The Call from the Wall

Our family rented the ground floor of a Victorian house in Duluth, Minnesota, back in the late ’80s. The place had high ceilings, drafty windows, and a basement that always smelled of damp earth. My parents, my brother, and I lived there for two years, and I remember it mostly for the strange things that happened, especially with the telephone.

We had one of those clear, light-up desk phones, the kind you could see the innards of, with a glowing dial that made the whole thing look like a piece of modern art. It sat on a small table in the hallway, right next to the coat closet. My mother, a practical woman, never believed in ghosts, but that phone tested her sanity.

It was a Tuesday morning, and I was six. My father had left for his job at the steel plant at six, and I was eating cereal before school. My mother, who worked part-time at the library, was in the living room, sipping coffee and watching the morning news. The phone rang. It was one of those sharp, jangling rings that seemed too loud for the room. She picked it up, said hello, but there was only silence—not even static, just a dead quiet. She hung up, muttering about wrong numbers.

A few minutes later, it rang again. Same thing. She picked it up, no answer, only that hollow quiet. She hung up and turned off the ringer with a click. That should have been that, but then the phone rang again—not through the earpiece, but the physical bell inside it, even though the switch was off. It rang four times, and my mother, startled, yanked the cord out of the wall. The phone went dark. But then, right in front of her, the clear plastic housing began to glow faintly, and the dial lit up as if it were alive. And then it rang again, not from the speaker, but from inside the wall, a muffled, deep thrumming sound.

My mother screamed. She grabbed me, even though I was halfway out the door with my school bag, and ran. She drove straight to my father’s workplace, nearly in tears, and made him come home. When we returned, the phone was still unplugged, and the house was silent. My father checked everything, found nothing wrong, and for a while, it was fine. But my mother never used that phone again. It sat there, unplugged, like a dead bug.

The second incident happened a few months later. My father was working late, and my mother had her friend Jean over. They were sitting in the living room, drinking wine and watching a movie on the VCR. I was supposed to be in bed, but I was lying on the floor, half-hidden behind the couch, pretending to sleep. It was around nine when the phone—still unplugged—started to ring. We all froze. The cord was curled on the table, the plug nowhere near the jack. But the phone was ringing, loud and clear.

My mother and Jean exchanged terrified glances. Jean whispered, ‘Maybe it’s the neighbor’s phone.’ But the sound was coming from our phone, and the dial was glowing. Then, the ringing stopped, and a voice came through the speaker, distorted and garbled, like someone speaking underwater. It said something that sounded like a name, but not any name we knew. My mother grabbed my hand, and Jean grabbed her purse, and we all ran out of the house. We sat in Jean’s car in the driveway, the engine running, until my father came home an hour later.

The phone was gone the next day. My father took it to a landfill, and I never saw it again. But I still hear that muffled ring sometimes, in the walls of other houses, especially in those quiet moments between sleep and waking. It’s as if the call was never meant for us, but that it found us anyway, and it’s still waiting to get through.