Thursday, October 22, 2009

Text Messages from Hell

Ever since moving in together as young adults, my uncle and aunty always experienced strange occurrences around their home – bizarre noises in the night; lights turning themselves on and off and various household objects would often be found in strange places or upside down. Being fairly religious, my aunt would prey to Jesus for spiritual peace, and for a time calm and order would return to the house.
My uncle is religious, but not as religious as my aunty (a devout Catholic) – in fact he is quite skeptical and cynical about the spirit world. He had an indifferent attitude regarding the strange occurrences around their home, and dismissed each one of them as having a logical, rational explanation.The strange occurrences virtually stopped overnight when my cousin was born.
Skip forward in time to around two years ago. My cousin has grown into a normal young teenager, with friends and the social life of a teenager, having completely forgotten about his strange imaginary friend as a child. Then his parents got him a mobile phone (cell phone in America) for his birthday. That is when the peace in the house was shattered once again. The mobile phone was bleeping constantly with text messages. At first my uncle and aunt were happy that their son was popular and had a lot of friends that wished to get in contact with him. But my cousin had not yet given his phone number out to anybody, and so who was sending them?
The text messages were being sent off a weird number (one that didn’t look like a real number), and were mostly garbled nonsense or just a jumble of random letters. However, occasionally, my uncle, aunt and cousin could make out their names in the messages, or the name of their house or street, or the occasional word such as "love," "sky" and "soldier." My aunt was unnerved by this and advised getting rid of the phone, but my uncle was having none of it. After all, they had paid a lot of money for the phone. My uncle argued that the strange text messages were probably just a fault with the network; either that or a prankster.
However, the text messages continued flooding through night and day, and over time the messages became more literate and started to form entire sentences. Curious, my cousin started sending messages back in reply to the same number from which the messages were originating from (the messages went through perfectly). He would ask the stranger questions, to which semi-literate replies were sent back. From the parts of the messages which were not completely garbled, my cousin could deduce that the sender was male, and he believed himself to be a soldier. When asked of his whereabouts, the reply was, “I am here,” or something to that effect. When asked where "here" actually was, the reply was "hell."
My father called the telephone company, who promptly informed him that, by their records, no text messages had been sent or received by the phone. More than this, the number which had been sending the strange text messages did not exist as an authentic number. It didn’t even have the correct corresponding number of digits that a real phone number is supposed to have, so it should not even been able to send or receive messages. My aunt brought in the local priest, to bless and exorcise the house. No strange occurrences have happened since, and I now have the mobile phone. Although I dare not turn it on!

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