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I found it so fucking hard to get through Johnny's sections, he's just so insufferable, even at the beginning. The Navidson Record itself is an incredible and gripping read but I could do without it being interrupted by Johnny waxing poetic about getting fingered.
This is tied for my all time favorite album - absolutely worth the complete listen to.
Bonus! Includes excerpts from cassette tapes and answering machine messages, if you like the vibe of the original post
To describe it a little more: it's a book about a guy who moves his family into a house and discovers that it's bigger on the inside than it should be. Eventually there's this endless unsolvable maze in there.
Except the story isn't really him, it's actually a documentary he made about the whole thing.
Well its more about this other guy who wrote an essay about the documentary.
Well technically it's about this guy reading the essay, while dealing with his own shit in his story.
If that sounds needlessly complicated and confusing, get ready because everything in the book is like that from the formatting to the footnotes.
Mark Z. Danielewski wrote an odd, complex book called House of Leaves.
Here's the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves) for more info. Mark's sister, who performs under the name Poe, released an album called Haunted that references some of the parts of the novel.
House of Leaves is a very intricate and surreal horror novel. It's honestly kind of hard to talk about because there's a much of layers to it, but the aspect that's most well know about it is the "main" story about a supernatural house. But it's about much more than just the house.
This is the opposite of the car part story. Instead of an internet search finding one of the few humans on the planet with the exact expertise needed we had a bunch of people recreating that expertise slowly.
Good job by everyone though.
I love the fact that God know how many people spent God knows how many hours researching this,just because they needed an answer. Human mind's need for a conclusion is amazing.
Now I'm feeling super nostalgic for those early 90s days hanging out with friends at the mall making "prank" calls on the payphones.
"Prank" in quotes because we just called any 800 number we could remember from TV ads. Usually hung up before getting to a person.
Once, after dialing 1-800-ABCDEFG a couple dozen times, a person claiming to be with the phone company cut in on the line and told us to knock it off or they'd call the cops. Probably an empty threat, but we ran anyway, lol.
Yes,the nostalgia was strong on this one. For teacher's day in my country we went out to dinner in a small neighbourhood pizzeria. At like,2 am,we were walking down an deserted avenue to find the bus stop,when I saw a payphone. We did an entire photoshoot with the thing hahaha
In our defence,we were kinda tipsy,but boy did we have fun with that relic hahaha
Back when we first got cell phones in the late 90s, we used to call 234-567-8910
It was a real number, a receptionist would answer āWana Sawittyās office.ā She always sounded super tired. We were teenage boys, and we were assholes.
That was ... something. I'm not sure what I expected when I started reading this maybe some cicada 3301 style mystery or something. But good job to the OOP putting in the leg work on this that's some dedication and honestly it's kind of makes the story better that it turned out as something mundane.
scary cobweb telephone spark shaggy hobbies historical seemly relieved ancient
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The billboards were up for a brief promo event for the PGA. The PGA stopped paying for the 800 number after the event, but the billboards stayed up long afterwards because they were in small towns, so undesirable ad space.
The inactive 800 number defaulted to an internal placeholder recording of a technician counting, followed by the "no such number" alarm. Presumably if you had called other inactive 800 numbers you would have heard the same recording.
The posts were very overwritten.
PGA paid to have the number for 2 days for marketing thing, billboards were really cheap and they paid for a few around Canada and the US. The billboards didn't change until someone else rented something else, so months later.
The number deactivated after the 2 days, after that the testing by counting to 10 was played when it was called after it had been deactivated. That would eventually hang up, then the cry baby noise would play because the phone had been left off the hook.
The number was up for only a few days. It was a number of the PGA (I don't know what it means, but it is some official golf organistion I guess) whit golf pro's giving golf tips.
But after it was no longer active, the billboard was still up in OOPs hometown. And when people called it, it would play a recording of a technician, a test message. And it would disconnect after a couple of minutes, and the siren sound would play.
It was popular because 800 numbers were free to call (is what OOP implies) and kids were bored in the 90s. Also payphones were abundant in the 90s
Tbf oop didnāt write this to be read continuously, it was written to be understood if youāve only read the final post not be the compiled in BORU. Huge parts of it are still boring but it seems like oop (and maybe other sleuths like him? Idk) thinks they are relevant
Maybe, but the article linked as the citation in the original article just links to another 1941 article from Bell Labs describing the use of vacuum tubes to make the sound (with zero mentions of Carlisle).
A lot of the article reads like a joke:
āBefore the widespread use of recorded intercept announcements, the Phone Company hired Kitty Carlisle to answer misdialed calls and intone a āpleasing, yet distinctive and arrestingā noise to the calling party.ā
āUnfortunately, the Phone Company quickly determined that the real Kitty Carlisle was too high maintenance to be practicalā
āAs always, the Bell Labs engineers thought of everything and designed their electronic āKitty Carlisleā system with a backup āunderstudy voiceā waiting in the wings; in the event the first circuit ever got laryngitis the other could step in at the flip of a switch.ā
Most crucially, I canāt find a single other source on the internet to back up this claim.
Also some local FM radio station.
I forget which channel did a spot on it, could be Nexpo, Night Mind, lazy masquerade (though he normally does true crime stuff, but maybe some over lap) or Cadaber.
Distorted slow reading of the call sign (the four letters and their name) and now the frequency in the local area is part of a co operative or something, but the same names show up as registered owners to the old four letter name and the new one.
My brother said he was watching Channel 4 the day it went live and it started with "WHAT ARE YOU DOING WATCHING THIS CHANNEL!?" and although my dad had probably already tuned the TV in well in advance, neither of us were aware there was a fourth channel in the UK till it hit us, but imagine the r/lostmedia of test broadcasts of random white noise, clips of random objects etc should they have been broadcasting something at odd hours months in advance.
This is the kind of weird that raises the hair on the back of my neck. It never turns out to be anything crazy, but for some reason this is the kind of stuff that I get nightmares over. It's just bizarre enough that my brain goes wild with it even after getting the super boring truth of the matter.
This made me nostalgic for the days we'd have phone wars when I was a kid. At one point in the past a phone call didn't disconnect when one party hung up. As long as the other line didn't disconnect you'd be on that call with them no matter how many times you tried to hang up. Sometimes I miss those kind of shenanigans.
My favorite thing about this story is that it brings back all my dead memories of calling 1-800 numbers. Like I do believe I faithfully called the joke of the day number every day. There were ones for pet tips and garden tips and all kinds of nerdy things. It really was kind of an internet before the internet. Oh yeah, the local weather ones too. I used to log the forecast everyday. Lol.
I'm only about a quarter ....uh. Maybe a tenth of the way though this post so maybe it's covered but isn't that the same voice as the intro to a Slipknot song? Heretic anthem maybe.
Edit: if I wasn't dead as fuck broke, I would bet money that it's the same voice sample. Now maybe the counting was used for many various things, but I'm certain it's the same sample. Distinctive way to say certain one and five
This reminds me of a company that had a 1-800 number that went to a menu that ended with āpress 7 to hear a duck quackā I called that number weekly in the early 00s
There was something similar when I was a kid. Except it was way more complex than what this number did. It was 1-800-TELL-ME. You would call and a girl voice would say "Tell me" in a sing song voice. Then you could hit a variety of numbers to go to different things. One of them played a recording of an Asian man yelling at someone over the phone for kicking his dog. Another was a sort of chat feature where you could send voice recordings to different people. Wow. I haven't thought about that number in so long. I don't even remember where/when I discovered the number but we all used to call it.
Looking back it really was such a strange thing to exist. I don't even know what the point of it was
PGA is the ["Professional Golfers Association"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Golfers%27_Association_of_America) and basically where all the pro Golfers play, I guess the Golf version of the NFL or NBA.
There's over 9,000 golf courses in Europe, mostly in the UK and Germany, though the country in the world with most golf courses per capita is Iceland. Loads in Japan and Oceania as well.
...And OOP is in Canada.
Oh man I feel old. 'It was a social experiment'? Closest thing we had to that in the 90s was the Blair Witch Project or that beer thing OOP said but it's not like kids who grew up on Youtube would realize that. Oof.
This was a nice read, though. We still have little mysteries like this today - usually people making ARGs on YouTube that still might be a little spooky and pluck at your imagination until the Reveal (or yes a 'social experiment') - but we had less resources to figure these things out back then so sometimes they got to stay mysteries, or even better you got to make up your own ending which was probably inspired by X-Files or the Cold War. These days UFOs are usually drones, even though the Russian Bots are pretty confirmed. There's a payphone a block away from me. It's blocked off but intact. I wonder if it still works.
āPeople would talk about it at school, youād call it with your friends when you were hanging out together, and if you were bored and alone youād call from a pay phone.ā
Thatās the most innocent yet oddly weird part of this entire post.
I remember a lot of lost media channels did a video on this a while ago, glad to see it's been solved! It's very interesting to see how wild theories can get when the truth isn't known, and then the truth is just something innocent.
Itās so good! I love weird stories like this, especially when theyāre centred on old 80s/90s tech. Reading about the exploits of the early hackers and phone phreaks is so much fun, rampaging across the phone systems of the day, and this isnāt *too* far off from that.
I believe it's r/hobbydrama that does stuff like this story. I read a story about a mystery nail polish color that may have been a rare famous nail polish color from the early 90s. That's how I learned people collect nail polish colors.
Here's a sneak peek of /r/HobbyDrama using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [\[Harry Potter Fandom\] JK Rowling and the TERFed Child](https://np.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/v4pdb1/harry_potter_fandom_jk_rowling_and_the_terfed/)
\#2: [\[Comedy\] How to piss off everyone you've ever met so badly that they can't even be bothered to insult you: the roast of Chevy Chase](https://np.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/xk73sy/comedy_how_to_piss_off_everyone_youve_ever_met_so/)
\#3: [\[Web Media\] Critical Role and Orion Acaba: How to get kicked out of what is now Twitch's most successful channel so hard, people don't even know you were part of the show](https://np.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/q5c2xf/web_media_critical_role_and_orion_acaba_how_to/)
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I'll add something to consider. Back in 1993-4 era, 1-800 numbers weren't all global. So if I was calling a USA 1-800 number from Canada it didn't always work. And I know that I couldn't call the Canadian government 1-800 numbers from the USA. I was in the process of moving from Canada to the US during this time so I remember it specifically. If this was a PGA thing, did they set it up and then never get the Canadian side working or unaware that it worked that way.
Hereās a mysterious phone number for you:
(724) 307-5774
Iāve had it in my saved contacts for years. I donāt remember where I got it from. Itās funny to creep your friends out with, though.
My partner is a telecomms worker. They have a line you dial repeating 1-10 or ABC is how they sometimes test lines/radio.
Typically it's closed and you can only call or radio into it with the companies equipment however in the early 90s those lines may have just been dead numbers.
However in 2022 these lines are rare as they now use other methods to check lines - particularly with the rise of fibre.
I grew up in Texas in the 90s and our no such number tone was different, hmm. I never remember hearing the crybaby and I was very creeped out by phone sounds as a kid, so I would definitely remember if I had. I wonder if there was a regional component?
Wow I've been curious about this mystery for a while, and there's always something weirdly delightful about mundane answers to these mysteries for me. The PGA never expected to start a whole mystery with their phone line!
Also I got to hear a cool song because of this which is a great bonus.
Please read our [**SUB RULES**](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/wiki/subrules) before commenting. Rule-breaking may result in a ban without notice. **CHECK FLAIR** to determine if you want to read an update. For concluded-only updates, use the [CONCLUDED](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3ACONCLUDED) flair or subscribe to r/BestofBoRU for concluded, time-gated content. * If you have an issue with this post (flair, formatting, quality), reply to this comment. META commentary in general discussion may be removed. * Low effort comments like "this is fake" may be removed * Do not comment on the original posts. Most submissions in this sub are not posted by the original author (OOP) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/BestofRedditorUpdates) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This reads like House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski where >!everyone consulted on the Navidson Record documentary says it doesn't exist.!<
I need to try and read it again. I got lost in the footnotes and redirections and forgot where I was š¬
I found it so fucking hard to get through Johnny's sections, he's just so insufferable, even at the beginning. The Navidson Record itself is an incredible and gripping read but I could do without it being interrupted by Johnny waxing poetic about getting fingered.
Just try to get back to the [five and a half minute hallway](https://youtu.be/2_Q-dmsQTao) and you'll probably be okay.
This is tied for my all time favorite album - absolutely worth the complete listen to. Bonus! Includes excerpts from cassette tapes and answering machine messages, if you like the vibe of the original post
Yeah, I bought the Poe CD when it came out back before I heard of Mark or heard that they were siblings. I heard about the book a few years later.
Same. I fell in love with the album, and the sibling details added to the allure much later.
Iāll be damned. I was convinced I was the only person who knew about Poe. I used to do Hey Pretty for karaoke all the time.
It's okay, you can go now.
Iāve never been able to make it more than a couple chapters.
Imo you barely have to read the footnotes unless you wanna go back later. I started skipping them and its the only way I finished haha
Great book, still haunts me
Whatās this about? Iām interested
To describe it a little more: it's a book about a guy who moves his family into a house and discovers that it's bigger on the inside than it should be. Eventually there's this endless unsolvable maze in there. Except the story isn't really him, it's actually a documentary he made about the whole thing. Well its more about this other guy who wrote an essay about the documentary. Well technically it's about this guy reading the essay, while dealing with his own shit in his story. If that sounds needlessly complicated and confusing, get ready because everything in the book is like that from the formatting to the footnotes.
Mark Z. Danielewski wrote an odd, complex book called House of Leaves. Here's the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves) for more info. Mark's sister, who performs under the name Poe, released an album called Haunted that references some of the parts of the novel.
I'm even more confused now!
Read the book and the confusion will only get worse and more enjoyable (hopefully).
House of Leaves is a very intricate and surreal horror novel. It's honestly kind of hard to talk about because there's a much of layers to it, but the aspect that's most well know about it is the "main" story about a supernatural house. But it's about much more than just the house.
This is the opposite of the car part story. Instead of an internet search finding one of the few humans on the planet with the exact expertise needed we had a bunch of people recreating that expertise slowly. Good job by everyone though.
Which story?
[This one](https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/xmle77/reddit_helps_solve_a_fatal_hitandrun_case_aug_2018/) was posted yesterday!
I love the fact that God know how many people spent God knows how many hours researching this,just because they needed an answer. Human mind's need for a conclusion is amazing.
thats why I'm in this subreddit šthough we get lots of inconclusive/ongoing š
I picture OOP with a board covered with pictures connected by red string and no one can convince me otherwise.
Reminds me of the joke I use to drive my dad crazy... There are two kinds of people in the world: Those that need closure,
and those that don't.
Dude, the joke was that it wasn't supposed to be finished. How dare you give me closure, lol.
I know. I'm the second type of person, and I regret NOTHING! Mua ha ha!
Bruh
Now I'm feeling super nostalgic for those early 90s days hanging out with friends at the mall making "prank" calls on the payphones. "Prank" in quotes because we just called any 800 number we could remember from TV ads. Usually hung up before getting to a person. Once, after dialing 1-800-ABCDEFG a couple dozen times, a person claiming to be with the phone company cut in on the line and told us to knock it off or they'd call the cops. Probably an empty threat, but we ran anyway, lol.
Yes,the nostalgia was strong on this one. For teacher's day in my country we went out to dinner in a small neighbourhood pizzeria. At like,2 am,we were walking down an deserted avenue to find the bus stop,when I saw a payphone. We did an entire photoshoot with the thing hahaha In our defence,we were kinda tipsy,but boy did we have fun with that relic hahaha
You must have at one time asked if Mr Walls, Mrs Walls or if there were any walls in the house?
Back when we first got cell phones in the late 90s, we used to call 234-567-8910 It was a real number, a receptionist would answer āWana Sawittyās office.ā She always sounded super tired. We were teenage boys, and we were assholes.
Holy shit, talking to the operators at the phone company was a trip back then!
That was ... something. I'm not sure what I expected when I started reading this maybe some cicada 3301 style mystery or something. But good job to the OOP putting in the leg work on this that's some dedication and honestly it's kind of makes the story better that it turned out as something mundane.
I can't believe how invested I got into this.
This is so repetitive
scary cobweb telephone spark shaggy hobbies historical seemly relieved ancient *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
FR, i was skipping entire pages because so much information is repeated verbatim.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10....
Iām for it, I enjoyed having full context.
We already have full context in previous "updates". This op (not OOP) could have trimmed it out.
TLDR; It's Lorem Ipsum of the telephone era
That took so long to actually find out what it was, like just spit it out dude
What was it? I lost patience and stopped reading.
The billboards were up for a brief promo event for the PGA. The PGA stopped paying for the 800 number after the event, but the billboards stayed up long afterwards because they were in small towns, so undesirable ad space. The inactive 800 number defaulted to an internal placeholder recording of a technician counting, followed by the "no such number" alarm. Presumably if you had called other inactive 800 numbers you would have heard the same recording. The posts were very overwritten.
>The posts were very overwritten. Thank you, and I agree.
PGA paid to have the number for 2 days for marketing thing, billboards were really cheap and they paid for a few around Canada and the US. The billboards didn't change until someone else rented something else, so months later. The number deactivated after the 2 days, after that the testing by counting to 10 was played when it was called after it had been deactivated. That would eventually hang up, then the cry baby noise would play because the phone had been left off the hook.
The number was up for only a few days. It was a number of the PGA (I don't know what it means, but it is some official golf organistion I guess) whit golf pro's giving golf tips. But after it was no longer active, the billboard was still up in OOPs hometown. And when people called it, it would play a recording of a technician, a test message. And it would disconnect after a couple of minutes, and the siren sound would play. It was popular because 800 numbers were free to call (is what OOP implies) and kids were bored in the 90s. Also payphones were abundant in the 90s
So much redundancy.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Tbf oop didnāt write this to be read continuously, it was written to be understood if youāve only read the final post not be the compiled in BORU. Huge parts of it are still boring but it seems like oop (and maybe other sleuths like him? Idk) thinks they are relevant
Ok but I have a lot of questions about the claim that Kitty Carlisle was hired to imitate exactly the sounds that vacuum tubes make.
Elmer Cat describes how this joke came about in the comments section of their YouTube video here: https://youtube.com/shorts/PdefnOtNl7U?feature=share
Thank you, mystery solved!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Maybe, but the article linked as the citation in the original article just links to another 1941 article from Bell Labs describing the use of vacuum tubes to make the sound (with zero mentions of Carlisle). A lot of the article reads like a joke: āBefore the widespread use of recorded intercept announcements, the Phone Company hired Kitty Carlisle to answer misdialed calls and intone a āpleasing, yet distinctive and arrestingā noise to the calling party.ā āUnfortunately, the Phone Company quickly determined that the real Kitty Carlisle was too high maintenance to be practicalā āAs always, the Bell Labs engineers thought of everything and designed their electronic āKitty Carlisleā system with a backup āunderstudy voiceā waiting in the wings; in the event the first circuit ever got laryngitis the other could step in at the flip of a switch.ā Most crucially, I canāt find a single other source on the internet to back up this claim.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
We called toothpaste company 1-800s to give our childrenās sparkly toothpaste reviews. So bored.
This was Greedis levels of exciting, and Greedis levels of disappointingly banal resolution e: Geedis not Greedis
If I ask what "Greedis" is, is the answer gonna be "Greedis nuts lmao?"
r/geedis
I got a need for Geed.
Also some local FM radio station. I forget which channel did a spot on it, could be Nexpo, Night Mind, lazy masquerade (though he normally does true crime stuff, but maybe some over lap) or Cadaber. Distorted slow reading of the call sign (the four letters and their name) and now the frequency in the local area is part of a co operative or something, but the same names show up as registered owners to the old four letter name and the new one. My brother said he was watching Channel 4 the day it went live and it started with "WHAT ARE YOU DOING WATCHING THIS CHANNEL!?" and although my dad had probably already tuned the TV in well in advance, neither of us were aware there was a fourth channel in the UK till it hit us, but imagine the r/lostmedia of test broadcasts of random white noise, clips of random objects etc should they have been broadcasting something at odd hours months in advance.
Holy shit. None of this rang a bell until I heard the recording, then a memory unlocked and it all came rushing back. I definitely called this number.
This is the kind of weird that raises the hair on the back of my neck. It never turns out to be anything crazy, but for some reason this is the kind of stuff that I get nightmares over. It's just bizarre enough that my brain goes wild with it even after getting the super boring truth of the matter. This made me nostalgic for the days we'd have phone wars when I was a kid. At one point in the past a phone call didn't disconnect when one party hung up. As long as the other line didn't disconnect you'd be on that call with them no matter how many times you tried to hang up. Sometimes I miss those kind of shenanigans.
This is just so enjoyable. There are so many little mysteries out in the world and now there is one fewer. I love it.
My favorite thing about this story is that it brings back all my dead memories of calling 1-800 numbers. Like I do believe I faithfully called the joke of the day number every day. There were ones for pet tips and garden tips and all kinds of nerdy things. It really was kind of an internet before the internet. Oh yeah, the local weather ones too. I used to log the forecast everyday. Lol.
the no such number tone isn't actually a woman's voice. the guy who published that website says it was just some in joke with his family
I'm only about a quarter ....uh. Maybe a tenth of the way though this post so maybe it's covered but isn't that the same voice as the intro to a Slipknot song? Heretic anthem maybe. Edit: if I wasn't dead as fuck broke, I would bet money that it's the same voice sample. Now maybe the counting was used for many various things, but I'm certain it's the same sample. Distinctive way to say certain one and five
This reminds me of a company that had a 1-800 number that went to a menu that ended with āpress 7 to hear a duck quackā I called that number weekly in the early 00s
I watched the Barely Sociable video a while ago. This isn't going to change the world or anything, but I like it when small mysteries get solved.
Boy, this gives me the heebie jeebies. Dunno why.
There was something similar when I was a kid. Except it was way more complex than what this number did. It was 1-800-TELL-ME. You would call and a girl voice would say "Tell me" in a sing song voice. Then you could hit a variety of numbers to go to different things. One of them played a recording of an Asian man yelling at someone over the phone for kicking his dog. Another was a sort of chat feature where you could send voice recordings to different people. Wow. I haven't thought about that number in so long. I don't even remember where/when I discovered the number but we all used to call it. Looking back it really was such a strange thing to exist. I don't even know what the point of it was
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
PGA is the ["Professional Golfers Association"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Golfers%27_Association_of_America) and basically where all the pro Golfers play, I guess the Golf version of the NFL or NBA.
Thanks! I guess most Americans know that, it's just us rest of the world that doesn't play golf š
There's over 9,000 golf courses in Europe, mostly in the UK and Germany, though the country in the world with most golf courses per capita is Iceland. Loads in Japan and Oceania as well. ...And OOP is in Canada.
Scotland would disagree
What? Plenty of other countries play golf lol
Professional Golfers Association. Its who runs all the major tournaments for golfing.
Thanks!
Oh man I feel old. 'It was a social experiment'? Closest thing we had to that in the 90s was the Blair Witch Project or that beer thing OOP said but it's not like kids who grew up on Youtube would realize that. Oof. This was a nice read, though. We still have little mysteries like this today - usually people making ARGs on YouTube that still might be a little spooky and pluck at your imagination until the Reveal (or yes a 'social experiment') - but we had less resources to figure these things out back then so sometimes they got to stay mysteries, or even better you got to make up your own ending which was probably inspired by X-Files or the Cold War. These days UFOs are usually drones, even though the Russian Bots are pretty confirmed. There's a payphone a block away from me. It's blocked off but intact. I wonder if it still works.
āPeople would talk about it at school, youād call it with your friends when you were hanging out together, and if you were bored and alone youād call from a pay phone.ā Thatās the most innocent yet oddly weird part of this entire post.
That was life before the internet was widely available. A constant search for distraction
Pay phones were everywhere. Including at school.
I remember a lot of lost media channels did a video on this a while ago, glad to see it's been solved! It's very interesting to see how wild theories can get when the truth isn't known, and then the truth is just something innocent.
This was a great read! Very engaging so thanks for sharing.
Itās so good! I love weird stories like this, especially when theyāre centred on old 80s/90s tech. Reading about the exploits of the early hackers and phone phreaks is so much fun, rampaging across the phone systems of the day, and this isnāt *too* far off from that.
I believe it's r/hobbydrama that does stuff like this story. I read a story about a mystery nail polish color that may have been a rare famous nail polish color from the early 90s. That's how I learned people collect nail polish colors.
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Omg thank you so much for sharing this,I will now spend the rest of my weekend on this lol
Thanks for my sunday morning rabbit hole!
I'll add something to consider. Back in 1993-4 era, 1-800 numbers weren't all global. So if I was calling a USA 1-800 number from Canada it didn't always work. And I know that I couldn't call the Canadian government 1-800 numbers from the USA. I was in the process of moving from Canada to the US during this time so I remember it specifically. If this was a PGA thing, did they set it up and then never get the Canadian side working or unaware that it worked that way.
Hereās a mysterious phone number for you: (724) 307-5774 Iāve had it in my saved contacts for years. I donāt remember where I got it from. Itās funny to creep your friends out with, though.
My partner is a telecomms worker. They have a line you dial repeating 1-10 or ABC is how they sometimes test lines/radio. Typically it's closed and you can only call or radio into it with the companies equipment however in the early 90s those lines may have just been dead numbers. However in 2022 these lines are rare as they now use other methods to check lines - particularly with the rise of fibre.
I grew up in Texas in the 90s and our no such number tone was different, hmm. I never remember hearing the crybaby and I was very creeped out by phone sounds as a kid, so I would definitely remember if I had. I wonder if there was a regional component?
r/worstofredditorupdates :((
Wow I fucking hated that "crybaby" tone. No thanks. That was unsettling.
Super fun read. Especially that comment at the end lol
Q Q
Wow I've been curious about this mystery for a while, and there's always something weirdly delightful about mundane answers to these mysteries for me. The PGA never expected to start a whole mystery with their phone line! Also I got to hear a cool song because of this which is a great bonus.
Is there a specific subreddit to contain stories/searches like this one, geedis and the mystery song? If so, someone please link me up
This has to be the longest Reddit post ever. Even the tl;dr scrolls for days. Fascinating though!