The Ghost In The Old Radio Cassette Player
A true story of a not-so-bad but strange scare
It was around 10:30 that my nose started bleeding unexpectedly while watching television so I decided, after sorting myself out, that it was time to go to bed.
At the time I was living in the U.K. And even though I moved there for love, I wasn’t in a happy relationship. In fact, I was living with a control freak, better known nowadays as a psychopath.
But that’s a story for another day.
I must have fallen asleep quickly because I can hardly remember even getting under the big fluffy duvet. That was one of the many things I truly liked about living in a cold country. I know this sounds weird coming from a Mediterranean person, used to a lot warmer temperatures in the spring and summer, but I’ve never coped with the heat very well.
My then-partner and I had just bought the house where he grew up, and we were working extremely hard on redecorating some of the rooms to give the house a more personalised touch. I didn’t want to feel like I was still living in his parents’ house. That same house that had welcomed me so well when I first moved to the U.K, around that same time three years earlier but that now felt a bit like a stranger.
Changing things around and redecorating were important steps I felt I needed to take in order to replace the bad things in our relationship. Looking back on it, I know that what’s broken inside cannot be repaired by shifting and replacing things on the outside.
I don’t know what time my boyfriend came to bed, but I am sure I had not been asleep for long when a sudden loud noise coming from the next-door bedroom made me sit up straight in bed. It was as if a giant spring had catapulted me.
The corridor lights were on and a loud racket was coming from the radio next door, the room we had transformed into a gym and that had originally been my boyfriend’s sisters’ bedroom.
It took a few extra minutes for my partner to wake up and realise there was something strange going on. It wasn’t obviously one of his pranks because he looked more shocked than me.
I don’t know where I got my bravery from, but since all I wanted to do was to go back to bed, which was impossible with the radio turned on full blast, I got up without thinking too much and headed decisively towards the noisy room.
I wasn’t really scared, I was intrigued and sleepy.
As I walked into the room, my brain was trying to fill in the blanks. I was looking for rational explanations. Was it the wiring? A faulty contact? Had I left it switched on after training that day?
Being one of those 80s cassette players, in order to switch it on you had to eat some Popeye spinach first, it was that hard to move all the buttons to their right place.
There were a few things that got me puzzled. Number one, I had left it on FM and it was now set on AM. And number two, the conversation-interview kind of programme coming out of the radio was in Spanish. I didn’t even know it was possible to listen to Spanish radio in the UK.
For a moment I thought I had gone back home for good. Either that or I was sleepwalking.
I stared at the noisy thing for a few minutes, switched it off and then unplugged it from the wall. Just to make sure it wasn’t going to scare us again.
Only then the thought crossed my mind: what if someone was in the house?
So I walked inside the bedroom and looked around but there was nothing and nobody there, apart from me looking like a lemon. Cold shivers ran down my spine as the idea that there was really no logical explanation for the radio to have switched on by itself just like that was triggered. But also the rest of the corridor lights were switched on and there was that strange breeze of cold air I couldn’t explain. Although the fact the central heating was off and that it was nighttime made things easily explainable.
I kept thinking it must have been one of my boyfriend’s pranks, so when I went back to the bedroom pretty annoyed and ready to give him a piece of my mind, I realised that he was as shocked as me or even more so. He was standing in the middle of the bedroom, in his undies, paler than ever, holding up his baseball bat.
What was that? — he said.
I don’t know — I replied, and proceeded to explain what had happened.
I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was two in the morning, and there was nobody else there apart from us.
My mind was already on the grounds of the unexplainable. I started asking questions to my boyfriend about his deceased family members and the house just to find some logical connection, even if that meant considering the land of the ghostly as a possibility. We couldn’t find any explanations even there.
The thing that made the least sense of all was the radio chatting away in Spanish. Was there a message for me? That was my next thought.
Unlike my boyfriend, who spent the whole night stuck to his baseball bat, I managed to go back to sleep.
The day after, we decided to tell the story to his parents. His dad laughed. His mum went quiet. Nobody couldn’t make sense of it until my boyfriend’s oldest sisters overheard the conversation and said:
Oh, are you talking about my old bedroom? If you are, then it must have been grandma. I used to talk to her when I was little. She would sit at the edge of the bed and talk to me. Nobody ever believed me — she said looking regretfully back at her parents. They always told me to be quiet, so I did and then she left until the next time she decided to visit me again.
She said that as if it was the most natural thing in the world. And because for her it wasn’t such a big deal, she offered to come round and try to guide her grandma towards the new house.
It was all a bit funny and a bit weird at the same time, but she did what she said she would do. She came around, went upstairs, started to have a chat with her invisible grandma and that was that.
A few days later, my boyfriend’s mum told me she had sensed her mother-in-law’s perfume while going up the stairs. Meaning she was after her daughter all along.
Whatever it was that had turned the radio on, it didn’t do it again. But even to this day, I am puzzled about the fact that it had been talking in Spanish. And all I can think of is that I had been warned. From that day I knew that I had to come back home.
Key Message: When you think you might have been given a message from the other side, maybe it’s because you have!
Thanks for reading
- I normally write about the Gothic on Medium and in my own online magazine.- I help people learn more about themselves and their fears through literature, films, TV series, music and all those places where our Shadow-Selves lurk.- Have access to thousands stories from me and other writers. Use my referral link and start your journey of self recognition.- Also, use my referral link to no additional cost to you, to make great images like the one I have here, by using Canva.