Strange 911 Calls

It was around three point thirty in the morning on August eleventh, twenty eighteen. The police department in Pueblo, Colorado had just received a nine to one one call from Imperial Memorial Gardens, which was a combination of funeral home and cemetery. The operator picked up, as they usually did, asked about the emergency. Instead of a response, there was merely static on the other line. To help you, hello, hello, Hello, as standard protocol says, Police officers were dispatched to check on Imperial Memorial Gardens. When they arrived, the funeral home was dark and silent. In an interview, the police captain claimed, probably just line trouble, right, let's go with that. But if you're anything like me, line trouble isn't enough of an explanation for a call placed from a home for the dead at a time when no one was there. Sure it's a reasonable one. I mean, you kind of expect police officers to offer an explanation that makes sense. Maybe this mysterious call was just a bit of quote line trouble, but maybe it wasn't. Either way, I wanted to dig deeper into these strange, possibly supernatural nine to one one calls Some have pretty logical explanations and others are a bit more unexplainable. My name is Edwin, and here's the horror story. Back in twenty fifteen, the Honolulu Police Department was having problems with dropped nine to one one calls bet are known as ghost calls, ones where nobody would be on the line when the operator picked up, like the call from Imperial Memorial Gardens. And just like with that case, police officers were dispatched to check on the residences that the calls came from, just to be sure that everything was okay. They kept noticing that most of the time the homeowners were out when the calls were placed. One nine one one call even came from a landline that had been out of service for months. According to a technician from the company Hawaiian Telecon, electrical shortages and old copper wires caused these ghost calls. Once the copper wires were disconnected and replaced with fiber optic ones, the ghost calls stopped. So for these ghost calls, it seems the line troubled explanation actually made sense, but advancements in technology also made these ghost phone calls happen more frequently. Cell phone companies are making it easier to place nine one one calls if necessary. Holding down the volume and power button on an Apple iPhone for too long will dial nine one one. Siri could accidentally call if she picks up your voice saying nine one one. Even a smart watch can make an accidental emergency call if the wearer drops it. But if it's so easy, how are dispatchers supposed to know what to listen to what to ignore. Fortunately, they give the callers the benefit of the doubt most of the time and treat them seriously. But these ghost calls have caused lethal consquenses across different departments in the US. In twenty seventeen, t mobile phones were mysteriously calling nine one one and clogging up the lines. This turned deadly in Dallas, Texas, where a babysitter was watching a six month old whose name was Brandon. When he fell out of his bed. He hit his head and became unconscious. The babysitter called nine one one three separate times and found herself on hold for over thirty minutes. Brandon was taken to the hospital after the calls to nine one one failed to go through, but it was too late. For him. Similarly, when David Taffitt found his husband Brian unconscious after work, he tried calling nine one one and was unable to get through. After multiple attempts, he drove Brian to the hospital, where he passed away. T Mobile reported an issue when customers called nine one one for some reason, their phones began placing multiple calls again and again, even after the caller hung up to try again. When nine one one dispatchers attempted to return the call, they were met with a busy tone, unable to reach the caller. That wasn't the first time T Mobile flogged the lines in Dallas either for a nine one one operator. Ghost calls can be scary simply because the cause is unknown. These calls could be accidental or even pranks by mischievous children. At the end of the day, there's probably a logical explanation behind them. However, there are plenty of cases where the nine to one to one call is only the beginning. If you've ever seen The Conjuring two, there's a scene where the family calls nine to one one after experiencing a terrifying paranormal event, and though a unit is dispatched after officers arrive, they informed the family that they did not investigate paranori normal activity as it is not a police matter. Of course, that's just a movie and this is not the case in real life. In fact, looking into the paranormal side of police work yield some pretty disturbing results. Police One, a website dedicated to sharing information and resources among the global law enforcement community, compile the list of submitted stories that include supernatural events. Now, the names that we included here have been altered to protect the people's privacy, but the stories here of what we read on there. One nine to one to one operator named Mary received a call about a teenager in the middle of an alleged possession. On the caller's end, Mary could hear two people locked in a screaming match. Their voice is overlapping. One voice sounded like it belonged to a young girl, presumably the possessed team, The other sounded like an adult man. When Mary asked all to tell the male voice to stop yelling, caller responded that only the teenage girl was yelling, that both voices were coming from her. Later, Mary replayed the call for a colleague who also heard two distinct voices, apparently she doesn't know what happened to the teen, or at least she didn't share if there was more to the story. In her submission, Mary cites drugs or mental illness as likely explanations for the so called possession, but what the caller said about the two voices was enough to make her ponder a more sinister possibility. The next story features a welfare check call, which is when someone calls nine to one one because they're concerned about someone else's well being and they want the police to just go check on them. I call the best ghost story. This one happened on a dark and stormy night around three in the morning, when an officer Phil took a call from a woman who was concerned about her elderly neighbor, whom she hadn't seen or spoken to in weeks. Phil drove out to the residence and met the collar and the two of them headed next door to the old woman's house. They started at the side door, where Phil knocked no answer. No lights were on either. Then they tried the back of the house and got the same results. Through the front windows. However, Phil actually saw a light. Unfortunately, the windows were too high off the ground for either him or the Collar to check, and so they grabbed a bucket from the collar's house and Phil stood on it to peek inside. The light came from a TV, which displayed a plain blue screen. There were no other signs of life in the room or the darkened hallway beyond it, and there was no sign of the old woman. Phil turned back to the Collar to update her unanswered calls, mail piling up outside of the house. All of the evidence added up to the neighbor being dead. But when Phil turned back to face inside the house, a woman stared back at him, her face pressed to the glass. Terrified, Phil fell from the bucket. He scrambled to regain his position, and by the time he had climbed back up, the old woman had moved to the hallway. She turned her face to Phil as she slowly walked down the hallway and disappeared from sight. He climbed down and told the caller that he saw her neighbor and just drove away. Phil never returned to that house or found out the truth about the old woman who lived there, whether she was alive or dead. These supernatural phone calls can be terrifying for any officer to respond to whether the officer is a rookie or a veteran. In nineteen eighty eight, Officer Michael Wilke was fresh on the job who was working as a part time officer in Chickapee, Massachusetts. Because he was new, he was stuck on the night shift. During one of his shifts, Dispatch received a call about a noise coming from the old abandoned Air Force Hospital. Old furniture, operating tables in hospital beds. Everything was still there. When Michael and his partner arrived, they found nothing. After leaving, dispatch received the call again, another noise complained concerning the old building. Michael and his partner returned to the hospital. This time they found that the furniture had been rearranged and the doors that were previously shut were now open. Headless pigeons lined up on the windowsills and Satanic drawings all over the walls and the disturbing altar. The satanic ritual scenario had not been covered in his training, but Michael Wilke decided to treat it the same as any other call and went on to secure the scene. They walked past the disturbing altar. They looked in every room, expecting to find someone, and no one was found at the site. Experts were brought in to look at the scene, as they stated, this was a legitimate Satanic ritual. This wasn't just a group of kids messing around. Thirty years later, he still describes the abandoned hospital as spooky, like walking into a horror movie and feeling like you're going to die. To this day, the incident still unnerves Officer Wilke, and stories like these continue in recent times. It's a topic that's very common to nine one one cause alien sightings. Stay with me, Okay, what's going on over there? Okay, ladies, Me, my dad and my brother. We're working at a truck in our backyard and we have a big lot outside right court. Okay, were working and we just see in a corner of eye something fall on from the sky and it was with light and when I hit down, it was like a big impact and we felt we felt like an energy. And then and then and then we hear like a lot of footsteps near us. And then we have a big a big equipment and we see and there's a there's like an a fool person beside it, and another one's deside and it has big eyes and looking at us, and it's still the More recently, in the early hours of May one, twenty twenty three, a family from Las Vegas called nine to one one about an alleged UFO that landed in their backyard. Okay, where is this on your property? Uh? And in my backyard? I swear to god this is not adult but this is actually weird. So there's two people or two subtracts matter in your backyard. Correct. And they're very large, they're like a foot nine feet foot. I don't know they're they're like they look like illiots. Well, big eyes. They have big eyes like like I can't exclit it, and big a mouth. They're chiny eyes. And they're not human the one hundred percent they're not humans. The audio clips just heard is between one of the family members and the nine to one one operator. In addition to this call, the police department released bodycam footage from the responding officers. The footage doesn't show the officers going into the family's backyard because it's private property, so we can't know what, if anything, landed back there. The case was closed quickly. It seems that there was nothing unusual in the family's backyard when the officers arrived. However, we do know that the responding officers had reason to believe the family wasn't lying state. Minutes before the nine to one one call, another officer saw something unusual. That officer's bodycam footage, which a local news station used on a segment about the possible UFO sighting, shows a neon green object speeding across the Las Vegas night sky for just a few seconds for dropping below the horizon line, and the bodycam footage, officers can be heard telling a neighbor that one of their partners saw something that this was the reason they were even investigating this call. Did you see it? Did you see it? What did you see? It was like it was like a big creature, a big creature. Because I'm not gonna be yes, you guys. One of my partners said they saw something follow this guy too, So that's why I'm kind of curious. Did you see anything land in your backyard? Or they see like a big s They see like a big, big yard, I say, a cat over there. That neighbor hadn't seen anything themselves, but they continue driving around searching for possible aliens. As he was leaving the house. One of the responding officers told the family not to call the police if whoever they saw return. No, it does nine foot things come back, don't call us, all right, deal with it yourself. I ain't dealing with that. The officer's insistence, combined with that nervous chuckle, betrays his fear that aliens might have truly been walking among the Las Vegas suburbs, despite solid evidence to prove it. Nine one one hoax calls are a misdemeanor with the penalty that can lead up to a year in county jail in a fine of one thousand dollars despite zero evidence or video footage. Family certainly believes in what they saw. The research for this episode, we noticed a peculiar pattern of the thousands of calls to nine one one that could be deemed a necessary hundreds involve UFOs, and UFOs, as you know, are hardly unique, especially the sightings. In March eighth, nineteen ninety four, For example, there was a mass UFO scare in Holland, Michigan. The Holland Police Department received around sixty nine one one calls about lights emanating from cylindrical objects flying above Lake, Michigan. In response to these reports, the nine one one operator called the National Weather Service. A meteorologist answered, and the two of them were on the phone for thirteen minutes while the meteorologists described to the nine one one operator what he was seeing on radar. The now retired meteorologist Jack Bushong stated in an interview with Kalamazoo Michigan Channel three news that the lights were just moving so fast, and two more started coming into play there. Then, he continues, I really had little time to describe where they were before they had moved and jumped again. He recalled operating the radar that night and that the object appeared to be alone at first and then joined by another. You could see it hover, stop, shoot up five thousand feet into the air, and then ten thousand. He recalls the moment the officer said that he was saying the same thing as with the sixty locals that called nine to one one that night. Jack Bushong remains confused about the incident. After almost thirty years, these sidings remain a mystery. In early January of this year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an unclassified version of a report on UFO sightings although the report calls them unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs. This report says that there were over five hundred UAP sidings between two thousand and four and twenty twenty two. The majority of those sightings, three hundred and sixty six were reported between March twenty twenty one in August of twenty twenty two. Almost half of these UAPs were categorized as unmanned aircrafts, balloons or balloon like objects, or airborne clutter, but the other half, one hundred and seventy one UAPs, to be exact, have quote unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities according to the report. Of course, one possible explanation that the report offers for these uncategorized UAPs set their evidence of other governments invading American airspace, since sightings tend to happen near restricted areas. For example, the May first sightings took place near Creech and Nellis Air Force baces. Last June, NASA announced their intention of putting together a research team to further study yuaps. Almost a year later, on May thirty first, twenty twenty three, they hosted a live meeting to discuss their findings. This live meeting, which can be found on YouTube, was four hours long, and it took just over two hours for the panel to address the elephant in the room. There is no conclusive evidence suggesting an extraterrestrial origin for UAP, said science journalists Nadia Drake on behalf of the panel. Does that mean that sightings like the one in Vegas in early May were just a trick of the imagination. I think it's safe to assume the police officers didn't see any aliens that night. That doesn't mean the family that called nine to one one to report the UAP were lying, right. The fact is we just don't have enough evidence to know for sure, and that's the case for many of these supernatural stories of nine to one to one cause. Maybe the reason these stories haunt both those who lived through them and those who hear about them later, so that we don't know the truth. Whether it's as big as an alien siding or as small as a dropped phone call, there are some things that will never be explained, and it's up to us to decide what we believe. Horror story is built by your suggestions for ideas and comments that help shape everything. 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