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Dispatch → Account → Culture
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The Isles of Student Loan Debt.
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Carner Institute Inventory Entry: The Creep Hotline
The Creep Hotline
Material: Premium-rate telephone number
Purpose: Narration of horror stories over the phone
Locations of Operation: Debtian Isles, national range
Years of Operation: 1987-1988
Anomaly Classification: Liminal Anomaly
Anomaly Variant: Orphic Periphery
A premium-rate telephone service centered around themes of camp and horror, advertised that anyone who calls the line will talk to "real-life ghosts & zombies". This number first went live in 1987 and the commerical was advertized on a national level with most airing occuring in the early morning.
Most callers would connect with an automated recording of the Creep narrator who would tell them a scary story, although the quality of these stories left much to be desired. On rare occassions, a caller would not connect with an automated recording but an actor playing the role of the Creep who could interact with the caller.
On a rarer few instances, however, the caller would connect neither with an automated message nor an actor. The 6 callers our Institute were able to interview reported the majority of their call was of silence with the background sound of average phone static. At infrequent times, there would be sounds of thumps on the other line with a reverbing effect to them. Four of the callers reported that it was possible they heard a voice on the other side but were not sure. One caller said she did hear a voice but struggled to make out what it was saying.
The final caller said he could clearly understand the words being said and managed to have some small amount of conversation over the line. He told us he spoke to a woman named "Evangeline" who seemed frightened and confused. After a few minutes, she became more difficult to understand until the entirety of the sound consisted of phone static, at which the final caller hung up. Our observations of this caller found he had begun suffering from major depressive episodes that begun 1 week after that call. He died 3 years later from a stroke.
"Evangeline" was the name of a first generation immigrant to the Debtian Isles who was found dead 3 months prior to the final caller's call, dead in her room with a phone in hand. Her call record showed she was on the line with the Creep hotline when she died. While this hotline was active from 1987 to 1988 before Institute-backed regulations shut down the line permanently, an estimated 11 people thoughout the Isles had died in the same manner as Evangeline.
Perhaps the commercial's advertisment was more accurate than the operators knew.
