The Dial That Wouldn’t Stop

It was the summer of 2009, and I was living in a small, clapboard house in the outskirts of a town in Ohio, with my boyfriend, his sister, and her two kids. The house was old, with creaking floorboards and a damp basement that smelled of earth and old newspapers. My boyfriend’s dad, a man I never met, had been a country music fanatic, especially of Hank Williams Jr. His death five years prior had left a palpable emptiness in the home, and his framed records hung crookedly in the hallway.

On that particular day, the air was thick and humid, and the drone of a distant lawnmower was the only sound besides the kids’ laughter. My sister-in-law, Jess, and I were sitting on the floral-print couch, watching the children play with toy trucks on the worn rug. The radio, an ancient unit built into the oak cabinet under the counter, was playing a song by Pink, something upbeat and electronic that seemed out of place in that cozy, dust-covered room. I got up to rinse out a glass in the sink, and as I passed the counter, I glanced at the radio’s dial.

My gaze locked onto the numbers—93.3, the country station. But as I watched, the needle started to move, slow and deliberate, like an invisible finger was turning the knob. The music, however, continued playing Pink, unchanged. The needle slid past 94.1, 95.5, 97.1, and then stopped at 101.9, the classic rock station, but the song didn’t skip. It kept playing as if the radio were oblivious to its own dial. A cold chill ran down my spine. I called out, ‘Jess, come here! Quick!’

Jess rushed over, her eyes wide as she saw the needle vibrate at 101.9. ‘What the hell?’ she whispered. Then, the needle began to move again, this time with a jerky, impatient motion, back to 93.3. As it settled, the music abruptly switched to a twangy guitar riff—Hank Williams Jr.’s ‘Country Boy Can Survive.’ Jess’s face went pale. ‘That’s Dad’s favorite,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He’s here, isn’t he? He never liked that modern stuff.’

We stood frozen, listening to the song play. The kids, oblivious, continued their game. When the song ended, the radio clicked off, but the dial remained at 93.3. The next few days, strange things happened. The radio would turn on by itself at odd hours, always playing a different country song, each one a favourite of her dad’s. The volume would rise and fall, as if someone was adjusting it to get our attention. One night, I woke up to the sound of a faint melody coming from the kitchen, and when I went downstairs, the radio was on, softly playing ‘Are You Ready for the Country’ by Hank Williams Jr. I sat for a while, listening, and felt a weird sense of comfort.

But the comfort didn’t last. The dial started moving more erratically, flipping between stations that played everything from death metal to opera. The music would sometimes be accompanied by static, and I could swear I heard whispers in the crackling, but they were too faint to make out. Jess grew uneasy, saying her dad was trying to tell us something, but she didn’t know what. Then, the radio started playing songs that weren’t from his era—songs that we had never heard of, with lyrics that seemed to be about our own lives. One day, it played a song that mentioned my name, and I nearly dropped the plate I was holding.

The real horror began when the radio started broadcasting sounds that weren’t songs at all. Crying, muffled screams, and the sound of scraping metal. The dial would spin wildly, and the lights in the house would flicker. The kids started waking up at night, crying, saying they heard the radio talking in their rooms. When we checked, the radio was always off, but we could hear a faint hum, like electricity in the walls.

One evening, I came home from work to find Jess sitting on the floor, staring at the radio, which was playing a harrowing, discordant symphony. ‘He’s not alone,’ she whispered. ‘There’s something else in there, something that’s been pretending to be him.’ The needle was jammed at 88.1, a station that was supposed to be dead air, but through the static, I heard my own voice, begging for help. I screamed and yanked the radio’s plug from the wall, but the music continued, now coming from the speaker in the ceiling. The dial on the dead radio began to turn again, and I could see a faint, shadowy hand manipulating it from inside. That’s when we decided to leave the house.

We moved into a motel that night, and we never went back. The house was sold, and we heard later that the new owners complained of strange occurrences, and one of them actually threw the radio into a lake. But even now, in the quiet of our new apartment, I sometimes hear faint static, and the dial of my own bedside alarm clock slowly moves on its own. I won’t be buying country music CDs anymore, and that Pink song that started it all? I can’t listen to it without feeling a cold breath on my neck, as if something is trying to change the station from wherever I am to somewhere else entirely.