The Station is an audio fiction series from Midnight Signals. This is Part 1 of 6.
On the last Saturday of June, four friends who have just graduated from high school, Nora, Eli, Cass, and Dev, climb Copper Ridge above the small town of Harlow, Pennsylvania. They're looking for Site Kestrel, an Air Force station that shut down without explanation in October 1977. Behind a rusted fence they find a steel door with two lines stenciled in red, the second one never explained: Do not listen. Inside is a room full of machines, and a single reel of tape left threaded in a recorder. Eli gets the old generator running. Dev presses play. And on the drive back down the mountain, Dev begins to hum.
Listen to Part 1: https://midnightsignals.net/podcast/s/midnightsignals/the_station_part_1_do_not_listen
More from Midnight Signals: https://midnightsignals.net/
Chapters
0:00 The Warning Beyond Copper Ridge
3:19 The Secret History of Site Kestrel
5:59 Four Friends Enter the Abandoned Station
7:38 Beneath the Hillside
9:31 Bringing the Station Back to Life
11:39 The Beautiful, Terrifying Signal
13:05 What Dev Brought Home
14:41 The Warning, and What Comes Next
A Midnight Signals Story. A work of fiction.
Midnight Signals blends history, folklore, and dramatized storytelling. Some names, places, and events are fictionalized or illustrative. Characters are fictional, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Video visuals use real public domain and Creative Commons licensed photos (credited below) and generated radio graphics. No AI images.
Thumbnail photo: 'Radio Tower Long Exposure' by Harloh Massey, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) cropped and color graded.
Photo credits, all via Wikimedia Commons, each cropped and color graded (title, author, license, source):
Night sky radio towers, Unknown author, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=82747940
View of Great Smoky Mountains from Crest of N..., Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=123683896
Cooper Mill Road Vista (Revisited), Nicholas A. Tonelli from Northeas..., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=61604400
Abandoned Radar Station, Churchill, Manitoba, Mike Beauregard from Nunavut, Can..., CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=45992250
Indoor shot of Pori short wave station, 1954, Yle Archives - Yle Arkisto Archiv..., Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=33547462
Sevastopol Radar Station, Axelode, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=35945616
Dülmen, Kirchspiel, ehem. Sondermunitionslage..., Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=154869012
Perspective view of north end of Bunker 103 s..., Unknown, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=34523455
Во тьму Into darkness, spoilt.exile, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=105290806
Fort-moultrie-radio-room-sc1, Brian Stansberry, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=20589803
View of interior of room 114, supervisor's of..., Sims, Gregory, creator, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=33596794
Yanaike I power station old generator, Qurren, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=6977039
Electrical control panels in the Peenemünde P..., Siarhei Besarab, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=177272601
An NEC reel-to-reel audio tape recorder, Mk2010, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=46436999
SNF Tofte FC091013 foggy road, usfs_Eastern_Region, Public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=185524536
On an empty road at night (Unsplash), Alejandro Benėt alexphoto, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=61872743
Car in the middle of the wilderness in the mi..., JIP, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/?curid=42184726
License links: CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0; CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0; CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0; CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0; CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0; CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0; Public domain https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
