephone in 1876, but mostly just because he was the first to patent a working design and then win a whole bunch of lawsuits protecting that patent. A lot of people all around the world, around the same time, kind of arrived at the idea of the telephone. According to the Library of Congress, Graham Bell was granted US. Patent Number 174,465 for quote, an improvement in telegraphy on March 7th, 1876, and it was March 10th, 1876 that Bell declared to his assistant, Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you, over the lines of his working telephone as he wrote in his laboratory journal. But Ed, you'll be happy to know that two Italians might have actually beaten him to it.

I don't know, I saw this episode of Sopranos that talks about these guys.

There was first Antonio Miucci, an Italian immigrant who developed the design of a talking telegraph or telephone in 1849. In 1871, so five years before Bell, he filed a caveat, which is an announcement of an invention, I guess, that kind of comes before the patent. He filed his caveat for his design of a talking telegraph, but due to financial hardships, he could not renew his caveat. And his role in the invention of the telephone was overlooked until the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution on June 11th, 2002, honoring his contributions and work. So I don't know who-

That would have been the right time for Sopranos.

Yeah, maybe we were all swept up in Sopranos' Italian fever and felt that we needed to give the guy his due.

The first phone made entirely of hard noodles.

There was also the incredibly named Innocenzo Manzetti, who was working on the idea for a telephone as early as 1843. Although I think his Italian-ness might have gotten to him because it's a little unclear if he ever actually built the telephone or just boasted to people about the idea he had for a telephone.

Well, he was working so hard on trying to project talking with your hands.

Listen, I think I'm enough Italian to say that I've known a lot of Italian guys who had great ideas for apps during the app boom. And none of them came to be.

No, Innocenzo Manzetti is innocent of ever working a day in his life, I think. There is some evidence that he possibly beat Bell and Miucci to the punch, but it's a little bit of a game of telephone in and of itself. On November 22nd, 1865, the Parisian newspaper Le Petit Journal, the smallest journal they could find, the smallest journal in France, quoted an article that first ran in the Sardinia Courier, describing an electrical telephone device that could reproduce music and loudly spoken vowels, which sounds like something an Italian would do often, with good quality, but could only produce soft spoken speech confusingly. So this was the Italian telephone. If you talk too quietly, you got to shout.

Shouting only phone.

I do like that though. It's kind of interesting. It's something I've never thought about. You'd think the hardest thing was figuring out how to transfer voices, but you don't think about the fact that there has to be tons of troubleshooting into making it user friendly in any capacity.

Yeah.

Like this wasn't good enough. You can't be screaming all the time.

Right. Unless your name is Innocenzo Manzetti and you might be screaming all the time.

Listen, I know a lot of people who treat their iPhones like screaming-only devices.

We're all guilty of it, but there's that thing where you're at a loud location, so you feel that you need to yell into the phone.

Yeah.

It's like they're not in a loud location. They can hear you.

I also just think there's a certain age for any human being where you cross over into you're either shouting on the phone, or you're inaudibly whispering. It's one of these.

There's nothing in there. Yeah. Ed, the quote from the newspaper actually answers a question that you had earlier about if they had to replace all these wires. The quote from the newspaper says, Manzetti transmits directly the word by means of the ordinary telegraphic wire with an apparatus simpler than the one which is now used for dispatches. Now, two merchants will be able to discuss their business instantly from London to Calcutta, announce each other's speculations, propose them and conclude them. Many experiments have been made already. They were successful enough to establish the practical possibility of this discovery. Music can already be perfectly transmitted. As for the words, the sonorous ones are heard distinctly. So it sounds like he was using regular telegraph wires.

Yeah, that's great. That would be excellent to do. I mean, the wires under the ocean to me is like humanity's most insane thing. We've done like so much shit and maybe it's not even hard, I don't know. But the fact there's like thousands of miles of cable under the ocean that is the reason we're even probably doing this right now is so wild to me.

Yeah. Well, whoever fully got credit for the phone or whoever you choose to credit for the invention of the telephone, I think Maggie or Ed, I forget which of you said this earlier, but people thought this technology was haunted from the very beginning because it was new and it was different and it was strange. And I found one story from the Arkansas Sentinel record that recounts a quote haunted phone line that terrorized a town. That town being Hot Springs, Arkansas.

The town that jutted phone calls.

I dated somebody from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

You did?

What? Are you sure they were real? Are you sure they weren't a ghost voice?

Yeah.

Was it only over the phone?

I'm pretty sure they weren't a ghost voice.

Sorry. Sorry.

I was going to say, Ed, before you make any jokes about the intelligence of people from Hot Springs, Arkansas.

I didn't do that nor would I.

No, I'm sure you wouldn't. But I feel like now we are sort of in the clear because we know at least one dumb guy is from Hot Springs, Arkansas. But apparently, according to local historian John Archibald, Hot Springs was a unique place in history and time in America, and many of the first inventions available in America were brought to Hot Springs. It was a place where novelty was popular. So it's with no surprise that four years after the telephone was invented in the year 1880, the first telephone came to Hot Springs. And I believe they set it up in a grocers market, like in an early...

Somewhere everyone will go.

The phone line went from Little Rock through the woods to Hot Springs. It covered trees, it went over hills, it went on rocks, and in some cases, it also went on poles. It had a unique construction and that the line itself was connected with hooks. And that's pretty important for a very particular problem that soon cropped up after the first telephone was installed. The problem turned out to be the voices of the dead on the other end of the line. Apparently, John Archibald tells us that people would call Little Rock and they would swear that they heard haunts, moans, groans, shrieks, even clapping and music, particularly fiddle music. This came across as a great fearful event to people in Hot Springs, keeping in mind that electricity was a phenomenon that was not quite understood.

Have you covered in your show, I imagine you must have, the fact that ghosts, you know, ghosts playing fiddle music, that tracks to me. You're rarely ever getting a ghost who's like listening to Metallica or like, you know, badly playing their electric guitar. You know, there's like a certain age at which we find ghost lore to kind of pause. I know this transmission in particular is from that era. But you know, maybe that's one of the appeals of the Black Phone is we do have 70s teenager ghosts. Yeah. And 50s teenager, but even the 50s, you know, that's like-

They had amps.

The old timey, we do have a drummer. We have a ghost drummer in this movie. You never hear him drum though. Bless that kid, he learned how to drum for the film. But we didn't need to hear it.

Wow. I feel like that's a very- That's an actor thing, especially an actor with a big role like that. It's like, I am gonna- You won't be able to ask you to do anything that I'll say, I don't know how to do that.

No, I mean, it's- You gotta just tick the box on your special skills and then figure it out as fast as you can.

Yeah, exactly.

Sounds like that's what this guy did in Arkansas with phone creations or whatever.

I think that's a good point, though, that ghosts do seem to kind of pause at a certain point. And I'm curious if that has anything to do. Like, it definitely says something about how we feel about culture, and I don't know how much time needs to pass before an era becomes something that feels haunted. You know, like, some of it probably has to do with like cultural depictions. So, like, the fact that Black Phone has 70s teenage ghosts, I'm not saying there's going to be a wave of 70s teenage ghost sightings, but as that sort of, like, creeps into the culture, it moves that window forward, you know.

And I think now the idea, you know, I think there are a few reviewers who've even pointed this out, you know, the notion of a phone booth is so alien to people who were born after a certain year, you know, they just barely exist. To us, the idea of stepping into a space where you could, I mean, I definitely had walked by pay phones that were randomly ringing on the streets of New York when I was a teenager. And there were people who would use, you know, their pagers to get calls on phones, mostly to make drug deals. But no, there was a point.

There was a point.

There were doctors.

There were doctors for everything, right. But now that's such a bizarre, so antiquated notion. And I think it would be kind of freaky to answer a phone that's just.

Just ringing.

Say you were born in, I don't know, 2006. A freestanding, terrifying, terrifying thought. Freestanding phone in the middle of nowhere, ringing, very disturbing. But somebody from a different generation, you're like, yeah, sometimes they ring.

Yeah. I feel like if you were born in the, if you were born in 2006, you'd see a phone ringing on its own and you'd be like, fucking scam likely. Like I'm not picking that up. They don't pick up like, I stopped picking up my phone. And I know it's, you know what I mean?

I think we were all born in the era where, if your home phone rang, at least when I was a kid, you know, you'd pick up, I'd say, well, I would say hello. I actually wouldn't say such and such residence. Sometimes you'd announce like, hello, Levin residence, but not at my house.

Yeah, I remember very, very specifically the day we got a like caller ID. It was a separate, you know, little box that you would plug in to the phone. And so that was.

Game changer and disappointingly, the real prevalence of spam became, you know, because there was a kind of like a magical like, maybe I'll pick up the phone and it'll be something wonderful.

Yeah.

But you could see in advance like, no, this is AT&T.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

They're not calling with anything, anything too thrilling.

Also, star 69. Are we star 69 in Ghosts? What are we doing with that?

Well, that's a good question. We will get to that in a little bit. I don't think we're not quite in the area yet where you could star 69 in Ghosts. If you wanted to find a ghost.

Star 69 in Ghosts. That sounds like a 1-900 number. Speaking of old phone technology.

So, that actually brings us to the part of the story where people wanted to figure out what was going on here, and you couldn't star 69, what they did. So people began to believe that the phone line to Hot Springs was haunted, and what they were hearing when they talked on the phone were the voices of the dead. This concern resulted in the Western Union telephone company sending a lineman out to inspect the line to find out if people were actually talking with the dead. Which, can you imagine being that guy? They're like, listen, it's probably nothing, but we need you to follow this line. I think they said like over the rocks and through the woods, and see if there's ghosts in the other end. Like that's your job today.

Can you just check it for ghosts?

Yeah, and fight them. Yeah, sure. Fight them.

Was that the assignment, fight the ghosts?

No, but I feel like what would you-

If he wants to keep his job, it is.

Get rid of them.

Ghost extermination. Ghost bust the ghosts.

This guy might have been the first ghost buster because it was bothering a corporation. So I'm sure if he came back and said, yep, there's ghosts, they'd be like, well, fucking figure it out.

I don't know.

You're going to have to get rid of them.

Clean up this line.

Which, interestingly, I just heard you said Western Union Telephone. So it was the biggest name in telegrams is now moved into telephones as soon as technology.

Yeah.

They probably owned all the fucking poles and lines.

What this guy found out was that the wires hooked together, connecting the telephone line from Little Rock to Hot Springs, had carbon building up in them, which had in effect turned the wires into microphones that picked up the sound of people clapping, singing or having conversations nearby.

Oh my God.

So which I didn't know is the thing that could happen. I don't know.

That's why I'm shocked.

I didn't know that a buildup of carbon turned a wire into a microphone.

It sounds a little bit like if I caught someone bugging my apartment, the excuse they would also give me. Be like, no, no, no, we didn't put a microphone in there. What happened was we heard all your secrets because of carbon buildup on your pipes.

Yeah. So John Archibald said, the initial question about were the ghosts of the dead communicating in the living seemed a little less likely as a result of this investigation. They solved the problem by adding more insulators along the line between Hot Springs and Little Rock, and people never heard any ghostly voices again.

This is like that thing where as a homeowner now, if you don't insulate your pipes, then your cold water is like whatever the temperature of the ground outside is. Something I learned. You got to do that with your phone lines too. That makes sense. If you remember early cell phones, there used to be a lot more crisscrossed feeling wires that only happens now when you're connected to a call center, or perhaps your Hollywood agent, they have a switchboard, and then you get weird leakage, ghostly leakage.

Actually, I guess this is a-

Call this people's business conversation.

This is a good point to pause, I guess, and ask, have either of you ever had a weird phone, like a ghostly feeling phone call?

I've had, like, I'll be, years ago I would be, like, sitting in traffic in LA, and every once in a while through my Bluetooth, I'll pick up someone else's, like, phone call that, like, is a car next to me.

Yeah.

But that's probably as ghostly as it got, and I was able to decipher that pretty quickly by turning my head and seeing the person, like, speaking at the same time.

I remember picking up my home phone at night when I was growing up, and hearing, I mean, this is, this is not ghostly, but it felt ghostly to me when I was a kid. Hearing someone breathing on the other line and then having a hang up. I'm sure it was not a ghost. I'm sure it was just wrong number, wrong number or worse. But it didn't feel good at the time, something unsettling about it.

I don't like anything happening after a certain hour or two. Like, the scariest was a knock at the door one time, like two, three in the morning and it ended up being a neighbor who needed someone to move their car. But anything where like a phone call comes in at two in the morning, even if it's obviously a wrong number or someone got in a car wreck. But like that would be, I think, to me, my imagination goes ghostly if it's coming in at two in the morning.

So even though this story had a scientific explanation, the widespread belief that phones had the ability to somehow pick up voices and signals from the grave captured people's imaginations around the world. I found a couple other early ghostly phone stories at strangehistory.net, although I should say none of these are linked to their original primary sources. So I can't swear by the fact that these were reported at the time and manner in which they are described here. But this first one, I think, is really interesting. It's from a February 24th, 1895 edition of a paper called The Morning Call, weirdly enough. I don't think it was a newspaper about telephones. I think it was just called The Morning Call. The headline is New Things in Electricity, Telephony in Korea. In his newly published work, Korea, Henry Savage Landor tells a good tale of the telephone. Some months before he arrived in Seoul, a foreigner had visited the King, soliciting orders for installations of telephones. The King, being much astounded and pleased at the wonderful invention, immediately, at great expense, set about connecting by telephone the tomb of the Queen Dowager with the Royal Palace. Many hours a day were afterwards spent by His Majesty in his suite, listening at their end of the telephone, and a watchman was kept all night in case the Queen Dowager should wake up from her eternal sleep.

Wow.

But not a message or a sound or a murmur was even heard. The King was disgusted, and the telephone was condemned as a fraud. He approves of electric light because it keeps off ghosts and condemns the telephone because it does not raise them.

Wow.

Could be a little bit like, I mean, look, it feels a little, look how dumb these foreigners are, kind of a story to me of like 1895, the King installs a telephone and gets mad because the dead woman won't call him. But if true, it's really fascinating that this technology had enough a hold on people that the first thing this guy did was like, well, obviously we're going to run a wire from the grave to my house. Yeah.

I mean, we did an episode, we did two parts of Being Buried Alive. I think every tomb should have had a fucking phone in it at the time.

That's true.

Yeah. I also like the main character of that, who's a man who arrives in Korea to be like, or he goes into his boss's office being like, you know what I heard they have in Korea? No phones. I got to get over there. I got to sell him these fucking phones. Yeah. They don't even know what they're missing. Yeah. That's just a wild thing to think, there's an untapped market.

And then little did he know, he would soon piss off a king.

Yeah, by that point, he's got the gold, he left, whatever.

That's true. Yeah. He got the bag. Oh, sorry. Okay. And then I found one other story from The Manning Times, September 18th, 1901, headline, Ghosts Use Telephone, which is a very chill headline for a shocking development, honestly. Yeah. Sure, sure. The story goes, a number of spiritualists are interested in ghostly voices over the telephone to Mrs. Mary F. Bringman, a medium who keeps a boarding house at Springfield, Ohio. The mysterious telephone is on the wall of a large room and had been there for some time before the manifestations were noticed. One evening, a visitor was startled by hearing the voices, and finally the story was spread through town. A well-known spiritualist has said he has no doubt the voices were friends from another world. I have talked through the telephone and Miss Brigham's, he said, there can be no mistake in this matter, and it is not a subject to be treated flippantly. So nothing more convincing than a spiritualist telling you that you have to take him seriously. I feel like it is kind of like a big red flag. But one person who didn't treat any of these stories flippantly was none other than a guy we've talked about on this show before, Thomas Edison. According to weirdhistorian.com, quote, in October of 1920, Thomas Edison announced that he was working on a new machine that would allow people to talk to the dead. Naturally, people were optimistic. After all, this was the man who decades earlier figured out a way to record and play back the human voice. At the time, such a thing seemed completely magical. If the Wizard of Menlo Park could create a phonograph, why not a telephone to the afterlife?

I think there's something sweet and wonderful that like, I mean, I'm writing almost every- Chris, you're a horror writer, and Ed, you're a horror writer at this point now too. Oh, no. Yeah. I think a lot of what we- all of our ideas are centered around is how do we get in touch with people who've gone through the veil to the other side? What is on the other side? Can we find a way to connect with our loved ones that we've lost and not to make this- I know this is a podcast about being frightened, but I think the pursuit of that is really beautiful since we are, I think we're the only animals that mourn. Somebody is going to be-

Well, no, we did an episode that elephants mourn.

Elephants mourn.

They bury their dead and stuff, it's wild.

Us and the elephants.

Yeah, but they had good luck making a phone with those big-ass feet.

Really hard to dial. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, carry on.

Well, no, I think there's definitely something. I certainly trace part of my love of horror back to my initially great fear of death and I remember when I was a kid, I was fascinated by the way that death was described in horror novels. That's part of why I started reading horror. I don't remember how I figured this out, maybe from reading Jurassic Park, but I remember going to the library and I would take scary-looking books off the shelves and I would look through them to find the parts usually near the end of a chapter where somebody died because I was looking for descriptions of what it was like to die. It scared the shit out of me at the same time, but I was like, well, somebody's got to know, right? I mean-

Yeah. Well, there are a lot of stories, I'm sure many of which you've covered, that experiences that indicate that there is transitional space between here and being gone, which is how we get a ghost.

Which is how we get a ghost.

It is.

That makes a ghost.

That's the humunculus recipe that makes a ghost.

That's how the ghost hang out. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of really interesting study, some of which we have touched on briefly. We haven't, I don't think we've, Ed, have we done a full episode on near-death experiences?

No.

I don't think we have.

Especially since the names changed a little in that field.

Yeah. But there's a lot of really interesting research around, yeah, they don't call it near-death experience anymore. I forget what they call it, but there's like genuine scientific research around, how long does it take to actually die? What does that mean? What do people see? Part of the reason I think that research gets funded is because there is a great going concern of how to keep people alive longer. Sure. They don't intend for it to become spiritual, but I think a lot of that research quickly does become spiritual. You find a lot of researchers in that field who are approaching it with hard-nosed science, but they are like, we don't know. I mean, there's a point where they just go, it's weird. Weird shit happens all the time. Yep.

Which is a good segue back into the story because these people were interested to see what the wizard of Menlo Park can do with this problem.

Well, the announcement was made in the pages of American Magazine in 1920 in a way that kind of reminds me of the way that announcements about artificial intelligence get made. The headline was, Edison At Work On Machine To Talk With Dead. Inventor Hopes To Perfect Apparatus Within Few Months. Believes Idea Will Be Success. So I feel like, you know, that's pretty much the same thing our stock market is built on now. Yeah. Weird historian continues.

We're projecting it works.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Weird historian continues. If Edison was going to talk to the dead, it was going to be done through science. As he told BC Forbes of American magazine, the methods and apparatus commonly used and discussed in talking to the dead is just a lot of unscientific nonsense. Why, he wondered, would any personality in the afterlife bother communicating in such prankish and primitive ways? Edison didn't offer Forbes specific details of how his device would work, but he explained, quote, I am proceeding on the theory that in the very nature of things, the degrees of material or physical power possessed by those in the next life must be extremely slight and that therefore any instrument designed to communicate with us must be super delicate, as finely responsive as human ingenuity can make it. For my part, I'm inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected or moved or manipulated, whichever term you want to use, by our personality as it survives the next life. Such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something. So, ought to record something. Yeah. He added that should he succeed, the first spirits to take advantage of the device would likely be telegraphers or scientists, or anyone else with experience in the use of delicate instruments and electric currents.

He's saying on our side, like mortal beings.

No, I think he means the first spirits would be dead scientists.

Oh, right.

I recognize myself.

Yeah.

Wow, that's wild. Could you imagine that with like you died and then you got to heaven or wherever you are? And then you're like being introduced to your telegraph office. It's like, we'll get back to work.

Yeah.

I know you're this is not just you got time to lean. You got time to fucking clean. I mean, get get to work trying to reach the other side.

If Edison's theory holds, I'm surprised that prior to this, there weren't lots of people like looking through a microscope and finding the like bacteria range to spell hello or something. Because it seems like a scientist would recognize that method too. But we never had that happen. So Edison had to do this difficult work. A lot of people assumed he was maybe kidding, trying to make some headlines, which he was known to do pretty much as much as he liked inventing things. Yeah, he was a big, he was a-

He was a little prankster.

Well, he was a-

Yeah, Zoth protests too much, that's why he's like, why would a ghost prank?

I think he was more like a Steve Jobs. Like he liked kind of, he knew how to market his inventions and kind of catch, get headlines and make news.

Got it.

So people thought maybe he was trying to do that. But while he never did come forward with a phone that could speak to the dead, he took his experiments much further than some people ever thought he would. A 1933 article in Modern Mechanics, with an X, magazine, reported on a secret demonstration in his darkened laboratory with several scientists present. According to the article, Edison set up a photoelectric cell, a tiny pencil of light coming from a powerful lamp bored through the darkness and struck the active surface of this cell, where it was transformed instantly into a feeble electric current. Any object, no matter how thin, transparent or small, would cause a registration on the cell if it cut through the beam. The team of scientists spent hours closely watching Edison's prototype for any sign of movement from beyond, but none came. So, no reporting on whether or not Edison was disgusted by the fact that this didn't work.

I'm disgusted with everything I try that doesn't work.

Yeah, I go, no thank you.

I can't believe I told people it would be done in a few months.

Yeah, I know. He's like, fuck, fuck, fuck. He was really pulling an Elizabeth Holmes on this. This machine is going to be so good. Edison, I don't know how much we want to get into this. I think this is what we've discussed in previous episodes. He had some weird ideas about spirituality and human life that sound a lot more like bullshit from a guy who is sort of smart more than a guy who actually has any real idea how the human body works.

Yeah, he's like a PT Barnum of science at the time. You're probably homies. He's like Elon Musk a little bit, I guess.

It's just dawning on me right now how you guys have become and what, how long has your podcast been running?

Two years.

Two years.

Just under two years?

So in two years, you've become experts on so many different kinds of, not that you didn't know what Edison was like prior to all this, but I'm guessing that a lot of, there has been a giant knowledge expansion amongst you.

Yeah, if we ever-

We just weird factoids in history.

Pretty much. I mean, maybe one of our, maybe we should make some merch that's like a Scared All The Time trivia game, because that's really the only thing any of this is useful for.

I don't know. Fodders for the movies.

He's done nothing for the online dating profile.

Honestly, that is one of the things that even sometimes was when there's an episode where I'm like, I don't know about this one. I don't know if it's there. I do keep a running notepad of like stuff that I find that I'm like, oh, this would be good for a movie, whether it's an idea or a scene or like, because you do, I stumble across all kinds of weird stuff. This, so I did not know this about Edison prior to researching him, but he believed that the human body was composed of 100 trillion, I don't know where he got that number, infinitely small life units. Each was beyond microscopic and beyond what the human mind could conceive. He said he believed that life like matter is indestructible. There has always been a certain amount of life in this world and there will always be the same amount. You cannot create life, you cannot destroy life, you cannot multiply life. I believe our bodies are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitesimal entities, each in itself a unit of life, which band together to build our man. In our bodies, these entities constantly rebuild our tissues to replace those which are constantly wearing out, which is sort of true. They watch after functions.

They're not little men, though. They're not little Wreck-It Ralphs in there, though.

But it's so close. It's so close to being exactly true.

Yeah.

No matter it never created nor destroyed. It's all just moving bits around.

Yes.

But instead, he's written down something. He was real close, but he should have kept a lot of this to himself.

Especially this next part. Once conditions in the body become unsatisfactory, either through a fatal sickness, fatal accident or old age, the entities simply depart from the body and leave little more than an empty structure behind. Being indefatigable. Thank you.

How did you guess that?

Because no one can pronounce it correctly.

Every time I hit that word, I have a Chris experience. What he's doing right now.

I'm like, oh, old Maggie, large language model Levin. You're guessing the next word perfectly.

Did you mean indefatigable?

Yes. Being such, they naturally seek something else to do. They either enter into the body of another man or even start work on some other form of life. At any rate, there is a fixed number of options. Yeah, that's it.

Man, everything else.

Yeah. What about fruit? It's not keeping fruit alive or else you wouldn't get good banana bread.

Yeah. At any rate, he says, there's a fixed number of these and it is the same entities that have served over and over again. What he never explained is why these entities would pause their tireless work to try to make a phone call and use his machine at all, but that hasn't stopped them from trying. The bulk of the research that we have in the modern day about phone calls from the dead mostly comes in the form of a book called Phone Calls From The Dead by D Scott Rogo and Raymond Baylis published in 1979. There really only seems to have been one.

It seems real late.

Yeah. There's only one other book that people who have studied this phenomenon have found before that. It was a book written in 1925 called Voices From Beyond by Telephone. It was written by a Brazilian named Carlos G Ramos under the pen name Oscar Darnell, but very little is known about it. That book basically doesn't count because I don't even know if anyone's ever found a readable copy of it. These two guys, Rogo and Baylis, were a pair of parapsychologists and they were inspired in their work by a report in the September 1976 Fate Magazine from Don B. Owens of Toledo, Ohio, concerning his close friend, Lee Epps. They had lived in the same neighborhood for years before Lee moved away and their contact became limited to occasional meetings or telephone calls. On October 26, 1968, at 1030 at night, Don's wife, Ethel, answered a telephone call and immediately recognized the voice as that of their friend, Lee. He said, Sis, tell Don I'm feeling real bad. Never felt this way before. Tell him to get in touch with me the minute he comes in. It's important, Sis. Ethel tried to call him back but got no answer and neither did Don when he got home. That evening, Don learned that Lee was in a coma in the hospital six blocks from their home and had died at 1030 p.m. Oh my gosh. It would have been impossible for Lee to have made the call himself in that condition, and yet Ethel had immediately recognized his voice. That case is what caught the attention of these guys, and according to encyclopedia.com, they were sufficiently intrigued to follow up the phenomenon of phone calls from the dead. After collecting a few cases, they wrote an article for the October 77 issue of Fate Magazine, and eventually, as more and more cases came in, this led to a two-year investigation of the phenomenon. They felt that it proved really difficult to establish a scientific manner of study that was acceptable to the standards of regular scientific research.

Yeah, usually you need an element of repeatability.

Yes. And phone calls from the dead is sort of... I mean, they never flat out said this, but I think as far as the study of ghosts go, it's got to be one of the hardest phenomenons to study because they happen with no warning. It's like trying to study earthquakes. You know, it happens with no warning. There's very little record of it after it happens. And they did admit that it was very difficult to rule out hoaxes.

Yeah.

But we had a page count and a deadline.

So, yeah.

I think it's worth mentioning just for the sake of the pod that I'm a full believer in ghosts and ghostly experiences. I do think there's a lot of like bullshit out there and a lot of hoaxes and a lot of absolutely science cannot prove it. But there are just too many credible folks who've had some kind of paranormal experience. Myself included. None of mine fit under the heading of the topic of the day. But I believe that I was in the room with ghosts frequently as a child, because I believe I lived in some haunted houses. And I just think, like we said, like there's this interim space. I don't know what it looks like. I don't know what it is. But it makes perfect sense to me also that whatever that is, wherever that exists, is able to anchor itself to something like an analog phone or a strip of magnetic tape or something like that. I believe that being able to access the sound of someone on a different frequency makes more sense than visually being able to see them. Sure.

Yeah, I agree with you. And we've talked on the show before about how I think almost everybody, if they trust you enough or if they think they'll never see you again, will admit to you something that's happened to them that they go, yeah, I don't really know what that was. And some people just don't think about it. They just kind of file it away and go, not going to ask any questions.

Not going to dwell on that.

Yeah, and I, in my more skeptical moments, I think maybe it has more to do with the fact that our brains are very trickable and we see and hear things, especially in stressful situations or after a death or near sleep. But I also, the older I get, the more I do feel a spiritual component to the world where, yeah, it does feel like there is probably some other, there's two, I mean, even outside of Ghosts, I think there's just so many things. When you look at the full scope of UFOs and cryptids and people who claim to have time traveled or they've walked out of a building and suddenly it's 1850 outside or there's so many different kinds of weird shit that has happened that people experience. I don't have a grand theory of everything. I suspect that it probably all somehow comes from the same source whether it's a misfiring of the brain or some kind of our reality is maybe a little bit more permeable than our senses usually allow for us to notice. Yeah. But yeah, one of my favorite things about the show is the number of people who write in randomly with just a story that lands in our email box of the time something happened or their parents experienced something or I think it's a pretty universal experience. We will have to have you back on at some point to do ghost stories because I want to hear ghost stories.

Yeah.

Imagine if you had, go ahead Maggie. If this is important, you should say it now because I was going to say that. Imagine if you had said that you believe that the source of all of these things were telephones, you could have easily gotten back to the episode. But now you.

It is. I actually think it's cell phones. I think if the aliens came and invented cell phones and no, I couldn't, I can't even continue with that bit.

Well, if I'd.

If I G, the G is for ghosts, guys.

If I if I put this research bit in the episode, I actually would have had a great segue. I didn't put it in, so I won't remember it exactly. But one of the cases that I almost put in here is these guys were investigating at a different point in their career. They were investigating a woman who had seen a bunch of UFOs and also was getting ghost calls from the dead. And she seemed like a real interesting lady, but also questionably trustworthy. So once you start piling on, I'll allow that most people have a paranormal experience or possibly two. But if you're a person who is getting phone calls from the dead, seeing UFOs, and you've met Bigfoot, I start to have questions about how lucky you are.

You're just being greedy, really, at that point. We have some for the rest of us. Yeah. Those are the same people that are like, I'm just a vampire.

Yes. We've met a couple of those.

In person.

In person, yeah. So a lot of the stories that they collected are variations on the same story that we've kind of touched on a few different times to this episode of somebody calling and wanting to talk to a loved one, and then you find out that they died earlier that day or that week. And I think a lot of those, it's possible that some of them are actual ghost experiences. I think for me, it's a little easier to chalk them up to like, was the time of death really accurate? And is it likely that as someone starts to pass on, they pick up the phone to call a loved one, and just no one at the hospital noticed? I tend to think that's more likely.

Or the call receiver, if it's fresh like that. I mean, this person was a friend or whatever, but if it's like a loved one and you're not with them, I imagine grief might play some role into thinking you heard someone on the phone too.

Yeah, or misremembering when your last call with a dead loved one was, and you push it up to after the time of death.

Honestly, it must have been tight to have like a call with a loved one, then they die, and then that was it. Because now I have, and it gets kind of more each year, but I have friends who die and you go to type in someone else's name in your phone, and then you have like your entire text history with that person leading up to basically the day you got stopped. And I hate remembering it, but I also don't want to delete it.

Yeah, so it's like when my stepfather passed away, you know, his voicemail was still up for a long time. And I mean, a long time, I don't know how long it was, maybe a couple of months. And I used to just call just to hear it. You know, and I think that there's, yeah, having that track record, the text exchanges with other people, I don't know. There's something more unsettling about that and undeletable than I think it would be to, like, back in the day have had physical letters. Of course, it's very beautiful to have, like, longhand letters, but it doesn't feel like, you know, the way that we are all with each other now is so via text. So, yeah, I think that, like, a thing where I didn't want to delete, I deleted my Facebook, but I didn't want to because of all of the all of the mystery with some folks who are not not with us anymore.

And you'll need all that to build an AI version of your dead phones.

Right, yes, well. And if people want to speak to my hologram, however, that information from me, if I haven't given it all to Meta.

And I'm willing to bet there were no handwritten letters that were just like, you up?

Well, it took a month to deliver it. So, but I mean, I think there's something to that point. I do think there's something, and I don't know if it's for better or for worse when it comes to grief and memory and whatever, but the flattening of, you know, when people had handwritten letters that they would keep, it was both the handwriting was personal, the kind of paper it was on, even if it was just like scrap or nice paper, there was a very human personal aspect to all of that. And now with text messages, I think part of what, in a way, makes them hard to look back on is that they are frozen in time alongside every other text message, and they all look the same. They all have kind of similar rhythms. So it feels more, you want to hang on to it, but it also does have that feeling of, well, I just would type the next thing into the thing here, and then I want them to text back. And a letter is a very different, it's a very different vibe to the whole thing. Yeah, I don't know if it's better or worse, but it's a very weird feeling.

Speaking of things that replace letters, telephones.

Ed, usually I'm the one keeping the show on the rails, but Ed, you're doing a great job of it today.

There is, I will say that if you persevere through the wild, gory, horror antics of Black Phone 2 and get to the final phone call, it deals very much in the themes of what we're talking about right now, in a way that, you know, another thing that was really gratifying about the screening here was hearing how many people were crying at the end of the movie because of that connectivity of, you know, grief and space and time and the people we love and how, if we could be connected to them by a phone. I think I'm managing to pull this off without spoilers. It's pretty tough.

Yeah, no, I think so, I think so. I don't think that really spoils anything. It is, it does at the end.

But if you're looking for an uplifting ending, there is hope in the Black Phone. You're not just being terrorized by mean hell grabbers. There are some people that call that are nice people.

Nice.

Well, one of the nice people who called someone in real life from beyond is a little girl who, well, I'm getting ahead of myself. This happened in 1974. And what I was going to say is that how we got off and now back on track is most of these stories are people just calling to talk to a loved one and maybe there's a little bit of fuzziness around the time of death. This one is much more cut and dry and a little bit more actively helpful than just a conversation. So this story from 1974 recounts how an Indianapolis woman named Mrs. Viola Tollen received a phone call just before dark one evening from a little girl's voice. The little girl said, They told me I couldn't telephone, but I just did, didn't I? Mrs. Tollen was astonished. She knew the tiny voice but couldn't immediately place it. So she asked who it was. I'm Ruby, the caller replied. Ruby was the young daughter of Mrs. Tollen's neighbor, and she had died at the age of seven, not long before this phone call was placed. Mrs. Tollen immediately said something must be wrong next door, so she rushed into her neighbor's house and found Ruby's father, Mr. Davis, fallen asleep in a contorted position and was in danger due to a spinal injury he had of permanent paralysis if he had been left that way. Mrs. Tollen's timely arrival woke him and presented catastrophe. And so in this case, the ghostly phone call both happened well after this person was dead and in the ground, and it also I think raises some interesting questions about who the they in They Said I Couldn't are. You know, that's never come up in any other phone call that I can find, so whoever they are.

That's really interesting because I don't know if it's like a warden in heaven, like guards being like no one can use this technology or if it's naysayers being like you can't reach the other side. And she's like, I'll figure it out.

Yeah, she's like, Thomas Edison said only scientists could do this. Yeah. Fuck him.

But that's crazy. Yeah, the they thing is really interesting.

They said I couldn't call. Now, you know, is it?

They're ghostly keepers, the angels that are standing over you going like, mm-mm.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like she didn't call for any dark purposes or that she broke the fabric of reality or something.

But she could have been breaking the rules. It could be like, we don't interfere. It's like Star Trek. We don't interfere. Yeah, we know this guy is going to be whatever and it's your dad and you want to help them. But the rules are there's a separation here.

Yeah. I mean, the other possibility here is that not to put any dirt on Mrs. Tollen's name, but maybe she was in their house when she wasn't supposed to be for some reason and found this guy. It was like, a ghost called, your daughter, she said, you're in danger. Yeah.

I wasn't here going through your prime china and silver.

Yeah.

I mean, that seems a little extreme. I don't want to, like I said, I won't put that on her, but that's possibly something that I, there are stories of in spycraft, there are stories, rumors that a lot of remote viewing experiments and the idea that we were training spies to see things remotely was cover for stuff that we knew that we weren't supposed to know. And there was like a particular, I think it was in the Carter administration, they recovered, I think, a downed aircraft, like someone's plane had gone down behind enemy lines and they weren't supposed to be there or something. And there was a public degree of knowledge that they were recovering this plane. And the story was that they found where it was because they'd asked a psychic. And, you know, there was this feeling of like, did you or did you just have spies on the ground and you don't want to say that we have like the military in this country that we shouldn't be in?

I think we talked about it. I think we talked about in a previous episode, it was like the carrots thing where like carrots are good for eyesight was like the English and Americans didn't want people to know that we had invented radar. And so they dropped all those pamphlets being like, eat your carrots, it's good for your vision, it's the superfood. So like, that's how we were able to like see so far to like that planes were coming or that whatever was happening.

Oh, I don't remember this story from the show.

Carrots are a justification for radar.

Yeah, I think it's like pervasive to this day that like carrots are great for eye, we've all heard it.

That's true. Yeah, or at least it's said to be true. I didn't know that, yeah, they tried to explain superpowers.

I think it's true. I think they really ramped up the pro-carrot vision rhetoric around being like, hopefully, no one knows that we have this technology, lets us see farther.

Maybe that's why they tell us that calcium is good for our bones, because they didn't want the enemy to know why we had super soldiers. They were like, well, they're drinking their milk.

So that's a big dairy conspiracy.

Absolutely. I think a good place to wrap up this episode is on a very short but spooky story from 2018, just to kind of prove the point that we have had ghost phone calls all the way from the invention of the telephone up to the modern day. I'm sure there's probably some ghost phone calls that have occurred after this one, but it's particularly spooky and I think ends on a note that kind of wraps up the whole episode. So I found this through CBS News. On August 11th, the Pueblo Police Department Communication Center in Pueblo, Colorado got what they refer to as an abandoned 911 call at 3:28 a.m. I love that this is taking place in Colorado because it does tie it all back to Black Phone 2.

At the witching hour?

Carry on. At the witching hour. According to police, the call came from Imperial Memorial Gardens, a funeral home and cemetery located at 5450 West State Highway 78. Quote, an emergency services dispatcher answered the phone just as the line disconnected but received no response from anyone on the line, police stated. And actually, Ed, we can put this in the show notes. They actually do have this call recorded and it's available on the website. It's not particularly interesting because no one says anything, but you can hear the person answer the call and just hear static on the line. An officer was sent to check it out and the dispatcher called the number back. Police documents show and this call, you can hear it, show that the call was answered on the other end when they called back, but no one spoke. It was just a lot of static. Officers went to check out the funeral home, but it was locked up and dark with no one in sight. Captain Tom Rummel gave the Pueblo Chieftain a quote that I think sums up the entire episode pretty succinctly and he said, probably just line trouble, right? Let's go with that.

It is interesting that there's a scientific aspect there of we received the call, the dispatcher's going to get information on their screen about where the call is coming from, so it's not like it was some fucking phone on the wall they just picked up, and so they know an address to send the officer to, and they know that there was a firm real connection made, and so they had to actually send someone, and so that's interesting that they're like, it's this time, it's this hour at a funeral home or whatever.

Well, it's creepy that to me, this one's particularly creepy, even though the call itself isn't very creepy. What's creepy is a lot of these, there was a bunch of other modern ghost cell phone calls and stuff, and incoming calls, I feel like, are much more explainable or waved away than calling back and the phone being answered. Yeah, especially that if you're there and there's no one there.

Something's taken up. It's really...

It's creepy.

Yeah, especially because we're no longer in automated systems. Before, you could have like a... It would click over to your answering machines. So maybe there would be a glitch there and it picked up and that's really... That's eerie. I love it.

So with all that said, that brings us to the end of our Ghost Calls episode, which means there's only one thing left to do, which is put ghost calls on our fear tier, which is one, being not afraid of them at all, and ten, being Ed, would you like to fill Maggie in on what the scariest thing imaginable is?

Yeah, we keep trying to find a new thing for good reason. It's getting a bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on you. Not like in that hobo that did it a couple of years ago in LA, not like unexpectedly, not like a fear factor situation.

Okay.

Ed decided early in this show that that was the scariest thing he could think of, and I think he regrets that every day.

I only regret that you keep bringing it up for two years.

So where, Maggie, you can go first, as the guest of honor for this episode, where would you put ghost phone calls on your fear tier?

Oh, it's low down. I mean, I would say I would be enthusiastic to receive a ghost phone call, so it's gotta be down to like one and a half.

Okay.

Not that I wouldn't be freaked out in the moment, but I would welcome it, as opposed to the thing I'm the most afraid of, which is if you ever heard of that guy that convinced a girl to get on a submarine with him.

Oh, yeah.

And then took her down there and like tortured her for days and then killed her. And so being that girl on a submarine, the moment that she realized that she was about to get hella murdered, that is my 10, that's my 12.

That should be, that's a good replacement for sure.

I'm sorry to let you know that that's a thing, real thing that happened. I don't know why I'm smiling.

Yeah, well, we usually don't use video components, or I'll just put like a cartoon frown on your face.

Yeah, just.

The frowny emoji over her face.

But the United States Navy, until very recently, women aren't allowed to be on subs.

Well.

Straight up. And my friend who was a sub person for most of his Navy career, or however long you're subjected to it, you go under and you're down there for three, four months and stuff. Like you don't come back up. He, when the news broke that they were going to do that, he was like, oh, I really think that's a bad idea.

Yeah.

Not like in a way that's, I mean, I'm not giving his name for, because that sounds like he was like, oh, maybe he, I don't want to say he's part of what could be a problem, but he was like, it just feels like something we shouldn't be doing.

Yeah. Well, and that's fine.

Because of what you said, like submarines, there's no one can hear you scream in a submarine.

Yeah. No, and Underwater, I think when you guys began this podcast, Ed and I had a long exchange about how no one should go in the ocean.

Yeah. He still bangs that drum to this day. That comes up on a regular basis.

I don't like to be in a walking distance of the ocean, and I live in LA.

Ed, what about you? Where are you putting Ghost Phone Calls on your fear tier?

One, 1.5. Unless, I guess the only thing that would make it go higher is if the Ghost Phone Call, if I was like, hello, this is Ed, and then they just screamed or like some crazy thing that like, I guess what I'm saying is my screams are higher on my fear tier, I guess, than dead silence, but yeah, it's real fucking low.

I wouldn't want to get a ghost call from the grabber himself. There's a pretty scary phone call in the movie Obsession. I'm also here to plug the movie Obsession. I don't know what you're going to do with it, but it is great.

I'll cut that.

I have to agree with you guys. I would put Ghost Phone Calls. I'll give it a two because I get a little anxious when I hear the phone ring and especially if it rings and it says unknown number or 666 or wherever the ghost is calling from, I probably would be a little anxious. But then it does seem like usually these calls are fairly pleasant and it would be my grandfather or something. So I'm not particularly scared of it. But if you do want to move ghost calls a little higher up on your fear tier, go see Black Phone 2.

Oh, true.

And I will say in terms of the context of the Black Phone, like a phone ringing in the Black Phone 2, you feel, I still feel upset when I hear it. Sometimes on the day I was standing off to the side, we had a little live ringer, which was really fun to do. That's cool. I could push it and be like, oh, that's not good. That feels bad. Out here in the middle of the night in the snow, with a phone that's deader than disco.

Well, that was a good way to bring it back to the movie, Chris. But yeah, don't take our fear tier numbers. Go make your own decision after seeing fucking Black Phone 2 about where it sits on your fear tier.

If you'd like to become afraid of Ghost Calls. Exactly. I got the movie for you.

Yeah.

All right. With that said, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm going to stay out of submarines.

Our guest has been Maggie Levin, writer, director, executive producer. Go watch Black Phone 2, My Valentine, VHS 99. Do you want to plug where people can follow you on the internet?

Please follow me on yeoldinstagram. I'm still hanging on to it. And I'm also on Blue Sky and Threads.

Nice.

At Maggie Levin on all platforms.

Right on. Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. Until next time.

Oh, Black Phone 2 is in theaters on October 17th. Only in theaters.

Only in theaters. Get out there. Find us. Find someone with an AMC stub or whatever. Get a bunch of people together. Get after it.

Awesome. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Vifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry.

All scaredy cats welcome.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends production.

Good night.

We are in this together.

Together. Together.

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