FIVE HORROR STORIES THAT WILL GIVE YOU PHONE PHOBIA BY DOUGLAS WYNNE

27/4/2021

I’ve always had a bit of a phone phobia. That might sound paradoxical coming from a guy who has as much of an addiction to the damned thing as the next author with a social media feed and a doom scrolling habit, but I'm talking mostly about the voice part of the phone. The part we don't use much anymore. There's just something about having a conversation without being able to read the other person’s body language and facial expressions that I find unsettling, and the idea of having to make telemarketing cold calls sounds like a special circle of hell to me. Not that there aren't aspects of our text-centric smart phones that get my hair up. Anyone who's ever mentioned some odd product within earshot of their phone only to find ads for that very thing the next time they log on to Facebook has ample reason to feel creeped out.

I recently wrote a techno horror novel called His Own Devices that does its best to amp up whatever anxieties you may have about all those pieces of black glass in your life. It weaves together a celebrity YouTuber targeted by a high-tech occult mind control conspiracy, child device addiction, and an insidious touch of the supernatural.

That fuzzy borderland where technology and the supernatural overlap is an area I've been exploring for a while now in my fiction, starting with a backwards message left by a ghost on a rock song’s master tape in The Devil of Echo Lake. In addition to the strange and deadly things iPads do in my new novel, there’s also a story a father tells his son about a phone call he believes he received from his dead grandmother back when there were still pay phones in high school lobbies that took quarters.

Horror stories about phones have a long lineage. One that reaches back almost as far as the invention of the device itself. In their academic article “The Primitive, Technology, and Horror: A Posthuman Biology” (University of London, 2010) authors Norah Campbell and Mike Saren note that the invention of the telegraph “reactivated ancient and repressed fantasies about of the mind coming loose from the physical body and traveling great distances without the constraints of time and physicality…if it could cross the Atlantic in seconds, it would surely take only another few seconds to contact the souls of the dead.”

These days, we take such minor miracles for granted, but technology, with its seeming ability to circumvent natural human boundaries, still brings with it an inherent sense of the uncanny that horror writers have long recognized and exploited.

The following five phone horror stories are presented in chronological order. I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones that have rung my bell.

1. The Statement of Randolph Carter by H.P. Lovecraft

Written in 1919 and derived almost verbatim from a dream Lovecraft had, this short story is told by the titular first-person narrator who goes on to feature in several of Lovecraft’s other weird tales. Here, Carter accompanies an occult researcher named Warren on a trip to an ancient graveyard in a Florida swamp. Warren's studies of a forbidden book have convinced him that there are portals between our world and a demonic underworld and that a certain tomb he has identified is one such passage. Warren descends the steps into the tomb with a lantern and “portable telephone outfit.” Carter, nervously monitoring the handset at the other end of the wire, listens in horror as the other man struggles to convey a monstrous, unspeakable discovery. When contact between the two men is lost, something else delivers the news of Warren's fate.

2. Long Distance Call by Richard Matheson

Originally published in 1953 under the title “Sorry, Right Number,” this short story was later adapted by Matheson as the Twilight Zone episode “Night Call.” It was set to air on November 22, 1963 but was preempted by the JFK assassination.

Elva Keene, our bedridden elderly protagonist receives a series of hang up phone calls one stormy night. At first she thinks the silence on the other end of the line is someone playing a prank on her, but her fear escalates to hysteria as the calls continue and a raspy whispering voice haunts her in her isolation. After several complaints to a condescending operator at the phone company the next day, she is told that no one could possibly be calling her on that line as the wires are down from the storm. In a direct echo of the Lovecraft tale, the phone cable has fallen into a cemetery. But Miss Elva has given her address over the line to the operator, and when her mysterious caller calls again, it’s to announce that he’s coming to pay her a visit.

Bonus: Check out my reading of “Long Distance Call” for the New York Ghost Stories Festival here.

3. The Black Phone by Joe Hill

The last of our wired phone stories is from 2004, but the twist here is that this antique phone still rings, even though the cord has been cut. The black phone of the title is found in a basement where a kid named John Finney finds himself imprisoned by a kidnapper who threw him in the back of a van. The Galesburg Grabber has killed many other children in this blood stained basement, and when the disconnected phone rings, Finney discovers that those previous victims want to talk to him. “Ask not for whom the phone rings,” a dead boy who can’t remember his own name tells him. But the other twist in this story that builds on the legacy of Matheson is that this time the dead want to help our protagonist. And the phone turns out to be both a warning and a weapon.

Bonus: “The Black Phone” is currently being adapted for film by the team behind Sinister.

4. Cell by Stephen King

Cell phones have no doubt become more ubiquitous since 2006, but even back then Uncle Stevie was horrified by how they appeared to turn people into zombies. The tag line for this techno horror novel is “There’s a reason cell rhymes with hell.”

When a signal called “the pulse” wipes the brains of anyone within hearing distance of a cell phone, the metaphor gets literal and we watch a new kind of zombie apocalypse unfold on the streets of Boston. What follows is an evolving epidemic and a road trip with echoes of The Stand, but it all starts when the line between man and machine is erased in a scene that will ensure you never look at a flip phone the same way again.

5. Ghoster by Jason Arnopp

Laced with black humor and cutting insight into our modern digital obsessions, this 2019 novel lands closest to the territory I’ve recently been exploring with a focus on the dark side of social media. When Kate is ghosted by the man she’s supposed to be moving in with, she finds the apartment empty except for his phone. Her reluctance to invade his privacy is the first line crossed. What ensues is a plunge into paranoia as a series of weird voice calls and messages escalates through unnerving supernatural dread to an ending you won’t see coming.

Douglas Wynne

Douglas Wynne is the author of seven books, including His Own Devices, The Wind In My Heart, and the SPECTRA Files trilogy. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, and his writing workshops have been featured at genre conventions and schools throughout New England. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals.

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His Own Devices by Douglas Wynne

In 2016 an occult cabal activates a psychic trigger in a popular video game and a countdown to chaos begins.

While her husband is deployed in Afghanistan, Jessica Ritter finds herself navigating the pitfalls of parenting on her own. That includes moderating her ten-year-old son's screen time—an obsession that hits a fever pitch when YouTube sensation Rainbow Dave releases an addictive new iPad game. Gavin knows he isn’t supposed to keep secrets from his parents, but when his achievements in the game unlock personal messages from Dave instructing him to embark on real world mini-quests, he can’t resist.

In the aftermath of an ambush that leaves her husband missing in action, Jessica grapples with fear and sorrow while clues to a threat closer to home evade her detection. Rainbow Dave, the charismatic host of Scream Time, is America’s cool big brother—a gamer who built a video empire on the strength of his personality. He is also the focus of a shadowy conspiracy hell-bent on sowing chaos with vast technological resources. Dave’s anonymous benefactors have granted him a glimpse of paradise between the pixels, and the real world hasn’t looked the same since. Now, wired with a head full of unholy revelations and a crate full of dangerous devices, he’s on a mission to help his fans “level up” at a live event. Scream Time is coming to town, and it may be too late to stop a deadly game.

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