The 10 most terrifying anonymous calls of all time.
11 min read
The anonymous call is usually used as a telephone joke or to inform the police of some secrets without revealing their name. However, when it comes to phone calls, they are generally easy to track. Caller ID is a pretty common feature, and phone companies keep records of who calls whom, even if, apparently, this is an anonymous call. Not always a call has an innocent purpose, and there have been many cases in which anonymous phone calls have been the subject of debates and mysteries related to their veracity. There are some phone calls, however, that none of us would like to receive and with these mysteries, there are phone calls that are immensely puzzling.
10. The stalker of the Kuykendall family
During February 2007, Courtney Kuykendall, a 16-year-old girl from Fircrest, Washington, began sending random text messages to her friends. Things got strange when someone started calling the various members of the whole family threatening to kill them, kill their pets, and kill their grandparents.
The Kuykendalls turned to the police, who managed to find out that the calls were coming from Courtney’s phone.
Mistery solved? Not at all. Once the phone was shut down and seized by parents, the calls went on as often, and things only got creepier. Whoever was calling described things the Kuykendall family were doing or what they were wearing, and even their conversation with the police. This story continued for over four months, and no suspect was ever found and the cell phone company didn’t think the technology to hijack a phone existed at the time. However, security experts said a phone could have been hijacked using spyware.
The police thought that the family could have been making the story up, but two other families in the town also reported similar problems with their cell phones. The mystery was never revealed.
9. Charles Peck’s ghost calls
On September 12, 2008, a Metrolink commuter train collided head-on with a Union Pacific freight train in the Chatsworth area of Los Angeles, United States.
The driver of the Metrolink train was considered guilty, because it looked like he was sending a text message at the time of the crash. Historically, the crash was the worst in the history of the Metrolink, with 25 died, and another 135 people injured.
One of the people who lost their lives was 49-year-old Charles Peck, who was in Los Angeles for a job interview with the Van Nuys Airport.
He wanted to move to California because his girlfriend lived there and apparently he died almost immediately, because he was close to the spot of the impact and was one of the last people to be pulled out of the train.
The mystery is that, throughout the night and up until his body was discovered, Peck’s phone called a number of people, including his sons, his girlfriend, and his brother. All the calls lasted a few seconds of silence before hanging up. No one was able to explain how the calls were made, and there are some people who believe it was Peck’s spirit calling his loved ones to say goodbye…
8. The disappearance of Dale Williams
Dale Williams, 42 years-old, was the owner of a a body shop in Nucla, Colorado.
On May 27, 1999, a stranded motorist called him on the phone for ask help. Williams’s friend, who was at the shop, thought that the caller was female from the way Williams was talking. Williams seemed to be in a normal mood when he left, but the weird thing was that Williams wasn’t a mechanic, so he didn’t usually go out on many calls.
Dale took the company truck and disappeared, no longer found.
The vehicle was in gear, the ignition was on and the window was half-open, a thing that left his wife surprised because he always drove with the window all the way down.
The suspicions fell on a former William’s friend.
Williams and his wife had helped the former friend’s wife move, and they refused to tell him where they had moved her. Evidence that pointed to this former friend included torn-up pictures of Williams and the former friend’s family. They also found .22 caliber bullets around the shop, and Williams’s wife ran a video store, in which someone had dropped off a .22 caliber gun in the video return box after Williams had gone missing.
Both the pictures and the gun had come from Williams’s shop, however the police interviewed the former friend, but he denied any involvement. Williams has never been found, and no one has ever been arrested in connection with the crime. The identity of the caller also remains a mystery still today.
7. The disappearance of Balraj Rattu
The last confirmed sighting of 19-year-old Balraj Rattu was on November 6, 1995, when he was seen sitting in a car, drinking a beer with a friend in Surrey, British Columbia.
Three days later, his car was found about an hour away in Chilliwack, always in British Columbia, burned and with the man’s bloody clothes, but there was no trace of the body.
The day after he went missing, at 1:06 AM, a young woman called his family’s home: she thought that she was talking to Rattu and said, “Raj, you were beaten up.” Then she started laughing and hung up. The next day, there was another caller, whom Rattu’s father described the woman’s voice as much older.
She told them that Rattu was dead and then hung up. Both callers spoke Punjabi, and Rattu’s father is sure they were two different callers. The police were unable to trace the calls, and they are unsure what happened to Rattu. His body has never been found, and the identity of the mysterious callers remains unknown.
6. The missing crew Of Casie Nicole
On April 11, 1990, Nathan Neesmith, his brother Billy Joe Neesmith, his nephew Keith Wilkes, and his friend Franklin Brantley set off from McIntosh County pier in Georgia to go on a seven-day commercial fishing expedition, with their ship, Casie Nicole, recently restored.
The men headed to an unexplored area off the coast of South Carolina, but early in the morning on April 12, their boat capsized and quickly took on water. They had to abandon the ship, so they boarded a raft. Nathan Neesmith left the other three men in the raft with some food and went off in a wooden box to go find help.
He was rescued five days later, but the rest of the men were never found. The only things ever found were a sleeping bag and a life vest, and one probable conclusion was that the men simply drowned at sea. Of course, it is wholly possible, but there were strange phone calls from a man who didn’t speak English, which made the families of the missing men think they were still alive.
The calls were seven in all. Four were made to Nathan’s sister, and the other three were made to a man named Doug Tyson, the owner of Casie Nicole. The caller would just repeat the phone number, say the name of the person he was calling and the name of one of the missing men, Billy Joe.
In the last call, the man said he was going to bring them home. However, the men were never seen again.The phone calls led the family to speculate that the men were actually rescued from the ocean but were being held prisoners in a foreign country. However, the Men were never traced.
5. The strange case of “L’enfant”
The Marrakesh is a Moroccan restaurant in Washington, D.C. Opened in 1983, for 10 years the restaurant and its owner were subject to telephone harassment by an unknown individual or a group of people. The workers at the restaurant simply referred to the caller as “L’enfant” (“the Young One”). Sometimes, L’enfant called with death threats, and other times, he just swore or made sexual advances. He would call the restaurant multiple times, almost every day, and getting 20 phone calls in a day wasn’t unusual for the restaurant. The crazy thing is that this went on for over a decade!
Bashir Kouchacji, the manager of the restaurant, was the alleged target of L’enfant, probably because of an incident in 1974, when he was in Beirut. The Palestine Liberation Army kidnapped Kouchacji, because they thought he was a spy for the Mossad or a CIA agent. He was held in a Palestinian refugee camp, where he was threatened daily. After attempting suicide, he was sent to the hospital, where he was able to get in contact with his family. They contacted the American Embassy, and he was finally released.
When he was back in the US, Kouchacji and his sister opened the first Marrakesh restaurant in Philadelphia. Once it was successful, they decided to open a second one in Washington. That’s when the phone calls started: at first, it was just laughter or someone saying “tsk tsk”. It escalated from there and got so bad that Kouchacji became an angry and paranoid man. He lost lovers, friends, and employees over it. For years, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Other evidence that Kouchacji points to is that his car was vandalized with the Star of David, his former girlfriend was threatened, and the phone calls followed him when he visited the Philadelphia restaurant. The phone company and the FBI both tried to establish the identity of whoever was making the calls, but the only thing they could tell was that the calls came from public telephones across the Washington area.
After 10 years the phone calls were still usual, but less frequent.
4. The murder of Tracey Kirkpatrick
Tracey Kirkpatrick was a responsible 17-year-old girl who wanted to be a lawyer. On March 15, 1989, she was working alone in a women’s sportswear store in Frederick, Maryland. Her manager stopped by the store at 8:00 PM. At 10:50 PM, a security guard was checking the shopping center and saw that the lights in the store were still on, so he went to investigate.
In the storage room, he found Kirkpatrick dead from stab wounds to the chest and neck.
The police were without evidences because death seemed completely unmotivated: there was no sign of sexual assault and the store wasn’t robbed, only her purse was gone.
Three months after the murder a man, who identified himself as “Don,” called a confession hotline. The public line, which was based in Las Vegas, charged people per minute to confess their secrets and then charged others to call in and listen to those confessions.
“Don,” who said he was from Frederick, Maryland, claimed he stabbed a young girl and thought about turning himself in, but he didn’t.
He said he was sorry, but he couldn’t do anything to change what happened. Then he hung up.The hotline sent a copy of the recording to the police, and it was also sent to radio stations in the hope that someone would recognize his voice. However, since the man didn’t specify that he murdered Kirkpatrick, it’s unclear if he is her murderer or a killer at all. The police had two viable suspects throughout the years, but no one has ever been charged in the murder of the 17-year-old student.
3. The abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic
On April 27, 1989, a police officer went to the school of 10-year-old Amy Mihaljevic to talk about how you should never go anywhere with a stranger. The problem was that the man who abducted and murdered Amy was not a stranger to her: they had talked over the phone a few times.
Her brother overheard one conversation she had with a mystery man. On that tragic day, Amy told a friend she was meeting her secret caller to go buy her mother a present: in fact the man claimed to work with her mother and told Amy that she had just been given a promotion.
After school, Amy and a friend walked together until Amy went off to meet the mysterious man.After Amy had met the man, he allowed her to call her mother, which made the woman think that her daughter was calling her from home. It was only after she arrived home that she realized that Amy had never been there.
A frantic search of Bay Village, Ohio was done, however, sadly, the little girl’s body was not found until February 7, 1990. Her head had signs of trauma, and it appeared that she was probably sexually assaulted and stabbed. It also looked like the body was dumped a short time after she was kidnapped. No one has ever been arrested in connection with the crime, the man was sought all over America, but without success, and investigators are still hoping to track down the mystery caller.
2. The woman who predicted John F. Kennedy‘s assassination
On November 22, 1963, just after 10:00 AM, a switchboard operator at General Electric in Oxnard, California answered a call. There was no one talking on the line, but since the caller could have been in some sort of trouble, the operator asked a coworker to pick up as well. That’s when the caller, who appeared to be a middle-aged woman, whispered that the President would be killed at 10:10 AM.
The caller whispered some other warnings, such as “The justice. The Supreme Court. There’s going to be fire in all the windows. The government is going up in flames.”
Another call, made after 10:10 AM, insisted that the President was going to be killed at 10:30 AM.
At 10:25 AM, they disconnected the call, thinking the caller was just a disturbed individual. Meanwhile, in Dallas, Texas, President John F. Kennedy was driving down Elm Street.
The shots that killed the President were fired at 12:30 PM Central Time, meaning the time in California was 10:30 AM, exactly the time the caller mentioned. The phone company reported the call about an hour after the President was shot, and the FBI wrote a report about it. They were unable to trace the call, although the FBI believed (or allowed to believe they were) it was just a disturbed woman.
1. The Long Island serial killer
Along a remote stretch of the Ocean Parkway in Long Island, the bodies of 14 women have been found: all of the women were associated with the sex trade, and the police believe that at least 10 of the bodies were dumped there by one man, known only as the “Long Island Serial Killer.”
The unknown man began the murders in 1996, and the women were first strangled and then wrapped in a burlap sack before being dumped.
Besides murdering the women, the killer also found a sadistic way to torment the family of one of his victims. On July 10, 2009, 24-year-old Melissa Barthelemy went missing. Shortly after that, Melissa’s younger sister, Amanda, started getting phone calls from her sister’s cell phone: seven calls were made in all, and none of them lasted more than three minutes.
The last call, which lasted about 40 seconds, took place on August 26, 2009, at 1:00 in the morning, and during the call, the unidentified caller admitted he killed Melissa.
Melissa was not found until December 2010, and the Long Island Serial Killer has yet to be identified, still free and potentially dangerous.