This 911 dispatcher horror story is about one call. It came in three nights in a row at 3:02 a.m., always the same whisper, always from inside the building I was sitting in. Dispatchers collect terrifying tales to tell at night. This is the one I don’t tell new hires.
I was a 911 dispatcher for a small mountain county in Colorado from 2017 to 2021. Our dispatch center was on the second floor of the county sheriff’s office, an old brick building from the 1960s on the edge of town. On nights, there were two of us. Me and a woman named Gwen Albers, who’d been dispatching for nineteen years and had heard everything.
Our county had maybe twelve thousand people, most of them asleep by midnight. A slow night was three or four calls. A car in a ditch. A bear in a trash can. A drunk who wanted to report his ex-wife’s dog for barking.
The building had a basement where the old radio room used to be, before they moved dispatch upstairs in the nineties. It was storage now. Boxes of old files, broken chairs, a dead radio console nobody had bothered to haul out. The door was usually locked. Nobody went down there at night.
“There’s Somebody in the Building”
In January 2020, at 3:02 a.m. on a Thursday, a 911 call came in on line three.
I picked it up and did the script. “911, what is the address of your emergency?”
A woman whispered, “There’s somebody in the building.”
I asked her where she was. She didn’t answer. She was breathing fast. I could hear something behind her. A low hum, and a crackle, like an old radio.
I looked at my screen for the caller’s location. When a 911 call comes in from a landline, the address shows up automatically.
The address on my screen was our address. The sheriff’s office.
Then the line went dead.
Gwen leaned over and looked at my screen. She said it was probably a glitch in the phone system. She said sometimes the system shows the address of the dispatch center when it can’t find the real one. She’d seen it before. I believed her. It sounded right.
I logged it as a hang-up. We called the number back. It didn’t ring. Just a long tone, like a fax line.
The next night I worked was Saturday. At 3:02 a.m., line three lit up.
Same whisper. “There’s somebody in the building.”
I said, “Ma’am, I need you to tell me where you are.”
She said, “He came in the back.”
The hum and crackle were louder this time. Behind them, very faint, I heard footsteps. Hard shoes on a hard floor. Slow.
The line went dead again. The address was our address again.
This time Gwen didn’t say it was a glitch. She sat there for a long time looking at the screen. Then she said, “What line did it come in on?” I said three. She said, “Line three’s the one that used to go to the old radio room. They never disconnected the jack.”
I asked her what that meant. She said she didn’t know. She got up and went to make coffee, and she didn’t talk for the rest of the night.
What Happened in the Old Radio Room
On Monday, I asked the oldest deputy in the department about the radio room. His name was Hollis and he was about to retire. He was in the break room eating a breakfast burrito.
He put the burrito down.
He said that in the winter of 1984, the county only had one dispatcher on nights. She sat alone in that basement radio room from midnight to eight. Her name was Corinne Haas. She was twenty-six.
One night in February 1984, a man came in through the back door of the building, which in those days was never locked. He’d been arrested the week before for drunk driving, and he was angry. He went down to the basement.
Hollis said Corinne called 911 from the radio room. Back then, 911 calls from our county went to the state patrol in Denver. She whispered to the operator that somebody was in the building. The operator in Denver took eleven minutes to get a deputy to our building, because the only deputy on duty was forty miles away at a car wreck.
Hollis didn’t say what the deputy found. He just said, “She was a nice girl. She used to bring in cookies.” He said that’s why the back door has had a keypad lock on it ever since.
I asked him what time the call came in. He looked at me for a second. He said, “Three in the morning, or right around it.”
The Third Call
I had one more night that week, on Wednesday. Gwen was on with me. Neither of us said anything about it all night. At 2:55, she got up and said she was going to the restroom. I think she didn’t want to be at the console.
At 3:02, line three lit up.
I sat there and looked at it ring. I let it go four times. Then I picked it up, because that’s the job. You always pick it up.
The woman whispered, “He’s in the hallway.”
Not the basement hallway. I heard it. Right then, out in the second-floor hallway outside our dispatch room door. Hard shoes. Slow steps. Coming toward the door.
Our door has a window in it. A little square of reinforced glass. I could see the hall light through it.
The footsteps stopped right outside. The light in the little window went dark, like someone was standing in front of it.
The woman on the phone whispered, “Don’t open the door.”
I didn’t. I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear and my other hand on the radio key, and I didn’t move, and I didn’t breathe.
The line went dead. The light came back in the window.
Gwen opened the door a minute later, coming back from the restroom. She said the hall was empty. She said she hadn’t heard anything at all.
The End of This 911 Dispatcher Horror Story
The next day, I asked the county IT guy to look at line three. He went down to the basement with me. In the old radio room, behind the dead console, there was an old phone jack on the wall with a line still connected to it.
There was no phone plugged into it. There hadn’t been for decades. The jack was full of dust and spiderwebs.
He disconnected it at the panel. He said that should do it.
The calls stopped. I worked there another year and a half and line three never lit up again.
But I still think about it. I was a dispatcher. My whole job was to answer when someone called for help. Corinne Haas called for help in 1984 and it took eleven minutes for anybody to come.
Thirty-six years later, she called again. And she wasn’t asking me to help her.
She was telling me not to open the door.
If you want more extremely scary stories from the night shift, read the haunted hayride story about an extra actor, our funeral home horror story about a van that drove itself, or the Appalachian mountain scary stories about a trail marked behind someone.
Share a 911 dispatcher horror story
Dispatchers hear things the rest of us never will. If you’ve worked the phones overnight, share your 911 dispatcher horror story, or any horror stories to read at night from a call you can’t forget, in the comments below.
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