The Carrow Hill Tape

Theo Marsh had recorded episodes of Out of Frequency in a lot of places that wanted to scare him, and the trick, after four years and a hundred and ten episodes, was simple. You let the place be a location. You did not let it be a presence. You set up your gear, you found your angles, you talked your audience through the history in your warm even radio voice, and you treated the supposedly haunted thing the way a film crew treats a soundstage — as somewhere you were working, not somewhere you were trespassing. Carrow Hill made the trick harder than usual. The radio station had broadcast for thirty-one years and had been dead for fifty-three. It stood alone at the top of its hill behind a chain-link fence, a low brick building with a transmission mast still bolted to the roof, rust-orange against a sky the colour of wet newspaper. The mast was the thing Theo's eye kept going back to. A mast is a building reaching up to be heard. Carrow Hill had been reaching up to be heard, into nothing, for fifty-three years. He had come for the story of Owen Pell. Owen Pell had been the night DJ at WKRH Carrow Hill, the graveyard shift, midnight to six, playing records to the insomniacs and long-haul drivers of three counties. On the night of the fourth of November, 1971, the station logs showed Pell on the air as normal. At 3:50 a.m. he introduced a record. The record played. It ended. And the next thing on the tape — Theo had heard the tape, the historical society had a copy — was forty minutes of dead air, the soft hiss of an open microphone with nobody in front of it, until the dawn engineer arrived and found the booth empty. Pell's coat was on his chair. His cigarette had burned a brown stripe into the edge of the desk. The exterior doors had been locked from the inside. That was the whole of it. A man had been speaking to three counties, and then he had not been anywhere at all, and fifty-three years later Theo Marsh had driven up the hill to make a podcast episode out of him. He got in through a gap in the fence the local urban-explorer forums had documented for him, and he found the building unlocked, which the forums had also said, and which still made the back of his neck cool. He moved through it with his torch and his recorder, narrating quietly as he went, building the episode in real time the way he liked to. The lobby. The corridor of dead offices, their filing cabinets gaping. The studio. The studio was the room the building had been built around, and it had been preserved by sheer neglect into something close to a museum. The broadcast desk. The two reel-to-reel machines, huge as washing machines. The microphone on its sprung arm, and beside it the cigarette burn, a brown groove worn into the desk's edge, exactly where the historical society's photographs said it would be. And bolted to the wall, the ON AIR sign, its red glass dull and dead. Theo set up there. He framed his shots, he placed his recorder on the desk where Owen Pell's recorder would have sat, and he began to talk — about 1971, about the graveyard shift, about a voice that three counties had trusted to keep them company until dawn and that had simply, between one record and the next, gone off the air forever. He recorded for two hours. It went well. It went, if he was honest, better than well — the room gave him a stillness that made his voice sound right, made the history land. He packed up a little after midnight, pleased, already cutting the episode in his head on the drive down the hill. He did not notice, because there was no reason on earth to look at it, that at some point during those two hours the dull red glass of the ON AIR sign had begun, very faintly, to glow.