from Tray
They heard a disembodied voice coming through...
Back in the 1980’s (I couldn't have been any older than seven, which means my brother was eleven), my brother and I made common practice of pretending to be DJ’s, by recording our favorite songs from the radio onto tapes (this was before CDs and Limewire mind you).
Now, many people may recall that radios from that era lacked the dubbing option, which allows one to record without picking up noises in the room. He and I would sit barely breathing, just to ensure that our favorite songs didn’t have any mistakes when we played them back.
We were doing this one day and luckily our noisy sisters were gone, and our mother was asleep with the flu, leaving only him and me alone in the house. I can still recall the song we had just recorded: “Just my fantasy,” by the 1980’s R&B group, GUY. The DJ ended the song abruptly, and my brother, always a perfectionist, decided that we should remove it from the tape, because it wasn’t the version with the extended music that we had hoped for.
I really liked the song, so I begged him to play it back one more time before recording over it, and when he did, I nearly peed my pants. There was a deep, angry, male voice saying to us over and over, “Turn that damn radio down!” and sometimes, “Turn the radio down now, boy!”
We woke my mother and played it for her, but she was not convinced that he and I had not disguised our pre-pubescent voices, just to play a prank on her. She ripped the tape up in anger, frustrated that we would wake her from her sick bed just to amuse ourselves.
Part of me wanted so badly to convince myself that it had been a joke, and that maybe he had found some way to scare his kid brother; but logic prevailed. I had been sitting there beside him, holding my breath the entire time the song recorded, and neither he, nor I, heard the voice until we played the tape back.
For the duration of our remaining three years in that house, I was afraid to go anywhere by myself. People (if you can call them that) were there that could see and hear me, but went unseen by my eyes. As a grown 29 year old man, I still have trouble sleeping, from time to time, when I think about what that incident proved: spirits are around us all the time, watching and listening to us, as we go on with our everyday activities. Sometimes, they just may be bothered by our routines.