Are any of you familiar with something called a ‘party line?’
The last time I remember seeing an ad for one was when I was a teenager. I used to like staying up late, waiting until my parents went to sleep to indulge in my nightly bong hits that were necessary to put me to sleep because I was, and still am, an insomniac. They would usually come on after 1 AM and would pop up during commercial breaks until 3 AM or so, depending on what channel I was watching. They would always feature the same gimmick. Women could call in free and connect with ‘local’, and supposedly single, men. The men, however, had to pay per minute to use the line. The commercials would always have some nubile, slender, super model looking woman in lingerie or skimpy clothes just hanging out in bed or on the sofa, smiling and laughing on her cordless telephone. If you couldn’t tell, the concept is a bit archaic. Chat rooms and forums, even things like Omegle, would make the party line concept kind of obsolete, considering they’re usually free for all and some didn’t require you to be 18 or older with a credit card on file like the party lines did.
I never really got into them. I was too young to call in when I saw the ads and, when I got older, I assumed that they were obsolete. Not to mention, I’m an introvert and typing has always been easier for me than speaking to someone. I preferred the chat rooms and forums (like Reddit) that I assumed had all but taken their place. There is just something about being able to hide behind the screen of a phone, tablet, or computer that summons my extrovert alter ego forth to speak in my place. I had pretty much forgotten party lines existed until recently.
I was one of those misguided souls that saw success with their online small business during the pandemic and ultimately quit my job in 2021 to keep up with my shipments as a sole proprietorship and the one handcrafting every item I had listed, each customized and personalized, I couldn’t easily juggle having a standard 9-5 on top of it. My crafts became more than a hobby and for a short period of time I enjoyed my success. Everything changed last year with the economic shifts echoing issues the pandemic had created or set in motion that ultimately came to a head during this past year. I needed to re-evaluate my pricing, my inventory, and how I wanted to proceed with my business with inflation and people becoming more frugal with their spending. This, and the platform I used to sell my crafts on jacked their commission rates up and the customers using the platform became more expectant of next day shipping on items that took me literal weeks to make and finalize just one of. I couldn’t just throw in the towel though. I still had orders to fill and I couldn’t keep up with my current demand if I went back to the 9-5 thing. I started to look for other options, something I could do at home to fill my downtime that offered me enough extra cash to cover living expenses.
So, I started looking for opportunities in remote work. You would think with the recent shift toward more remote job listings that finding something to accommodate me wouldn’t be that difficult, but when I wasn’t sure that the job listing was some kind of scam, I was competing for positions that were already filled by the time I even saw the listing or filled out an application. I was frustrated and desperate. I had to close my shop to get ahead of my orders which left me with no income. I needed a solution that would make me some money fast and I wasn’t about to start selling drugs or my body for some quick cash. I was considering pawning pretty much everything I owned, though.
I had been checking my email one morning and came across an email that had ‘Voice Acting Opportunity, Great Pay, Women Only’ in the subject line that hadn’t been sent from any of the employment websites I had signed up to receive leads from. The body of the email was pretty vague, but I was able to figure out that it was actually one of those ‘party lines’ that I had learned about from those late night commercials years ago that needed women to populate the line as there were always more male callers than female callers. They paid per minute like a phone sex line and offered weekly direct deposit with a super low deposit threshold that was awesome.
Deep down, I knew that they WERE a phone sex line, more or less. The draw of the standard party line was that you were connecting with local singles, but this company didn’t seem to advertise themselves the way the lines I saw on television ads back then did. When I clicked on the link to visit the website and do some research to at least verify that the opportunity was legitimate, I was sent to a polished homepage that outlined the position, the per minute rates, and what would be expected of you as an applicant. I was in a relationship and lived with my boyfriend at that time I was worried that my man would be somewhat pissed off that I was essentially flirting and seducing other men on the party line, but I rationalized it in my head as it being a means to an end. We were struggling to just pay our current rent and I knew that our landlord was about to raise it another $200 the coming year and we couldn’t afford that with just his income alone. We barely afforded it when I was turning a decent profit off my sales.
After doing the math for hourly pay, I figured that I would make something like $18-$36 an hour depending on how many callers there were on the line due to surge pay rates. Of course, that sold me. I didn’t see anything else where I could sit at home, work on my crafts and fill orders, all actively while making a living wage (or at least a decent one) talking on the phone with strangers. Despite the fact that I loathed talking on the phone, it was the best opportunity I had found. I thought it would be silly to pass it up. I would at least give it a shot. If it didn’t work out, I would find something else. I quickly filled out the application and submitted it without a second thought. I would get a notification that my application had been accepted within a few hours.
The acceptance email wasn’t automated, to my surprise. It was written by a human that had a name (Janet). I would find out that the company was entirely female owned and operated, where the support team and moderators were also ‘talkers’ on the party line, which was cool. The email outlined what I would need to submit for my payment info and I had to fill out a standard W9 form for work as an independent contractor, unaffiliated with the platform itself. The very last thing that I had to do before I could go live was complete an orientation call with one of the moderators that would explain how everything worked and what they were trying to achieve. There was a calendar with time slots available and I was able to choose one for that evening. Everything up until that point went smoothly and I was pretty confident that I wasn’t giving my personal info out to some scam artist.
The orientation call made things even more real and comfortable for me. Naturally, I put myself on mute and set my phone down on the counter while I began to mix a batch of resin for one my projects while we waited for other would-be talkers to join the conference call. The woman hosting the conference call was named Gina and she was much older than I am, which didn’t surprise me. I assumed that I would be dealing with people 5, 10, even 20+ years older than I because of how long the whole ‘anonymous chat line’ concept had been around. She explained that she used to call into party lines with her girlfriends in college. The first time, they called together just to see what it was like, all of them huddled around the corded phone they had in their dorm which reminded me of times my friends and I would pop on random webcam chat sites together and just fuck around with strangers. This was no different in my mind. She would go on to say that it became somewhat addicting to her and she called in a lot after that when she was alone. When she found out decades later that she could get paid for doing something she loved doing, she ran with it. Gina said that she had grown kids and a husband so she preferred logging in to the chat line late at night when hubby and the kids were asleep, which I planned to do myself. It was hard enough for me to have a conversation with my own mother when my boyfriend was home and doing things (loudly) in the background. I figured I would call in when he was at work or late at night when he was asleep.
Gina explained the rules, which were minimalistic. The main rule was that we should never give out any personal information on the phone line, which was a no-brainer. She explained that some callers may think that, after talking with you on the line for months or whatever, that asking for your phone number or email address to contact you instead is acceptable, but she warned against it and told us to come up with whatever reason we wanted to avoid doing so. For our privacy, we were advised to create a fake name, a handle that we would go by on the line. She also said we could even go so far as to create an alter ego or character for our chat line persona. Since there was no way for callers and talkers to identify themselves other than their voices - no profiles, no photos, no ID numbers- that we could essentially be whomever we desired, but to try and keep it simple so that we could stick to our story once we started getting regulars.
This opened up a world of possibilities in my mind. Aside from telling us that we are not to, for any reason, disclose that we are getting compensated for our call time, Gina stressed a final rule that was probably one of the most bizarre things I have ever heard in a job related orientation.
“Never, ever, connect with any caller or in a chat room that mentions 000343.”
I didn’t really question it then. I was sure that she was referring to maybe a scam or something that some callers got away with. I made note of it and hung around for a few minutes to listen to questions the other girls had before hanging up on the conference call. We were told that we would receive another email from the admin within the week that would contain our login information to start working on the line. I was excited to give it a shot. I had already come up with a fake name and birthday, but kept my own appearance and other details / interests so I wasn’t fumbling to pull those things out of my butt when I was on a call. I got pretty good at pretending to be Kali from Virginia, a buxom and bubbly blonde that was literally the opposite of everything I was in real life, save for having big boobs, which hardly mattered when taking anonymously on a party line. I could have been hideous, a paraplegic, an abomination spawned through genetic experiments. It’s not like the caller would know any better. That was kind of what I liked the most about doing it. I was never judged right off the bat by my appearance.
The next morning, I received the email with my login info and I dialed into the line right away. It was about ten- thirty. I didn’t expect there to be a whole lot of people calling before noon on a Tuesday, but I wasn’t looking to connect immediately. I just wanted to see what it would be like when I called in. When dialing the 800 number, I was prompted by an automated recording to press one to login and so I did, entering my login number and pin. I was the asked to record a short greeting describing what I wanted to talk about and record my name so callers would know what to refer to me as and how to pronounce my name. I recorded something ambiguous, saying my name was “Kali and I was just looking for some company.”
Once I got passed the recording segment, the system would start to play greetings from callers that were on the line at that moment. They were recordings, just like what I had just recorded, but I only heard mostly men, which I think customers could determine which side they wanted to be placed in when calling as I did come across some allegedly transgender and bisexual callers that announced this in their recordings. I wasn’t surprised at all that there were a lot of recordings that followed the old ‘ASL’ formula for their introduction.
“6’5”, crew cut brown hair, blue eyes, fit, I work out. 38 year old professional looking for hot young girls ready to play with daddy.”
That was a tame example. There was much worse that I had heard when I called in, That was why I was thankful for the ‘block caller’ feature which allowed me to block a caller for that session or indefinitely and I wouldn’t have to listen to their sick recordings anymore. The demographic from the line was mostly middle aged ‘professionals’, that is, men that claimed to be lawyers, real estate investors, stock brokers, and such. There would sometimes be recordings that just sounded like someone moaning or listening to porn in the background. Yes. Very cringe. Despite all this, I did manage to connect with some pretty awesome people on the line and did find that not everyone was looking for a phone quickie on their lunch break, which made it worth my time. We had already been advised to avoid greetings that sounded like the caller was already ‘on the edge’ because of the per minute rate. You always wanted to find a caller you could either talk down or seduce over time, whether the ultimate ending involved an orgasm or a promise to find you if they called in again in the future.
The other cool thing about the line was that I didn’t have people calling me through a VOIP or something that masked and rerouted the call. Everyone was connected on the line by pressing a button. If you didn’t want to be on the line anymore, you hung up. If you just didn’t want to talk to someone and were stuck in a conversation with them, you could hit the asterisk button (star) and return to the main menu recording, so I was only available to receive connection requests when I wanted to be, never ‘on call.’
I found myself calling in frequently after I saw how it worked. This particular line had a new feature that I liked to use sometimes because it came with additional ‘promotional’ pay. This new feature didn’t come up until a few months of me working on the line and I had come across it at random when calling in one night. The recording that asked for your login had asked if I wanted to “continue to live chat” or join a “party room”, which was basically like a chat room on the phone. You would enter the chat room based on the recording that would play for its ID number and there would be up to five people in the chat talking together. There were party rooms for all different kinds of topics and with all different types of people talking in them. You could join in on a party room as a listener if all the talker slots were filled, but if you did this you did not get paid for your ‘lurking’.
There was one party room that I found myself dialing into every chance I got. I had made friends with some of the regulars there and they were always talking about crazy things, everything from conspiracy theories to what they thought about religion or politics. It was very open and non-judgmental. Nobody was ready to rip you a new one if you disagreed with them. Everyone was simply open to a new opinion or mindset. There wouldn’t always be open talker slots for that room though, so sometimes I was forced to listen until one opened up and I was next in queue to fill it. A man named ‘Zeke’ had created the room and acted as a moderator for it, leading the discussion and keeping the civil, open atmosphere that I loved about it.
One night after I had been a regular to the party line and that room for a couple months, Zeke and I were the only ones on the line and it was about one thirty in the morning. Zeke had brought up the topic of ghosts and hauntings, telling me some paranormal experiences he had had. He didn’t know that my solo work and main focus had been based around the creation of customized and personalized ritual and divination tools, such as runes, carved crystals, and such. Once I told him this, he got really excited, as it turned out, his wife was a practicing Wiccan. We talked about her beliefs and practices for some time, but I’m not sure at what point we started down the road of discussing curses in lieu of hauntings and the occult.
“Did you know that these party rooms were actually a feature on this line years ago?”
He said and that surprised me. The feature didn’t open up to me until a month or two into my work on the line and the mods had to give me a special log in for the promotional pay rate to be applied. Zeke confessed a while back that he had been calling in since he was in highschool, so if anyone knew, it was him.
“Yeah, so, basically they put them out and they didn’t catch on for many people. I guess people just really like the one on one connection, but there was one group that used them exclusively and they’re part of the reason they shut it all down for a while,”
Zeke explained. He had my interest and curiosity piqued. I was sitting there, listening to him, clutching my coffee mug until my knuckles turned white, waiting to hear what all happened.
“This group was one of the first dark web kidnapping rings. They would find their victims on the main line. Someone would listen to greetings and find a girl they thought would be good to go and they would tell her the pin to their chat room, 000343. I’m not sure the name of the room exactly. I tried to look for it when they came back online but I haven’t found one that fits. They would somehow get these girls to blab their real names and locations. Who knows how. Someone would allegedly show up at their house and kidnap them right out of their beds to participate in some fucked up rich people games. The company that owns this line caught on, I think before the FBI did, and shut down chat rooms before they could be held liable,”
The story shocked me. It shocked me because I couldn’t understand how they were able to find someone ready and willing to give out their personal information like that, but Zeke made it sound like the girls never had a choice, that the group would hypnotize them or something. Zeke could hear the anxiety in my voice when I asked questions and chuckled, telling me to calm down.
“This was like, twenty years ago. Nothing like that goes on here now, just perverts and weirdos, BUT, there’s a rumor I’ve heard that one of the girls’ ghosts haunts this line trying to lure an unsuspecting talker to take her place. They say her spirit is caught in the transmission signal, attached to the cellular wavelengths,”
That didn’t help my already overactive imagination. Once we got off the line that night, I crawled into bed with my boyfriend and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep. The adrenaline of an interesting subject was running through my veins. My mind was churning out scenarios that would easily become the plot of a nightmare in the future. As I laid there, staring up at the ceiling, my eyes following the shadows made by our little night light plugged into the wall, I thought I heard something like a vibration coming from where I plugged my phone in on my dresser. Every night before I logged into the chat line I would put my phone on ‘do not disturb’ before calling in so that notifications or random calls wouldn’t cut me off or interfere. My phone shouldn’t have been making any sound at all, not even a vibration, until nine o’clock in the morning. The more I ignored it, the louder and more annoying the sound became. Finally, I threw the blanket off of my body and swung my feet around to slide off the bed, padding quietly over to my phone. My boyfriend was snoring so loudly that there was no way that he heard my phone going off at all. When I looked at it, the screen was unlocked and I had a new text message from ‘Unknown.’
As someone who enjoys horror movies and works with occult and supernatural themes, the second I saw the new message pop up my heart sank into the pit of my stomach like I had just dropped after being on the incline, hovering over the edge of the track of a rollercoaster. I hesitated. What if I ignored it? Would it go away? I knew it wouldn’t. I knew I had to check. With a sigh, I opened the message and dropped my phone on the floor when I saw it.
The message was nothing but the number ‘343’ typed into a wall of text in the message box.
The second my phone hit the ground, the touch screen cracked. I cursed the cheap laminate flooring under my breath. I had just gotten the phone in the mail after upgrading from my old one and hadn’t even made the first payment yet. Filled with anger and fear, I decided I wasn’t going to even try to go to sleep. I took my phone with its stupid cracked screen out into our living room and plopped down on the couch. The first thing I did was do a search on the number that sent me the message.
At first, nothing showed in the results. The matches that were pulled weren’t accurate to the exact number, but, weirdly, when I scrolled through the results the website that I had been working for on their party line platform popped up. They had a list of VOIP numbers that talkers could call in if the main lines had too much traffic or wouldn’t let them connect. The number that was listed under the ‘unknown’ ID tag was one of those VOIP numbers, which was odd. I knew that the line was established decades before the internet was a widespread thing. It was highly unlikely that those numbers had any kind of SMS / MMS capability, but I wasn’t a technical genius or anything. Had one of them been hacked to pull off some kind of elaborate prank on the talkers?
Confused, I then typed in ‘000343’ into the search box. The first result was a zip code. Other results referenced everything from UPCs to HTML color codes. It then occurred to me..
When I created my pin numbers, I often looked at my phone keypad and came up with a four letter or six letter word or name that would be my pin and that I could easily reference the numbers for on my cell phone or any number pad. I picked up my phone and switched to the keypad screen under the call application and looked at the numbers 3-4-3 to see what letters correspond to the numbers. On a piece of paper, I wrote all the letters that were associated with the number 3 - D, E, F. I then looked to see which letters were associated with the number 4 - G H I. The answer was right in front of my face. I didn’t need to write out many anagrams to realize that ‘343’ spelled out ‘DIE.’
The uneasy feeling I had when I received the text message had grown and festered. It was nearing 3 AM and I didn’t want to wake my boyfriend up, especially if I was just being silly. I had already told him about what I had been doing to earn extra cash and he was wary of it. I didn’t want him to have any ammunition to talk me out of it entirely. I found the call in number for the chat line in my contacts and dialed in, signing in with my login and pin number. I went onto the party room line in search of Zeke’s room, but it wasn’t live on the line up after listening to them all the way through. I sighed, returning to the main line to listen to greetings. I just wanted to take my mind off of whatever spooky nonsense was happening and maybe get some sleep at some point before the sun came up.
Unsurprisingly, there was no shortage of creeps and perverts on the line at that hour. I found myself skipping through the greetings faster and faster as I went deeper into the recordings. There were a shocking amount of people on for the night, but barely any of them sounded like people I wanted to talk to. I knew I had to be hearing the end of the live recordings when I skipped on and segued into another that sounded like the caller was having connection issues. I could hear something like white noise, high and low frequencies, the combination of which made me feel dizzy, especially wearing the noise cancellation headset I used when talking on the line. Despite my uneasiness and the headache-inducing sound of the frequencies, I couldn’t bring myself to skip past the recording to move onto the next one. All I had to do was press the number ‘3’ and the mind-melting, ear-raping, noise would be gone. I tried with all of my willpower to force my finger to hit that button, but it was frozen, stuck, just like I was stuck listening to it.
The noise seemed to go on and on without end even though the recording had to be under forty seconds per the platform’s restrictions. Every muscle in my body was tense. It reminded me when I stupidly used a taser on myself as a kid just because I was curious as to what it felt like. In my mind’s eye, I imagined that my heart would also tense up and stop beating. I could feel the sweat beading under my hairline, dripping down my forehead, blurring my eyes, and splashing onto the phone screen in my head. Whether it was my tired eyes or the cracked corner of the screen that was causing it, the display was going in and out, the backlight strobing with it. I could see colorful lines appear across the call timer and number display. My mouth was dry, but all I could do was gulp air as I tried desperately to end the call or even just remove my headset. I was willing to toss my phone in the garbage disposal if I had to at this point. If the noise continued, I thought my ear drums would burst.
Finally, the noise seemed to cease entirely with a static ‘whoosh’. After a pause of complete silence, an ethereal voice came through as a feminine whisper in both ears.
“Come to the Blue Room. The code is 000343.”
I knew I didn’t have a choice. As soon as the message ended, my phone beeped as if I had hit a button on the screen and I was propelled to the main menu where I could only listen as the ‘Party Room’ option was selected from the menu and the titles and greetings played for each of the rooms that were live until that same voice declared that the live room ‘The Blue Room ‘ was looking for talkers. I watched in horror as the number ‘1’ was pressed on my keypad to join and then ‘000343’ when prompted for the passcode. Once connected to the room, all I heard was the same noise that I heard on the greeting in the live greetings lobby. Trying to fight whatever had control over me was futile, I knew now. I could feel tears welling up in the corners of my tired eyes and streaming down my cheeks, wetting the phone screen, mixing with the sweat of my terror. I opened my mouth. I didn’t want to, but I did.
I could feel the words starting to form. I knew what I was going to say. In my mind, I prayed for someone to help me before I made a horrible mistake. I closed my eyes, my lips began to move.
“My name is…”
“Babe? What are you doing up?”
My boyfriend was standing in the hall that led out into the living room with his arms crossed around his chest and tucked under his armpits. His presence must have broken the possession or the spell that had been cast on me because when he got my attention, I was able to hit the ‘End Call’ button and take my headset off my head. I had no words to tell him what was about to happen and what had already happened. I was lucky that I wasn’t compelled to do something much worse than what was about to happen and I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had given my personal information to whatever or whomever was on the other end of that line.
After that night, I stopped calling in to the line that much, cutting my online time down to a couple days a week, if that, and finding other ways to make extra cash if we needed it rather than put in more time. I didn’t tell Zeke or anyone about what had almost happened and I never called in at, or after, 3 AM anymore.
It would be several weeks before I caught a news story in passing about a raid on what was thought to be an abandoned factory just outside of the metropolitan area, only a half an hour drive from where I live, that contained the bodies of several young women that had been missing since 1999. The FBI reported finding both wireless receivers and burner phones taped or tied to their hands along with sigils and occult symbols painted on the walls and tattooed or carved into the bodies of the girls. They never mentioned catching anyone they believed to be a suspect and none of the young women were recovered alive.
Shortly thereafter, I received my last deposit from the chat line, along with an email claiming they weren’t making enough money in the new ‘digital era’ to stay afloat financially and there was too much competition with similar, but free to try, platforms. I don’t know if the platform was directly involved in the strange operation that was uncovered at that site, but I’m certain that what the FBI uncovered would have linked them to it somehow if they dug deep enough. I wish I could find out if the phones in the hands of the victims had an outgoing call history or if one had sent me that text I received that night.
This would be the first time I have told anyone about this experience and possibly the last. Zeke had said that this group that kidnapped the poor talkers that fell into their clutches were defunct, but I have reason to believe that they are still operating, using the anonymous nature of chat lines and whatever black magic they used to manipulate the frequencies of the party line that hypnotized people into giving them their personal details so that they could find them.
Once I stopped working for the party line, I didn’t look for another similar job opportunity. I opened my shop back up to sell my crafts and never looked back. If anything, it justified my hatred of talking on the phone even more so.