Chris worked overnight at a call center outside Phoenix. Tech support for an internet company. Mostly boring shifts.
His coworker Diane played read aloud scary stories through her headset during slow hours. She was into true crime too, had a whole ranking system for serial killer documentaries nobody asked her for.
She found the recordings on some app. A list of read aloud scary stories people narrated themselves. Amateur stuff. Some had background noise, dogs barking, traffic.
Chris didn’t care about it much at first. Just heard bits leaking through her headset when the office got quiet.
One night he caught part of a story about a call center. Same setup as theirs basically. An employee kept getting the same customer call over and over, always right before shift change.
He mentioned the coincidence to Diane later, mostly as a joke. She didn’t laugh. Said their own voicemail box had been doing something similar for a bit now, she just hadn’t brought it up because it sounded stupid saying it out loud.
Chris checked it during his next break, more out of boredom than anything. Scrolled the list. Found one from an unlisted number, no real timestamp he could make sense of, just sitting near the top like it had been added recently.
He played it. Breathing at first. Then a voice reading off a name and address, slow, like filling out a form nobody asked for.
Didn’t know the voice. Asked the supervisor about it the next shift. Nobody could explain it, no call log matched anything close to it.
Diane brought up more stories to read scary stuff she’d found related to it, said other call centers online mentioned something similar, voicemails with no incoming record attached.
Chris didn’t fully buy it. Figured it was a prank from someone else on shift, easier explanation than the alternative.
It happened again some weeks after, he couldn’t tell you exactly how many. Different message that time, just numbers read out slow, no context to any of it.
He stopped checking the box first thing anymore. Left that for whoever came in during daylight.
Diane kept her stories to read scary playlist going regardless, said it was background noise at this point more than anything scary to her specifically.
Chris asked once if she thought it was connected somehow. She said probably not, then went off on a tangent about a documentary she’d watched the night before, some cold case in Ohio that had nothing to do with any of this.
One more message came through eventually, empty, just silence sitting there when he played it back, nothing he could really describe beyond that.
He mentioned it to Diane once more, she just shrugged and went back to her true crime rankings, moved a documentary up two spots for reasons she didn’t explain.
Chris still works there. Doesn’t check the voicemail box early in his shift anymore, just lets it sit until someone else deals with it eventually.
