• From prank calls that drove a man insane to a call from someone who disappeared, we
count ten creepy phone calls that will make you fear unknown callers!
10 – Possible Call from the Zodiac Killer, • In September 1970, nurse Donna Lass disappeared
under mysterious circumstances. Her car was still parked outside her apartment complex,
but the twenty-five-year-old was nowhere to be found.
• The next day, an anonymous male caller informed her landlord and workplace that she
would not be in that day because of an unexpected family emergency.
• There was no family emergency and Lass was never heard from again.
• Investigators suspect she may have been one of the many victims of the Zodiac Killer,
who it’s assumed was the caller. 9 – The Kuykendall Family Harasser,
• In 2007, a group of sixteen-year-olds in Washington received strange and disturbing
text messages from their friend Courtney Kuykenall. Courtney claimed she hadn’t sent them, but
they were definitely coming from her phone. • Soon after, someone started calling the
Kuykendall family, threatening to kill various family members and their pets. The Kuykendalls
contacted police, and again the calls were traced back to Courtney’s phone.
• Police and the family suspected Courtney was behind it and playing some kind of sick
joke, but the calls continued even when Courtney’s phone was turned off and confiscated.
• The psychotic mystery caller continued to harass them, and could describe things
the family were doing and what they were wearing. They even left voicemail recordings of family
conversations, suggesting they were close by. This harassment continued for nearly five
months, and the culprit was never found. Security experts believe the phone may have been hijacked
using spyware. 8 – I Can See You,
• Reddit user elliot509 received a disturbing phone call from a stranger whose voice they
didn’t recognise. When asked who was on the line, the caller said ‘Why do you want
to know?’ • Elliot was sure this was just a dumb prank,
so said nothing. The caller then said ‘I can see you …’, which Elliot shrugged
off, saying that it was a nice try but wasn’t very original as far as pranks go.
• That’s when things got weird. Elliot’s house is near train tracks and, at that moment,
a train happened to pass by. The passing train could be heard on the phone at the same time.
• Elliot will never know if it was a creepy stalker or a well-timed coincidence because
the caller hung up and was never heard from again. Maybe that’s for the best…
7 – The Call that Never Happened, • A teenage boy received a shocking voicemail
after missing a call from his mother. In the voicemail, the boy’s mother eerily whispers
his name then rustles around frantically, as if she’d dropped the phone in a panic.
• Worried for his mother’s safety, the boy rushed home and found his mother at home
making dinner as usual. When he asked her about it, she had no idea what he was talking
about and insisted she made no such call. • The boy’s mother wasn’t one for pranks,
so he believed her. The creepiest part, though, was that records indicated the phone definitely
came from her phone. Either Mum had had a few too many chardonnays or something creepy
was going on… 6 – I Don’t Know How to Help Her,
• A woman returned home and checked her answering machine, which is what they called
voicemail in the Nineties. She discovered she had a message from a woman
she didn’t know. • The woman knew things about her, including
her name, and told her one of her friends had died in a car crash. She went on to say
that she didn’t know how to help the friend, but sounded smug rather than concerned.
• The woman confirmed the friend was okay and deleted the message, assuming it was some
sick prank. Six months later, her boyfriend was involved in a car accident and killed
the other driver involved. The circumstances of the crash were eerily similar to those
described in the message… 5 – Last Words,
• In 2008, nineteen-year-old college student Brandon Swanson was driving home after a night
out when he crashed into a ditch on a gravel road in Minnesota. Distressed, he called his
parents to ask for a ride. • Swanson’s parents came out looking,
but had trouble finding him. His car wasn’t where he said it’d be, so they spent the
next forty-five minutes on the phone trying to find him. Swanson told them he could see
lights from a nearby town, so was heading in that direction. That’s when things took
a devastating turn: Swanston suddenly yelled ‘Oh shit!’ before the call cut out.
• No one ever heard from him again. Hundreds of volunteers and their dogs spent 120 days
searching the surrounding areas and rivers, but only his car was found. His phone had
continued to ring for two days after his disappearance and there was no evidence of foul play.
• Phone records revealed that Swanson was nowhere near any towns, so it’s unclear
what the lights he’d claimed to walk towards were.
4 – Extraterrestrial Call, • In 1997, Art Bell, the host of paranormal
radio broadcast Coast to Coast AM, received a strange and distressing on-air call from
a man claiming to have worked at Area 51. • The sobbing caller says he was a former
Area 51 employee who was released on a medical discharge. He claims to have been on the run
since and believed his former employees would ‘triangulate on his position real soon’.
• Terrified, the caller frantically unloads everything he knows about aliens and conspiratorial
government plots. His distress sounds real and he seems to genuinely fear for his life.
• Suddenly, the connection is lost. Several minutes of silence pass before a back-up power
system returns Art to the air. Speaking to a new caller, Art explains that the bizarre
power outage has never happened in the entire history of the station and that someone obviously
didn’t want listeners to hear any more of the distressed caller’s claims.
• The following year, comic book writer Bryan J. L. Glass called in to take credit
for the call. Sceptics believe he isn’t the real caller and is only trying to disprove
the first caller’s claims. 3 – Innocent Man Framed by Anonymous Caller,
• In 1931, insurance agent William Wallace received a telephone message at his local
chess club. The message was from someone with the fake-sounding alias ‘R.M. Qualtrough’.
Qualtrough wanted to meet up the next night to discuss insurance policies.
• The next night, Wallace went across town only to discover the provided address didn’t
exist. He returned home thinking it was just a stupid prank and found his wife had been
beaten to death. • Police blamed William Wallace, and argued
that Wallace had left the message himself to fabricate an alibi. He was found guilty
and sentenced to be hanged. • Fortunately, the Court of Criminal Appeal
overturned the conviction when some inconsistencies came to light. The guy who’d taken Qualtrough’s
call was adamant he hadn’t spoken to Wallace and Wallace had no blood on him. A witness
also came forth saying they’d spoken to the victim minutes before her husband’s
tram had departed. This meant it was impossible for Wallace to have committed the murder in
time. • Unfortunately Qualtrough was never identified,
but he may have been one of Wallace’s former insurance firm colleagues. The colleague had
asked his wife to provide a fake alibi and neighbours saw him wearing bloody gloves and
hosing down his car on the night of the murder. 2 – Decade of Phone Harassment,
• In the early Eighties, Bashir Kouchacji, a former political hostage, left Lebanon to
open a Moroccan restaurant in Washington, D.C. Not long after, some strange and persistent
anonymous phone calls came in. You might dismiss these as harmless pranks, except they kept
coming in for an entire decade. • Anywhere Kouchacji went, the calls followed.
They came to his restaurant and even to the private lines of his family and friends. The
caller’s voice was soft like a child’s, so they the referred to the caller as ‘L’enfant’.
• The calls ranged from demands for money, to obscenities and death threats. Anyone associated
with Kouchacji was a target – even his pregnant spouse and restaurant employees. The abuse
even turned physical when the Star of David was scratched all over Kouchacji’s Mercedes.
• The FBI traced the restaurant phone, confirming that L’Enfant was real, but they couldn’t
catch him because the calls came from different payphones each time and were at such high
volumes that more than a single person had to be responsible.
• Kouchacji became deeply distressed, barely sleeping and developing psychosomatic disorders.
In 1987, he voluntarily checked into the psychiatric ward and has been there, off and on, ever
since. 1 – Caller Predicts Presidential Assassination,
• On November 22 1963, a Californian switchboard operator received a strange call at 10 am
from a whispering woman. The woman claimed the president of the United States was going
to die in ten minutes. • When ten minutes passed without incident,
the woman changed the time to 10.30, which is incidentally when McDonalds stops serving
breakfast. She also made cryptic remarks about a fire in the Supreme Court and a government
dictatorship. • The operator dismissed these cray-cray
ramblings because the president receives multiple death threats every day and JFK wasn’t even
in California at the time, so, y’know, no cause for alarm.
• President Kennedy was, at the time, travelling in a motorcade toward Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
Then, at 10.30 am Californian time, Lee Harvey Oswald – or aliens, the government, whoever
– assassinated the president, proving the woman’s prediction right.
• Conspiracy theorists believe the caller was actress Karyn Kupcinet, whose dead body
was discovered six days after JFK’s assassination. Kupcinet may have had advanced knowledge of
the Kennedy murder plot because her father was friends with Jack Ruby, the man who shot
Oswald while he was in custody. • Speculation aside, the true origins of
the call were never determined, but it does go to show that all anonymous tips should
be taken seriously – even the batshit insane ones.