The Station, Part 2: The Town

0:01 At six o'clock on a Thursday morning in early July, the overnight automation at WHRL in Harlow, Pennsylvania, handed over to the morning show as it had every weekday for twenty-two years. The host was a man named Gary Pruitt. He had been reading the farm report, the weather, and the school lunch menus to the people of Harlow since before most of his listeners were born. That morning, at three minutes past six, in the middle of the forecast, Gary Pruitt stopped talking. Across town, in kitchens and pickup trucks and the break room of the feed mill, people turned up their radios, thinking the signal had dropped. It had not. The station was still on the air.

0:43 Through the speakers came the sound of the studio, the faint hum of the equipment, and Gary's breathing. Then, very softly, close to the microphone, Gary Pruitt began to hum. This is a Midnight Signals story. It is the second chapter of The Station. To understand what happened in that studio, it is necessary to go back five days to the night four friends came down from Copper Ridge, and to the boy they left humming on his front porch at two in the morning. Dev Okafor did not sleep that night. His mother, a nurse at the county hospital, came home from a late shift a little after three and found him sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with his hands folded in front of him, perfectly still.

1:29 She asked him what was wrong. He looked up at her and smiled and said that nothing was wrong. He said that he was listening. When she asked him what he was listening to, he did not answer. He only tilted his head slightly as though he were trying to make out a voice in the next room. She put it down to the end of the school year, to nerves about the future, to something he had smoked or drunk with his friends. She sent him to bed. In the morning, she found him sitting at the kitchen table again in exactly the same position, and the bed upstairs had not been slept in. Nora went to see him on Monday afternoon. She had not slept well either. Since the night at the station, the tone had followed her. Not loudly. It came at the edges of things, in the hum of the refrigerator at night, in the whine of the tires on the highway, in the hiss of the shower.

2:22 Each time, she would stop and listen, and it would be gone. She told no one. Cass had texted the group twice, joking about ghosts. Eli had not answered. Neither had Dev. His mother let her in. Dev was in his room, sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, wearing his headphones. The headphones were not plugged into anything. Nora sat down beside him and said his name. After a long moment, he took the headphones off and turned to her, and she saw that his eyes were clear and calm, calmer than she had ever seen them. He told her he was fine. He told her he felt better than he had ever felt in his life. He said the world had always been so loud, and now for the first time, it made sense.

3:10 Then he said something that Nora remembered for the rest of her life, word for word. He said that there was more of it, that what they had heard on the tape was only the beginning, and that the rest of it was out there waiting, and that it wanted to be heard. He said it the way someone might talk about a song they could not get out of their head, gently and with longing. Nora left the house shaking. She called Eli from the truck. He picked up on the sixth ring, and when she told him about Dev, he was quiet for a long time. Then he told her that he had gone back to the station. He had gone alone on Sunday morning in daylight because he could not stop thinking about the equipment and because he wanted to prove to himself that there was nothing up there but old machines.

3:59 He had restarted the generator. He had not played the tape, but he had sat in the long room in the light and listened to the static coming out of the speakers for almost an hour. And he told her that there was something in the static, something faint, very far down, moving underneath the noise as if the station were still receiving. Nora asked him why he had not told anyone. He did not answer, and in the silence on the line, very faintly, she could hear him breathing, slow and even, and just beneath it, so soft she could barely make it out, a hum.

4:40 On Wednesday night, Dev Okafor walked out of his house a little after eleven o'clock, and his mother did not hear him go. He walked the mile and a half into the center of Harlow, down the empty main street, past the dark windows of the diner and the hardware store to the brick building beside the feed store, the radio station. WHRL was a small operation. During the day, it was staffed by three people. At night, it ran on automation, a computer playing a loop of country songs and recorded advertisements, and the building was locked. But the lock on the back door was old, and the door itself was propped open with a cinder block on summer nights because the air conditioning in the transmitter room had been broken for years and the engineer liked to let the heat out.

5:26 No one knows exactly what Dev did inside. The building had a single security camera mounted over the front door, which recorded nothing but an empty sidewalk. What is known is that he was there for about forty minutes, and that the station's engineer, a man named Phil Dorsey, came in at five thirty the next morning to check on the transmitter and found Dev sitting cross-legged on the floor of the studio in the dark with a pair of studio headphones on his head plugged into the main mixing desk. Dorsey asked him what he was doing. Dev smiled and took off the headphones and offered them to him. Phil Dorsey, by all accounts, was not a man easily frightened. He had served in the Navy.

6:08 He had been fixing transmitters for thirty years. He told Dev to get out, and Dev did, without arguing, walking out of the front door into the gray dawn and away down Main Street. Dorsey checked the equipment, and nothing seemed to be damaged. The automation was running normally. He decided it was a prank, a bored teenager breaking in for a dare, and made a note to call the sheriff later in the morning. Then, out of curiosity, he picked up the headphones and put them on, to hear what the boy had been listening to. Half an hour later, Gary Pruitt arrived to do the morning show and found Phil Dorsey sitting in the same place on the studio floor with the headphones on. Gary asked him if he was all right. Dorsey said that he was.

6:54 He said that he had never been better. Which brings us back to six o'clock, and the farm report, and the long silence in the middle of the weather. Nobody ever found out exactly what Dev had done to the station's equipment, or how. Later, a state engineer who examined the mixing desk said it looked as though someone had patched a second audio source into the main broadcast feed, very carefully, using a cable from the station's own storeroom. The second source was a small recorder. On it was a few minutes of audio, the tone from the tape, slow and low, almost perfect. It seemed to have been recorded from memory, by someone humming.

7:36 Whether Gary Pruitt played it deliberately, or whether it played itself, nobody could say. What is known is that from three minutes past six until seven-fourteen that morning, WHRL broadcast nothing but the sound of Gary Pruitt's breathing and his humming, and beneath it, faint but unmistakable, the tone. About eleven hundred households in Harlow and the surrounding farms listened to the WHRL morning show on a typical weekday. In the weeks that followed, the county health department would try to reconstruct who had been listening that morning, and for how long. It proved almost impossible. But a pattern emerged. People who had turned off their radios in irritation after a few minutes, or who had changed the station, mostly reported headaches, a ringing in their ears, and trouble sleeping.

8:26 People who had kept listening, out of curiosity, or because they had left the radio on in another room, or because they were driving and too busy to change the channel, were different. They became calm. That was the word the families used, again and again, when they were asked to describe it. Calm and quiet and gentle. They did not seem to be ill. They ate when food was put in front of them. They answered questions, slowly and politely. But they stopped sleeping, and they stopped working, and they spent long hours sitting very still, with their heads slightly tilted, listening. And sooner or later, every one of them began to hum. It spread from there, and it spread fast, and the people of Harlow did not understand it until it was already too late.

9:16 The first theory was that it was something in the water. Harlow's water came from a reservoir on the other side of the valley, and there had been a scare a few years earlier about runoff from a mining operation upstream. By Friday afternoon, the grocery store had sold out of bottled water. The second theory was that it was some kind of mass hysteria, the sort of thing that sweeps through schools and factories from time to time, and that the best thing to do was to stay calm and let it pass. That was the view of the county's public health officer, a capable and decent woman named Dr. Alice Brenner, who drove into Harlow on Friday morning with two nurses and a case of blood-sample kits.

9:56 She found the town's clinic overwhelmed, not with sick people but with worried families, bringing in husbands and wives, parents and grandparents, who sat quietly in the waiting-room chairs, humming. Dr. Brenner took blood from forty people that day. Every sample was normal. She examined their eyes, their ears, their reflexes. She could find nothing wrong with them at all. In her notes, which survived, she wrote that the patients were uniformly cooperative and that she had never seen a group of people so serene. Nora, Cass, and Eli met that Friday night in the parking lot behind the high school. Or rather, Nora and Cass met there.

10:39 Eli came late and stood a little apart from them, with his hands in his pockets, and he did not say very much. Nora told the others everything, the tape, the static, Dev in his room, and what he had said. It was Cass who said what they were all thinking, that it was coming from the station, that whatever had been on that tape was not just a sound, that it did something to the people who heard it, and that it was spreading because the people who heard it wanted it to spread. She said they had to tell someone. Nora agreed. And Eli, standing at the edge of the light, said nothing, and Nora noticed that he was tapping his foot, very slowly, in a rhythm that matched no song Nora had ever heard.

11:23 They went to the sheriff on Saturday morning. Sheriff Tom Garrity listened to their story in his office, patiently, with his arms folded. He had known all three of them since they were children. When they had finished, he thanked them for coming in and told them that the state was sending people and that the best thing they could do was to go home and stay with their families and keep their radios off. He did not believe them. He was not unkind. He simply did not believe them. Nora later said she could not really blame him. She would not have believed it either. On Saturday night, at half past nine, Eli Marsh walked out of his uncle's house and did not come back His uncle found his phone on the kitchen table, and next to it, a note, written in Eli's neat, careful, mechanic's handwriting.

12:13 It said that he was sorry, and that he loved them, and that he had to go back, because there was more of it, and someone had to listen. The next morning, the sheriff's deputies drove up the logging road and found Eli's truck parked at the end of it. They followed the path through the woods to the fence, and the fallen tree, and the broken steel door. From somewhere deep inside the hill, they could hear the roar of a diesel generator, and above it, very faintly, through the open door, the tone. The deputies did not go in. They had heard enough, by then, about what happened to people who listened. By Sunday evening, it was no longer a local story.

12:56 A reporter from a television station in Pittsburgh had driven out to Harlow to cover what her station was calling a mysterious illness in a small town. She did a live report from Main Street, outside the brick building of WHRL, with the station's broadcast tower behind her. Halfway through her report, a man walked slowly into the frame behind her and stood on the sidewalk, looking into the camera. It was Gary Pruitt. He was humming. The reporter turned to look at him, and the camera operator, without being told, zoomed in. The report went out live to nearly half a million homes across western Pennsylvania. The station cut away after eleven seconds.

13:37 Afterwards, the news director said it was the longest eleven seconds of her life. Tonight's signal. It is the word that every family used. Calm. Not sick, not frightened, not violent. Calm. In every account of those first days in Harlow, the same word appears, over and over, from wives describing their husbands and children describing their parents. They were calm and gentle, and they seemed happy. Nora said later that this was the cruelest part of it, and the part the outside world never understood. It would have been easier if the people who listened had been in pain.

14:18 It would have been easier if they had screamed. Instead, they smiled and said that they were fine and that everything finally made sense. And they asked the people who loved them, very gently, to listen too. Next time on Midnight Signals, the station continues. The signal is no longer in Harlow. It is on the evening news and the internet and the phones in people's pockets, and every speaker it reaches becomes a door. Within weeks, the governments of the world will learn that the most dangerous thing on Earth is a broadcast, and one by one, the lights of the world will begin to go out. This has been a broadcast by Midnight Signals.

15:00 I'm Russ Chamberlain, guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery. Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello. If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and drop a review. Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember, in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal a story waiting to be told. [outro music]