Static
Greg Mitchell had always found comfort in broken things. In a world of sleek touchscreens and wireless everything, his cramped radio repair shop in the narrow lanes of Cheltenham stood as a defiant anachronism, cluttered with vacuum tubes, resistors, and the ghosts of technologies past. The locals called him peculiar; he preferred to think of himself as a curator of forgotten frequencies. The shop itself was a testament to his obsession—shelves lined with radios from every era, their dusty facades telling stories of BBC broadcasts and late-night Radio Luxembourg transmissions. Housed in a Victorian terrace building, with its original sash windows and creaky floorboards, the shop seemed frozen in time. The air perpetually smelled of solder and PG Tips, and the ancient radiator clanked and hissed like a temperamental old cat. It was on a dreary Tuesday evening in October when everything changed. The rain had been falling steadily since morning, drumming against the windowpanes, and Greg was preparing to close up shop. He’d just finished repairing Mrs. Henderson’s 1960s Bush radio when he noticed something odd tucked behind a stack of repair manuals—a radio he didn’t recognise. The device was unremarkable at first glance: a simple black box with no manufacturer’s marks or model numbers. Not a Roberts or a Hacker, or any British make he recognised. Its surface was smooth, almost organic, with three basic knobs and a dial that glowed with a faint, greenish light. Greg frowned, trying to remember where it had come from. Had a customer dropped it off? He would have remembered that—he kept meticulous records of every repair job in his leather-bound ledger. Curiosity got the better of him. He plugged in the radio, and a soft hum filled the air as it warmed up. The sound was different from the usual electrical buzz—deeper, somehow. More alive. Greg turned the frequency dial, moving through stations of Radio 4 discussions, Radio 2 oldies, and local adverts until he reached the dead zone between channels. That’s when he heard it—whispers in the static. Most people would have written it off as interference, but Greg had spent thirty years working with radio equipment. He knew every type of atmospheric disturbance, every kind of signal bleed. This was different. The voices were too structured, too deliberate. He leaned closer, adjusting the fine-tuning knob with practiced precision. The whispers became clearer: “…breaking in through the back garden… she’s upstairs watching Coronation Street… doesn’t know he’s there…” Greg’s hand froze on the dial. The voice was describing a break-in, happening right now at the Thompson house three streets away. He could hear the fear in the whispered words, the urgency. Should he ring 999? What if he was wrong? But then again, what if he wasn’t? His hands shaking slightly, he dialed emergency services and reported a suspicious person at the Thompson residence. The next morning’s Gloucestershire Echo confirmed everything—an attempted break-in had been thwarted when police arrived just in time. Sarah Thompson was quoted as saying she had been home alone watching telly and hadn’t even known someone was trying to get in. Greg couldn’t focus on his work the next day. The radio beckoned to him like a siren’s call. That evening, after his last customer left, he turned it on again. The whispers were waiting for him: “…arguing about the pension again… he doesn’t know about her building society account…” “…the council leader’s meeting him at the Premier Inn… no one’s supposed to know…” “…she’s been lying about the NHS test results…” Day after day, Greg listened. The voices revealed the town’s hidden machinery—affairs, embezzlement, small betrayals, and quiet desperation. He began keeping a journal, documenting each revelation. Sometimes he would verify the information in roundabout ways, asking casual questions at the local pub or reading between the lines in the Echo. The voices were never wrong. But knowledge, even secret knowledge, comes with a price. Greg’s sleep became fragmented, haunted by static-filled dreams. He stopped taking new repair jobs, telling customers he was backed up with work. Dark circles formed under his eyes, and his hands developed a slight tremor that made soldering difficult. Even his regular morning cuppa couldn’t shake the fog from his mind. Then, one evening, as the autumn rain pelted against the windows, the whispers changed their focus: “…Greg Mitchell sits alone in his shop… his tea has gone cold… he hasn’t called his sister in Cornwall for three months…” His blood ran cold. The radio knew his name. Knew him. “…he’s afraid now… his heart rate is increasing… he’s thinking about unplugging the radio…” Greg yanked the plug from the wall, but the whispers continued, now coming directly from the speaker without power: “…he doesn’t understand yet… he thinks he can stop listening… but he’s already part of the frequency…” He backed away from the workbench, knocking over a mug of screwdrivers. The metallic clatter seemed to amuse the voices: “…he’s becoming erratic… just like his father before the motorway accident outside Bristol…” “Stop it,” Greg whispered. “…he’s talking to us now… good… that’s what we wanted…” The voices were growing stronger, more numerous, overlapping like a crowd at Piccadilly Circus all speaking at once. Greg grabbed a hammer from his toolbox. This had to end. “…he thinks he can destroy us… doesn’t realize we’re already inside…” He raised the hammer above the radio. “STOP!” The scream came from everywhere and nowhere, a burst of audio feedback that made his teeth ache. The shop’s fluorescent lights flickered, and for a moment, everything went silent except for the steady drumming of rain outside. That’s when Greg saw his reflection in the shop window, illuminated by the sodium glow of the street lamp outside. Except it wasn’t quite his reflection—the figure standing behind him was paler, its edges somehow less defined, like a photograph slightly out of focus. And it was smiling. “We’re not done yet,” the reflection whispered, its voice carrying the same static-filled quality as the radio. Greg tried to run, but his body wouldn’t respond. The world around him began to blur, reality breaking apart like a bad telly signal. He felt a pulling sensation, as if every atom of his being was being drawn toward the window. “No,” he managed to say, but it was too late. The reflection reached out, its hand passing through the glass like fog on the moors, and grabbed his wrist. The touch was electric, sending waves of numbness up his arm. The last thing Greg Mitchell saw was his own face, smiling back at him as he was pulled into a world of endless static. His doppelganger straightened its collar, picked up the shop keys, and walked out into the rainy Cheltenham night, leaving behind only the faint sound of radio interference and a cold cup of tea. In the days that followed, none of the customers at the radio repair shop noticed anything different about Greg Mitchell. If he seemed a bit quieter, a bit more distant, well, he’d always been a peculiar sort. And if sometimes, late at night, passersby heard whispers coming from the shop’s darkened windows—voices that sounded like static speaking in Greg’s voice—they hurried past, clutching their coats tighter against the autumn chill. For in the world behind the glass, in a dimension of pure signal and noise, the real Greg Mitchell screamed soundlessly, his cries lost in an eternal sea of static, forced to watch as something wearing his face lived his life. And sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, when the rain fell just so, you could almost hear him in the white noise between radio stations, whispering a desperate warning that no one would ever understand. Credit: Don Campbell Official Site Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.