At 2:47 a.m., dispatch received a 911 call from a disconnected phone booth — and the voice on the line matched a woman reported dead ten years ago.

The first sound the dispatcher heard was static — the kind that buzzes in the dead of night when everything else has gone still. Then came a faint, trembling voice.
“Help me… please.”

It was 2:47 a.m. when the call came through to the Pine Valley Police Department. The number that appeared on the screen shouldn’t have existed. The call was traced to an old phone booth at the corner of Lakehurst and Hollow Creek Road — a booth that, according to city records, had been disconnected since 2009 and slated for demolition years earlier.

The dispatcher on duty, Laura Bennett, recalled the moment vividly.

“At first I thought it was a prank,” she said. “But the voice… it didn’t sound like someone playing a joke. It sounded terrified — and familiar.”

When the call abruptly cut off, officers were dispatched to the location. Sergeant David Hensley and Officer Rachel Ward arrived at the scene within minutes. What they found would later be described in the police report as “physically impossible.”

The Scene at Hollow Creek Road

The booth stood at the edge of an overgrown field, long forgotten. Its glass panes were cracked, its metal frame rusted through. The ground around it was littered with weeds and debris — no recent footprints, no tire tracks.

But the strangest detail wasn’t the booth’s condition. It was the handset, swinging slowly from its cord, emitting a faint dial tone even though the wires beneath the base were completely severed.

“You could see the cut,” Sergeant Hensley told reporters. “The cable wasn’t just unplugged — it had been snipped clean, years ago. But somehow, the phone was live. And when we picked it up, it went cold dead again.”

Officers secured the area and requested a technical inspection. When a telecommunications specialist examined the booth hours later, his report confirmed the impossible: no active line, no power source, and no signal activity could have produced that call.

But when dispatch logs were reviewed, there it was — a 43-second 911 call recorded in the system, with trace data showing the exact coordinates of the disconnected booth.

The Voice That Shouldn’t Exist

The recording of the call was later played back at the department. Several officers gathered in the break room to listen. The voice was faint, distorted by static, but clear enough to identify certain words:
“Help me… he’s coming… I can’t get out…”

Officer Ward, who had joined the department three years earlier, described what happened next:

“When Laura replayed the recording, one of the senior detectives went pale. He recognized the voice immediately.”

The voice, he claimed, belonged to Emily Sanders — a local woman who had vanished ten years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Her car had been found near the same road where the booth now stood abandoned. Despite extensive searches, Emily’s body was never recovered. She was declared legally dead in 2015.

“Her voice was distinct,” the detective told local news outlets. “I worked her case. I’d spoken to her multiple times. There’s no doubt in my mind — that was Emily.”

Forensic audio analysts later confirmed that the voice pattern matched archived recordings from Emily’s missing persons file with a 97% probability.

A Town Haunted by Its Past

News of the “phantom call” spread quickly across Pine Valley, reigniting old theories about Emily’s disappearance. Some residents believed the call was a hoax, an elaborate stunt by someone with access to police archives. Others whispered about something far stranger — a voice reaching out from beyond.

The old booth became a quiet landmark overnight. Locals left flowers and candles near it, as if it were a memorial. A few even claimed they’d heard faint ringing when passing by at night, though the police have never verified those accounts.

The department has since sealed the area and removed the booth for “safety reasons.” However, neither the recording nor the event itself has been publicly explained.

When asked if the department planned to reopen the Sanders case, Chief Mark Holloway gave a careful answer:

“We are reviewing all available evidence. What happened that night raises questions we can’t yet answer. But we intend to find the truth — one way or another.”

The Final Transmission

Weeks after the incident, dispatch logs show one final anomaly. At precisely 2:47 a.m. — the same time as the first call — the system registered a short burst of static lasting exactly ten seconds.

No call came through. No number appeared. But when technicians enhanced the audio, a single, faint whisper could be heard beneath the noise:

“Thank you.”

Whether it was a glitch, a coincidence, or something else entirely, no one could say for sure.

The file has since been archived under the title:
“Incident 247 – The Call from the Old Booth.”

And for those who worked that shift, one fact remains — the line was dead.
But someone, or something, still managed to call.