Static

Diane Calloway, 39, hosts the late-night show on a small Astoria station, and every Halloween she does the same stunt: she broadcasts the annual call-in special, "Dead Air," alone from the station's decommissioned transmitter building in the woods above town. This year, ninety minutes into the show, a caller who gives his name as Tom starts describing, in perfect detail, what Diane is doing inside the locked studio at that exact moment. He is not guessing. He knows things before they happen, and when she asks how, he says there is no delay on his end, because on his end it is still 1994, and he has been on hold for thirty-two years. The station's landlines were cut years ago, and Tom is coming through a wall phone that has not been connected to anything since the nineties. As the night wears on, Diane starts to understand that Tom is not the haunting. He is the host of it. And the woman humming underneath his voice, singing the lullaby Diane's mother used to hum, is the reason her family has been lying to her since she was seven about what happened to her mother on Halloween night in 1994.