The Man on the Radio

This is a true story of when our family moved to Shelton Laurel, a small community in Marshall, North Carolina, I was a boy of about six. The old farmhouse stood at the end of a dirt road up a holler, and neighbors who knew the place warned Daddy that a man had died inside and his spirit had never left. Daddy paid them little mind. He had six children to feed, and a five-room farmhouse with a sound roof, land for a garden was the best he could do for the price.

We learned the story of the dead man from a neighbor woman after church one Sunday. A hole the size of a Mason jar lid marked the living room wall, left by the bullet that killed him. She told us what had happened inside that house, although I remember more about the way she spoke than the details of the killing. Her words frightened us enough that we began giving the hole a wide berth, and the younger children refused to cross the living room after dark unless an older brother went along.

The trouble began at night, after the bedroom lamp had been turned off and the family had settled into bed. Dishes shifted on their shelves, making little clinks from the lower rooms, and footsteps climbed the old wooden stairs one step at a time. Daddy would holler for us to settle down, and we would call back from under our quilts, insisting every child was in bed. He would take his flashlight and climb the stairs, checking each step before returning to bed. The moment he settled under his covers, the footsteps began again.

Our old hound slept on the porch and refused to come inside, even in the coldest weather. Mama was a God-fearing woman who kept her Bible on the shelf beside the radio. She prayed over each room before bedtime, trusting the Lord to protect us. Her prayers brought her comfort, although the radio continued to glow in the darkness whenever it pleased and was oblivious to her prayers.

The lights

came on by themselves, too. Daddy would get up and switch them off, convinced one of us boys had been sneaking around after bedtime. We swore we had stayed in bed, and he took us for liars. With six children, he had reason to suspect somebody was pulling a prank. His suspicion began to fade on nights when he counted every head in every bed before retiring, only to find the bulbs burning again a short while later.

The radio and television troubled him most. They came on during the deepest part of the night, when every child was asleep and the house had settled. Daddy would go downstairs in his undershirt, examine the switches, check the cords, and turn the sets off. By the end of our first winter, his irritation had given way to worry, and he stopped discussing explanations in front of us.

The radio was an old walnut set on a shelf in the living room, a few steps from the bullet hole. Its dial glowed yellow in the dark, and some mornings we found the needle resting between stations, suspended in a stretch of static where nothing came through. One night Daddy pulled the plug from the socket and laid it on the table. He wanted us all to see that the set had been disconnected, and he stood watching it while the rest of us gathered behind him.

The dial continued to glow, and the static rose and fell in uneven bursts. Then a man's voice came through the speaker, low and breathless, saying, "Help me." Every child in the room heard those words and took off running upstairs and Mama began praying aloud. Daddy stared at the radio, holding the loose plug in his hand, while the voice repeated its plea. The sound stopped after several seconds, leaving the room dark and silent.

The television did the same thing. Its screen filled with shifting white specks, and a rough sound came from the speaker even after Daddy had turned the volume down. Then the same man spoke, using the same two words. Daddy switched off the television, and the sound ceased. On another night, the radio would start up again, and the voice would return, always pleading for help.

One night during our second winter, I woke and crept to the top of the stairs. A blue glow rose from the living room, and the rasp of static came from the television. I lay flat on the upper step and peered down. Daddy stood before the set in his undershirt, his head lowered as he listened. The man's voice came through the speaker again, and Daddy finally answered.

"Who are you?" he said.

I had never heard my father speak to a voice coming from an empty room. He stood waiting for a reply, while the static continued to rise and fall. The man offered nothing further, and Daddy remained before the television until the screen went dark. He switched off the set, pulled a chair into the living room, and sat facing the bullet hole. I watched him from the stairs until the first light of morning reached the holler, and he never once looked toward the bedrooms.

After that night, Daddy spoke less about what was happening. He still checked the rooms with his flashlight, still turned off the sets, and still ordered us back to bed. He could deal with misbehaving children, broken equipment, and the usual troubles of a large family. A voice coming through an unplugged radio belonged to a different world, one he had no way to explain to his little girls and boys.

I shared a bed with two brothers under the slope of the roof, and I learned to count the footsteps as they climbed toward our room. The first step creaked, followed by another, then another, until the sound reached the top of the stairs. Every night it stopped outside our bedroom door. I watched the dark gap beneath the door while my brother's knee pressed against my back, waiting for the next sound. The footsteps never entered our room, and that frightened me more than anything else about the house.

I often wondered who the man wanted to reach. His voice sounded close enough to touch, although the radio gave us nothing to identify him. He might have been a man who had died long before we came to Shelton Laurel, trapped in the last moments of his life and calling out to anyone who could hear him. Or he might have been something else entirely, using a voice we could understand to draw us toward a place where we had no business going.

We lived in the farmhouse for around four years. The moving dishes, footsteps, burning bulbs, and nighttime broadcasts became part of our lives, and we learned to sleep through much of the disturbance. Daddy eventually reached his limit. He had spent enough nights listening to a dead man's plea come through a radio and TV he had unplugged with his own hands, and he decided our family would leave. One morning he told Mama to start packing, and we carried our beds and quilts down the dirt road, leaving the farmhouse behind.

Years later, an old man at a feed store in Marshall told me other families had occupied the house before ours. Some stayed only a few months, he said, and one family left during the dead of winter with dinner still on the table. I have wondered whether those families heard the same two words and whether any of them answered the voice the way my father did.

I still remember Shelton Laurel, the house, the hole the size of a Mason jar lid, and the man's voice coming through the radio. I grew up, built a life of my own, and left the old farmhouse far behind, and I have never forgotten what happened inside it. Even now, when I turn a radio dial and hear static rising between stations, I stop and listen for a moment before moving on. Part of me expects that man's voice to return, and part of me fears the day it might call me by name.