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Hi there - I'm Beltania - a long time lurker, and occasionally poster of stories about finding fossils in dishwasher tablets...

A while back, I remember reading a (possibly) IHTM story about someone (I think it was a man) who had been alone in their house, and had received a phone call. The voice had sounded like a little girl, around 5 years old, and kept repeating that they were all alone and scared.

After searching the internet, I found this similar story, which appears along with a copied-and-pasted list of generic scary phone stories which had made its way around the internet.

From http://paranormal.about.com/od/trueghoststories/a/More-Phantom-Phone-Calls.htm

Posted: 08-07-2013 20:02 Post subject:

I've had my fair share of weird phone calls over the years too.
Mostly, it's kids just messing about, dialling at random.

Posted: 08-07-2013 21:29 Post subject:

Our little boy (18 months old) has always been fascinated by the phone and pressing the buttons to dial numbers.

I think it's entirely conceivable that a little 4 or 5 year old could manage to successfully dial a number to connect with somebody (even at random) and might expect to speak to their "mama" on the other end, becoming upset to hear another voice.

I've always got an open mind, and it would freak me out too, but of all the stories you see on here, this is potentially one of the more readily explained (I hope).

Posted: 08-07-2013 22:49 Post subject:

There was a story in the news about a year ago about a couple of schoolgirls messing about and pretending to be a little girl whose mother had died, phoning people up in prank calls that resulted in a widespread hunt. The joke was on them when the cops traced the calls and they were caught out.

Posted: 09-07-2013 20:00 Post subject:

Thanks for your help!

I've just looked at the news story about the schoolgirls - that's very interesting. It certainly strikes a chord with the fact that the 'little girl' in all three of the stories I remember seemed pretty reluctant to give any details about the situation.

It's possible that the similarities in the stories on the part of the call's recipients (i.e. that they tended to be alone and in an uncomfortable situation) were a coincidence.

Posted: 10-07-2013 18:45 Post subject:

I remember a few letters to the editor in FT magazine about this subject several years ago, possibly as long as a decade ago. Unfortunately, I no longer have my old copies of the magazine so I can't provide the numbers of the relevant issues. If I recall correctly, in each case the person who answered the phone suspected the caller may have been an adult pretending to be a child. Also, the person was alone at the time, as you've stated. There was some discussion about the possibility of it being a psychological phenomenon. Or it could just have been kids being silly, as suggested above.

Posted: 10-07-2013 21:58 Post subject:

I suspect the phone calls were either a prank or the story was a hoax or urban legend.

I had a strange thing happen on my cell phone recently. I had my brother's cell phone number listed in my phone as "Bro Cell". Then one day my brother got totally fed up with his cell phone service and had it terminated. He still has his cell phone...he just can't use it. A few months after he shut off his service I got a text message from Bro Cell. It didn't make much sense. I responded something to it. Awhile later I got another message that made no sense so I called him back. A stranger answered the phone and had NO interest in talking to me at all and invited me to never call him again.

Next time I saw my brother I mentioned that to him and asked if he'd lost his phone and he replied that he still has it in his possession. So I can understand that the phone company re-issued his old number to someone else and my phone would recognize that number as Bro Cell no matter WHO owned the number. I can't understand why, if that happened, could the new owner of that number have made such a longshot of a wrong number as to reach ME.

Posted: 10-07-2013 22:24 Post subject:

had you texted the new owner of the number thinking it was your broseph ... that wouldve at least got your number onto the other handset ...

Posted: 10-07-2013 22:39 Post subject:

That is conceivable, but I'm sure I hadn't done anything like that....especially not in the timeframe immediately preceding the arrival of my text message. Once my brother announced he'd shut off his service I stopped using the number.

And I have to suspect that if I'd inadvertently texted something to a number owned by a stranger he might've responded with something like, "Who are you"? What I got was a statement of some sort that made no sense to me. It seemed as if he'd texted something to someone who he expected to know enough to fill in the blanks....an acquaintance.

Posted: 11-07-2013 00:25 Post subject:

Late one night, many years ago, my brother received an unnerving phone call. At first there was the sound of sobbing, then a young-sounding girl said "I'm lost....I'm lost..." before the line went dead. He didn't have caller ID, so he had no idea where the call had come from. He was sure the voice was mine, he thought maybe I'd come to the city with friends and got lost in the middle of the night. He called my number to see if I was home. I was, so it certainly wasn't me. But he said he could have sworn it was my voice.

When he told me what had happened, I had a terrible feeling that in some parallel universe, another version of me was wandering lost in the dark, maybe never to get home again. And that it was only happenstance that it wasn't me. The feeling was so strong that I was actually more careful about my safety after that.

We both sometimes wonder what became of the girl who called...

Posted: 11-07-2013 12:45 Post subject:

Brrr, Bunny, that gave me chills. Shocked

Posted: 11-07-2013 12:45 Post subject:

I've always found public telephones oddly creepy. Maybe becasue most people now have mobiles, or home phones so a public phone would only be used in an emergency. Yet they seem lonely. Confused

As a child I'd go to the local phone box with my younger nephew and we would put 20p or whatever in the phone and make up telephone numbers to see if we could get one right. Once we did and a lady answered us saying that we had rung a hotel! Reading this thread, I was waiting for a story of someone working on the front desk of a hotel when they answered the telephone and some children were laughing Shocked

Posted: 11-07-2013 17:12 Post subject:

Posted: 11-07-2013 19:45 Post subject:

Posted: 11-07-2013 22:33 Post subject:

Some incredible stories on this thread!

I was about to say that my only phone-related weirdness involved being called up at home by two or three people over the last five or so years looking for the phone number for the mental health charity 'MIND', despite my phone number differing completely from theirs.

However, I've also had a memory triggered. About eight years ago, my dad was in hospital with a heart condition (he is doing fine now). While he was in hospital, I was trying to make a phone call from my home landline using the hospital's very confusing telephone system. I can't remember how it worked, but I seem to remember having to call a switchboard, and being patched through to the individual you were trying to reach. I made my way past what was either an automated system or a human operator, and was put on hold to wait. Suddenly, I head a male voice screaming a very abrupt burst of what I can only assume was verbal abuse, before hanging up. This was very definitely not my dad, and I was not able to distinguish any words.

Now I'm wondering who it was in the hospital that I got through to that night, and whether or not it was a product of my mind, having experienced anxiety and depression for a lot of my young life, and being at a very difficult stage in my life at that particular point.