The Relay Station Vigil

In 2004, I was a sophomore at Ridgemont High. For gym, Coach Brannigan, a squat, red-faced man with a whistle permanently fused to his lips, marched us to the abandoned relay station at the edge of campus. It was a crumbling concrete bunker from the Cold War, now overgrown with weeds and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence. He called it ‘open-air PE,’ which meant we could do whatever we wanted as long as we stayed within sight. My friends Danny, Leo, and I were kicking a deflated soccer ball around when we heard it: a series of shrill, piercing screams from inside the bunker’s main room.

We rushed in, our sneakers crunching on broken glass and old antenna parts. Inside, our classmates Jenna, Marcus, and Priya were huddled in a tight circle on the dusty floor, their hands resting on a cracked, weathered Ouija board. The planchette was spinning wildly under their fingers. Jenna’s face was pale, and she was whispering, ‘It’s here. It’s here.’ We demanded to know what was happening. Priya, her voice trembling, said they’d contacted a spirit who claimed to have died in the 1950s, right here, during a lightning storm that fried the station’s operators. She said the spirit was angry, trapped between worlds, and it wanted to finish its last transmission.

Danny laughed, a nervous, brittle sound. ‘Right. A ghost DJ.’ He nudged me, and I smirked, but Leo looked uneasy. Still, we weren’t about to be outdone. We dropped to our knees, pushing our hands onto the board, our fingers overlapping in a sweaty mess. Jenna, now in control, asked, ‘Spirit, what is your name?’ The planchette shot to ‘A’ then ‘L’ then ‘E’ then ‘X’ and just stopped. ‘Alex,’ Marcus breathed. Then it moved again, spelling out ‘BROADCAST’ and ‘STORM’ and ‘SOUL.’ We asked more questions, and the board spelled out that Alex was a young man, a radio operator, and that he’d been on duty when lightning hit the tower. He said he’d been trying to send a warning to the town about a coming disaster, but he died mid-sentence. He said his last message was never delivered, and he couldn’t rest until it was.

We didn’t believe it. But then, from the back of the bunker, we heard a crackle, a static hiss. The old radio equipment in the corner, rusted and dead for decades, suddenly sparked to life. A burst of garbled sound, like a voice buried under a mountain of interference, blasted from its speaker. We all jumped. The planchette flew off the board, clattering to the floor. The room went cold, and the lights—the few working fluorescent tubes—flickered and died. In the sudden darkness, a figure took shape near the radio: a translucent, shimmering outline of a young man in a 1950s jacket, his mouth moving, but no sound coming out. His eyes were hollow, and he pointed frantically at the radio, then at us.

We scrambled to our feet, stumbling over each other to get out. But the door, which had been propped open with a brick, slammed shut, and the brick shot across the room. We were trapped. Panic set in. Danny was pounding on the door, screaming for help. Leo was on his knees, muttering a prayer. Jenna, Marcus, and Priya were frozen, their faces streaked with tears. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and when I turned, the figure was inches from my face. It opened its mouth, and a stream of static poured out, but mixed with it, I could hear faint words, like ‘tornado’ and ‘siren’ and ‘school.’ Then, as quickly as it appeared, the figure vanished, and the radio fell silent. The lights buzzed back on. The door swung open, creaking on its rusted hinges.

We ran out, not stopping until we were back at the main school building, gasping for breath. Coach Brannigan blew his whistle and yelled at us for leaving the area, but we were beyond caring. We never spoke of it again. But sometimes, on stormy nights, I drive past the old relay station. The windows glow with an eerie blue light, and if you listen closely, you can hear a voice, young and desperate, repeating the same half-sentence over and over: ‘…the tornado is coming down Copperhead Road, take cover…’ The transmission was finally delivered—but not by us. It was delivered by the memory of a night that taught us some frequencies are never meant to be tuned in.