When I was younger, my brother Tom, cousin Jack and I invented what we called ‘The Radio Game’.
We only had the opportunity to play the game whenever we would all be staying over at our grandparents’ house. This happened a couple of times a year, whenever our respective parents would go away together for the weekend. Our grandparents had a fairly old fashioned house for the 90s, and as portable technology wasn’t AS common in those days, our grandparents would let us all have a sleepover in their dining room to make the experience less boring for three 8-10 year olds. The dining room also happened to be where they kept their old 1970s wireless.
We’d make forts during the day, playing with the limited toys and one Game Boy Color we’d been able to fit in our sleepover bags. After dinner, we’d transfer the forts back into our beds. Our grandma and grandpa went to bed at around 10pm, which is when they expected us to also have our lights out and be ready to fall asleep.
The lights would be out, but obviously, no sleeping would occur.
Murder in the Dark, Hide and Seek, very compact Flashlight Tag (that last one got us in trouble on more than one occasion) - we’d be so exhausted the next day that we’d be sleeping in the car the whole way home.
One Saturday, we were still up at 1am, having worked ourselves up with sugar and a VHS of The Nightmare on Elm Street (that Jack had snuck out of our aunt and uncle’s house). This is when Tom told us about ‘The Radio Game’.
He’d heard about it from his friend George in school.
“So you just flick through old stations? That sounds kinda dumb.”
We both stared at Jack at this remark.
“What do you mean old stations?!” I asked him.
“What? That radio is really old, like 20 years or something? Who wants to listen to a bunch of stuff from the 70s?”
Tom and I looked at each other, and burst out laughing.
“You-you don’t hear 70s radio from a 70s radio, man! It-it works-it works from today’s radio signals, dumbass!” Tom chided him between bursts of laughter.
Jack started hitting us with pillows in anger at us chiding him, which started a full on pillow war, ending up with me clattering into a dining chair, fits of laughter, and a stern word from grandma about how our grandpa is old and needs his sleep.
Once we’d settled back down in the dark, Tom began talking about The Radio Game more earnestly.
“No, seriously though! George told me his dad has a friend that’s a paranormal investigator. He said that radio signals can pick up ghost frequencies!”
“Bullshit!” Jack whisper-exclaimed.
“That’s what I said!” Tom continued excitedly. “But I heard it!”
“What?!”
“Yeah! Me and Elliot tried it at George’s! We just scrolling through stations to see if we could find anything weird, and nothing happened at first. Just a lot of crackling and it was kinda boring. LOADS of classical music. We were going to give up but then…urm…”
Tom faltered, looking uncomfortable for a moment.
“What?! Why are you stopping?” I nudged him.
Tom looked back up at me.
“Okay… Just… Don’t laugh at me. Okay?”
I looked into Tom’s eyes. When he’d first started talking about The Radio Game, he’d seemed excited. Now, however, he almost looked as if he wished he hadn’t brought it up in his sugar-crazed state.
He looked terrified.
I motioned for him to continue, the sugar crash and the late hour, the shadows being cast from the plants outside the sliding glass doors, beginning to get to me too.
“Okay,” Tom sighed. “I wasn’t going to bring this up because it was so awful. But…I need someone else to hear it. To…well. You’ll see.”
Tom shuffled over to the radio and switched on the plug, and immediately fell to the floor yelping with his hands clamped firmly over his ears, as an incredibly deafening wail emitted from the speakers.
We hadn’t accounted for our our granddad’s radio habits, who, as a partially deaf man who enjoyed listening to music whilst he did the garden, always had it set at a ridiculously high volume.
Five minutes after another (well-earned by now) chiding from grandma, and an assurance that we were firmly in our beds with the lights off, we all jumped back out of bed and crawled over to the radio, now silent, the orange/yellow light casting an eerie glow around the cabinet.
I felt trepidation as Tom began to slowly twist the tuning knob back and forth between stations, the quiet crackling and distorted sounds emitting from the stations as they skipped past adding to the sinister atmosphere in the now quiet house.
“George said it can help to talk to it,” Tom whispered, “so the spirits can tell you’re trying to get through or something?”
“Urm…” I started at Tom and Jack, unsure what I’d want to say to a ghost, if anything. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to invite them in.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” Tom whispered tentatively into the radio.
As he finished speaking, the radio picked up something.
We all jumped.
Staring at each other in silence in the static, I noticed even Jack’s face looked pale as Tom tuned the radio back to the frequency on which the noise had ‘responded’.
We could hear something, but as we’d turned the volume really low since the grandma incident, none of us could make it out.
“Turn it up!” Jack whispered, excitement and fear in his eyes.
Tom slowly increased the volume of the radio, until we could make out the sound on the other side.
It was a late night station, playing ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’.
We collapsed on the floor in hysterics together, the tension removed from the situation by the ridiculousness. This, again, gained us a final, FINAL warning from grandma, at which point we absolutely had to go to sleep, no questions asked. We were all suggesting majorly from sugar crashes at that point anyway, and with Cotton-Eyed Joe cleansing away our fears for the time being, we all essentially passed out asleep.
The Radio Game became a fun bedtime activity for us over the next couple of years. Although we’d sometimes freak each other out in the darkness, we didn’t really get scared much anymore. Even Tom seemed to forget about the fear from whatever it was he’d heard at George’s, assuming it’d just been another silly, random incident like our Cotton-Eyed Joe experience - a random station playing something weird.
We stopped playing The Radio Game after one Saturday night in late August.
We began as usual, giggling quietly to each other as we skipped through the stations, pretending to pick out words in the static, trying to make ridiculous sentences between stations, and finding the stupidest broadcasts we could.
Then we heard the scream.
Jack and I started laughing, thinking we’d stumbled onto another weird station, when we looked at Tom.
In the moonlight, I could see his pallid complexion, the colour drained from his face. I looked down at the radio. His hand had jerked away from the dial, and he was shaking.
“This…this is it,” he whispered, even more quietly than before.
Jack and I exchanged glances, and then looked back to the radio, listening intently to whatever had frightened my brother so much.
I wish we’d stopped playing that game after the first night. Maybe then, it’d be a nice memory, a good laugh with my brother and cousin as children.
Now that I know what I know now, I hear those sounds whenever I attempt to sleep at night.
The most unholy, hellish screams were emitting from the radio speakers. We still had the volume down low, but the pain and desperation in those screams, cries and whimpers stabbed at my chest.
We listened to wailing, shrieking, pleading, banging, and begging, in horrified silence, for around five minutes, until Jack began to whimper himself, and reached for the dial.
Tom grabbed his hand. Jack tried to struggle away.
“Wait.” Tom stated, without taking his eyes from the radio, in a tone so intently that Jack ceased his attempts to switch it off.
That’s when I realised that I could now hear another sound behind the screams.
Nasty, maniacal laughter.
The cruel noise sent an icy trickle down my spine, and I snatched the radio plug from the socket, then dialed the tuning knob all the way to the left.
We discussed our theories about The Radio Game in hushed conversations at school the following week. Was it ghosts attempting communication? A really weird song, some kind of death metal? We stopped discussing these theories after Elliott shared his particular theory.
“It sounded like hell.”
We forgot about The Radio Game eventually, as we all grew up and moved to opposite sides of the country for university. As I aged, I’d tell it as ‘my ghost story’, you know the one that most people seem to have? However, I assumed our more practical theories were correct as kids - just some weird broadcast we managed to stumble upon.
I hadn’t thought about The Radio Game for years until Christmas 2019, when my brother, cousin and I were all together again at my family home.
“Hey, remember that creepy radio broadcast we found as kids? Man, that thing freaked me out for months! I had to sleep with my TV on, remember?” Tom grinned at us across the dinner table.
Jack smacked his forehead comically. “Do NOT remind me of that game,” he groaned. “Every time I’m reminded of that I can’t get that damn screaming out my head!”
“Screaming?” My auntie asked, chuckling slightly.
We all chuckled along in semi-embarrassment, and launched into the tale of The Radio Game.
As we began to describe the screams with vigor, mock-shuddering at the memory, I noticed that both of our sets of parents had stopped eating, their forks clattered, mouths agape and eyes staring at us.
Tom and Jack noticed too.
“What?” Tom asked, his chuckles stopping, looking at our mum, confused.
My mum and auntie exchanged glances.
My mum faltered on her first word, bit her lip, then sighed.
Then she solved a mystery from my past that I wish had remained hidden.
As I mentioned, I’d moved across the country for university, found a job and career, and so had my brother and cousin, which meant that we weren’t up on local news from the last several years.
Mr. Martin, who’d been my grandparent’s quiet, garden obsessed neighbour, had been arrested in 2015. It had been a massive shock to the quiet community.
He was arrested and marched out by police officers, neighbours and passers by looking on in curiosity, my mum among them.
They should have kept walking.
Shortly after Mr. Martin, a team of paramedics emerged from the house, carrying an emaciated, beaten, dishevelled woman on a stretcher. My mother said she will never be able to forget the haunted look in her eyes. She was bleeding, and broken. But she was alive.
She’d been locked in his basement for 19 years.
The local news report on the matter provided more details. How and when he’d taken her, how he’d tortured and taunted her, details that I won’t go in to here. However, they did give away one significant detail. Mr Martin, sick bastard that he was, kept her in a soundproof room, but he couldn’t stand missing out on her screams. So, he kept a baby monitor in her basement prison, making sure he didn’t ‘miss anything’ when he wasn’t down there abusing her. The baby monitor must have interfered with radio signals, causing the sounds to intermittently be picked up by nearby devices.
My grandma and grandpa had died in my late teens, and a young couple moved into their house. In 2015, they’d put in a report to the police that they could hear hellish, tortured screams coming from their radio.