Freaky Frequencies:
Ghosts of Country Radio Stations
Country music needed rural listeners and rural listeners needed radio. It wasn’t like they could just head into the big city to catch their favorite artists. Radio and radio shows—like the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry—brought country music to them.
As country music grew to be a dominating force in entertainment—competing on the musical front with jazz and big band and later rock and roll—radio stations became powerhouses of country music, powerful enough to turn local or regional singers into national celebrities.
There are several paranormal theorists who suggest that radio stations didn’t just power careers, they could power supernatural activity. The people who believe that radio stations are exceptionally haunted have two questions: Does it have something to do with the powerful transmitters booming out wave after wave of electromagnetic waves? Or does the psychic power of music become embedded in the atmosphere of these high-spirited spaces?
I’ll let you consider those theories as you read about the eerie airwaves of country music radio.
KMCM Radio Station: Tuning in to Spooks
Back in the 1970s, most country music fans tuned in to KMCM, a radio station in McMinnville, Oregon, for their daily fill of country tunes and ballads. The station even said that the “MCM” part of their call letters stood for “More Country Music.”
The formats and owners may have changed many times over the years—and even the call letters have changed (the station became KLYC in 1990). But one thing has remained: the radio station’s haunted legacy, a legacy documented by a former news director at the station.
Tim King, who collected, wrote, and delivered the news for KLYC back in the early 1990s, told the Salem News that his experience working at the radio station is one reason for his interest in ghost hunting. He said that part of his duties at the station was to increase the AM’s power for the day as soon as he arrived for his morning shift. For anyone who has ever picked up a Chicago radio station while on vacation in North Carolina, AM signals tend to go haywire at night and most AM stations alter their power during the nighttime hours and return them to full power at the start of the broadcast day.
The equipment to power up the station was located in what employees referred to as the rack room, a narrow space in front of the studio where the DJ worked. King would enter the rack room and flip a few switches to start the “warming up” phase to prepare the station to go live. The warm-up phase took about fifteen minutes, and during that time the employee was usually on edge.
He called it a feeling that was as inexplicable as it was uncomfortable. The feeling—or whatever it was that flooded the DJ during the process—was often coupled with a chill. Oregon winters might account for some of that coldness, King told the Salem News, “but there were sometimes more goosebumps than usual.”
King continued: “I felt like I was sharing space with someone and neither of us liked the other very much.”
Sometimes, though, it was more than just a feeling. He often would see something—an image, a figure—dashing by his peripheral vision. He turned to look at whatever was racing by. But it would be gone. It’s easy to dismiss this as either imagination or perhaps the powerful radio equipment in a confined space was producing an electromagnetic effect that the radio station employee was picking up. But King said he knew there was something there. He didn’t fear it; in fact, he became more and more interested in discovering the source of these phenomena. King and his wife had several discussions about the ghostly occurrences that seemed to be happening at the radio station.
When Halloween approached, King searched for a supernatural angle to spice up his newscasts. He began to research some of the local hauntings and sought out local paranormal experts. That’s how he got connected to a local clairvoyant. The clairvoyant was quoted in a story about a haunting at Pacific University. When King contacted her, he told the clairvoyant that he was experiencing some weird stuff at the radio station. She agreed to come to the station on the day before Halloween for an interview—and perhaps an investigation.
Before the psychic arrived, King popped by the program director’s office to brief him on the special Halloween show. As the program director listened, he interrupted his news director.
“Well you know this place is haunted, right?” The program director asked rhetorically. “You know there’s something here, you open the station in the morning, don’t you?”
King had never told the program director what he experienced, so this was a complete shock to him. He only talked about the haunting with his wife. The program director continued his story, telling the now completely stunned news director that every worker who ever opened up the radio station in the morning had reported encounters with the supernatural of one form or another. There wasn’t a single employee who opened up the station who wasn’t a little spooked by the place, the program director continued.
This was quite a bombshell to go off right before the interview with the psychic. When the psychic arrived, she toured the station and immediately picked up on a vibration, or a presence. The vibe was particularly strong in the rack room where King had his own run-ins with the phantom, she told them. However, the psychic felt that the power from the transmitter seemed to be blocking her. The psychic’s impressions backed up his own experiences and their interview was a big hit among the listeners.
“I found it all very fascinating and it was good to know that I wasn’t imagining the strange presence each early morning,” he said.
King eventually left the station but, years later, found himself back in McMinnville. He visited his old workplace, which was no longer a radio station; it was now a daycare center for disabled children. He asked one of the women working at the center if she or any other employee experienced haunted activity. Her answer “made my skin crawl,” he said.
The employee told King she needed some supplies, so she walked into a storage closet. After she opened the door, a tape dispenser flew in front of her. It wasn’t like it tumbled off the shelf, either. There was no one there and the dispenser flew at such a high speed, the employee ruled out anything accidental or natural. Someone—or something—with a pretty strong arm tossed the tape at her, she said.
King now was a little better versed in paranormal phenomena. He wondered if the tape-tossing spirit was actually a poltergeist, a type of spirit that most paranormal investigators are familiar with. They are known for mischievous activities, like throwing objects and causing electromagnetic disturbances. Poltergeists are also noisemakers. In fact, poltergeist is a German word for “noisy spirit.”
However, a poltergeist is often attached to a person, typically an adolescent or young adult. So, it didn’t exactly fit the modus operandi of the spirit that King encountered. To this day, King looks back at that odd time at the radio station as a defining moment in his life—one that led him to exploring other signs of the supernatural. He investigated ghosts in nearby Pacific University and at cemeteries in Yamhill County. But those are only a few of the ghost hunts the former radio station news director has attended. He’s investigated “dozens” of cases and has come to the conclusion that there are things that exist that seem to defy what the rational mind defines as real and natural.
“And yes, I have seen some things that go far beyond reasonable explanation,” he told the paper.
But he’ll always wonder: what made that radio station so haunted?
Fresh Country 103.1:
A Tall Tale or a Tallahassee Terror?
The traffic reporter for a Tallahassee television station and morning DJ for the area’s country music radio station reports he had an unscheduled cohost in the studio with him on a few occasions. The DJ, who goes by the name Big Moose, provides country music and news for his audience each morning on Fresh Country 103.1 in Tallahassee. Big Moose now believes that the studio is haunted.
One time, when he was alone in the studio preparing to give the traffic report for the television station, he heard voices and then heard—very distinctly—the voice of a little girl say, “Can you hear me?” There was no one around and it didn’t seem to be any bleed through from any other studios or broadcast. The voice was that plain.
“Can you hear me?” The voice said again. Over the next few days, the voice called out again and again—usually at the same time.
Other activities baffled the DJ. He said doors would open and close by themselves. The staff, likewise, complained the computers would turn on and off without any explanation. Besides these anecdotes, evidence was hard to come by, though. There are dozens of natural explanations that skeptics could level at these supposed paranormal reports. For example, vibrations can cause doors to move and computers are notoriously temperamental, turning on and off with a will of their own. But then the staff at the radio station claimed to capture video evidence of the spirit.
One employee noticed something strange when Big Moose was giving his televised traffic report—an orb zipped around the room. Other people agreed. They saw it, too. There was some type of odd object swirling around the studio. If it was natural phenomena, it was really uncommon. No one ever noticed this type of effect on television before, at least.
Usually, when you encounter this weird behavior, you’ll discover a ghostly legend about the building and, sure enough, Big Moose said he found a possible connection between a tragic event and the haunting activity he was experiencing at the station. According to Moose, many years before owners built the studio at its present location, the building was just a residential home. The family that lived in the home included a brother and sister. The bedroom for the children was located in the same place as the studio where Moose seemed to be experiencing most of the haunted activity—although, to be sure, the whole site seemed possessed by unexplained forces. According to the story that Moose retold, the children were playing, jumping up and down on the beds, as kids do. The brother jumped into the sister, knocking her toward the window, which was open. She went out head first through the open window and plummeted to her death.
Now the questions begin: Is this the girl that Moose hears? Is her spirit the one that was caught on video flitting around the studio?
Moose—and a whole lot of other believers—seem to think so.