The Fire Tower Radio Logged a Call Nobody Made




At 2:14 AM, the radio at Black Mountain Fire Lookout started transmitting by itself.
I was alone sixty feet above the forest floor when the green transmission light began flickering on the Motorola console.
I wasn't touching the radio.
Nobody was supposed to be transmitting.
Then I heard three clicks.
Click. Click. Click.
The transmission stopped.
I didn't know it then, but something inside the tower had already answered.
I was working the late-season shift at the Black Mountain lookout, just east of Dubois, Wyoming. By mid-October, the summer crowds were gone and the Forest Service had started scaling back operations. It was just me up there, a solar-powered battery bank, and that heavy Motorola VHF radio console.
The night of October 14th started normally. By midnight, the radio had started waking up on its own. When the transmission light flared up, I pulled the hand mic out of its cradle, but the system didn't click. I told myself it was the cold. I threw the master breaker to OFF around 2:30 AM, watching the digital display die completely. I went to bed, confident the station was dark.
The next morning, everything seemed fine. I switched the power back on, called Martha at Cody dispatch, and told her I had shut the rig down because of the transmission glitch. She just gave me the weather brief and told me a maintenance tech would look at it in a few days.
Two days later, a regional supervisor named Marcus drove up the switchback trail in his dusty green Chevy Silverado. He didn’t bring a technician. He brought an envelope.
Marcus had been with the department since the late eighties. I knew him well enough to recognize the look on his face before he said a word. He climbed up the tower steps slowly, his heavy boots thudding against the wooden risers, and when he reached the cab, he didn't even take off his Stetson. He set a yellow legal pad on the map table, right over the glass-covered compass dial.
"Ben," he said, his voice completely flat. "We have a major discrepancy on the log from Monday night. The regional office in Ogden monitors all district frequencies through the digital trunk line. They recorded an incoming phone patch to this station at 3:44 AM."
"I told you, I turned the master breaker off at two-thirty," I said, pointing to the switch. "The whole console was dead until dawn."
"I know what you said," Marcus replied, looking straight at his boots. "But the call came through the physical landline connection."
I stared at him. The Black Mountain tower does not have a landline. The old copper wires were ripped down by an ice storm back in the winter of 1994 and were never replaced. There is a gray junction box on the outside wall of the tower base, about ten feet up, but it is entirely empty. I had checked it myself during my first-week inspection; there was nothing inside but dried pine needles and a dead hornet’s nest. The nearest actual telephone pole is twelve miles away on Highway 26.
Marcus didn't argue. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small digital recorder, and pressed play.
The speaker filled with a deep, rushing hiss, like water pouring through a concrete culvert. Beneath the hiss, there was a steady, rhythmic ticking. Click. Click. Click. It sounded like a plastic zip-tie being drawn through a fastener, or the cool-down clicks of a hot engine block.
Then, the static dropped slightly, and a faint, distorted voice came through, reading numbers.
“Forty-three. Point. Five. One. Zero. Two.”
A pause. More metallic clicking.
“Minus. One. Zero. Nine. Point. Six. Three. Eight. Seven.”
The voice stopped, and the recording ended.
I looked at Marcus, my hands suddenly feeling cold. "What is that?"
"Those are geographic coordinates," Marcus said, tapping his pen against the map table. “We plugged them into the regional GIS system.”
Marcus finally looked at me.
“You know where they point?”
I shook my head.
He tapped the map.
“This cabin.”
I took a deep breath. The cabin smelled strongly of old wood and the grease from my breakfast pan. Everything looked completely ordinary—the Coleman stove, the stack of logs, my red flannel shirt hanging from a peg by the window.
"Someone's playing a prank," I muttered. "A ham operator messing around."
"The call originated from the Lander maintenance yard," Marcus said. "The automated switchboard logged the outgoing trunk line from the tool foreman's desk. Problem is, the Lander yard has been locked up since October 1st for the winter. The power is cut. The main breakers are pulled. We sent a deputy out there yesterday morning. The dust on the floorboards inside the office was three inches deep and entirely undisturbed. No footprints. The lock on the chain-link gate was rusted shut."
We stood there in silence. The propane heater kicked on with a loud thump, making both of us jump. Marcus told me to stay put until the end of the month because they were short-staffed, but advised me to use the emergency satellite beacon if anything else happened.
That night, I didn't read. I sat in the dark with my flashlight turned off, listening.
Around 3:00 AM, the air in the cabin turned freezing cold. I looked at the small solar-powered digital clock on the desk. It read 03:12. I watched it for what felt like ten minutes, waiting for the numbers to change. It stayed at 03:12. I pulled out my wristwatch—an old mechanical Seiko. The second hand was sweeping, but the minute hand was stuck hard between the two and the three.
Then I heard the sound.
It wasn't coming from the radio console. It was coming from beneath the floorboards, right near the corner where the old, dead telephone junction box was mounted on the exterior wall outside.
Click. Click. Click.
It was the same rhythmic, metallic sound from the recording. It was slow, deliberate, and perfectly steady.
I picked up the flashlight, clicked it on, and shone the beam down through the gaps in the floorboards. There was nothing down there but the dry dirt forty feet below and the concrete footings. But the clicking kept going. Click. Click. Click.
I grabbed the orange emergency satellite beacon from the desk and pressed the distress button. The indicator light didn't flash green. It didn't flash red. It stayed completely dead.
When the daylight finally cracked over the eastern ridges, it brought no relief. The light was thin and gray, and the clock on the desk suddenly jumped from 03:12 to 06:45 in the blink of an eye.
I grabbed my pack, threw my logbooks inside, and hurried down the external ladder. I was going to hike the twelve miles out to the highway. But when I reached the bottom of the tower, I stopped dead in my tracks.
The gray plastic junction box for the old telephone line—the one that had been empty for thirty years—was hanging wide open. The small plastic latch had been broken off, swinging gently in the wind.
I walked over to it, my boots crunching loudly on the dry pine needles.
Inside the box, there were no wires. But lying in the center of the dust-covered plastic housing was a small, square piece of paper. It was an official Forest Service dispatch slip, yellowed and brittle around the edges, as if exposed to high heat.
Written on the slip, in clear, precise blue ink, was a single line of text. The handwriting was mine. Not similar to mine. Mine.
OCT 15 - 03:14 - STN-09 - MILLER REPORTING. REMAINING AT STATION FROM NOW ON. LOG CLOSED.
I stood there holding the paper, staring up at the lookout tower.
The wind picked up, rustling through the pines.
But somehow, it sounded miles away.
I did not hike to the highway. I turned around, climbed back up the ladder, sat down at the map table, and took out my pen.
When Marcus came back up three weeks later with the winterization crew to lock the tower down for the season, they found my green Chevy Silverado still parked at the bottom of the trail, its windows covered in a thick layer of pine pollen. My gear was still in the cabin. The propane heater was running on low, and the remaining pages of the logbook had been carefully cut out with a razor blade.
The only thing they found on the desk was my mechanical wristwatch. It was still ticking, but the hands were missing entirely, leaving only the bare silver posts spinning in circles over the white face.
They listed me as missing.
No body was ever found.
The case was closed months later.
But now, by late October 2026, more than two years had passed since I supposedly vanished. My brother, who works as a draftsman for the Bureau of Land Management in Cheyenne, recently managed to pull the internal network traffic logs from the regional Forest Service server and sent me a copy of the raw metadata file.
The server logs show that the Black Mountain lookout station has continued to transmit its automated VHF status check every evening at exactly 21:15, without a single miss, for the last two years. The transmission strength is full, verified by three separate repeaters in the Wind River Range.
The system didn't list me as missing.
It listed me as active duty.
Currently logged in.
Currently transmitting from STN-09.
My brother ran the recording through a noise filter.
After the filter removed the static, six words remained.

“The weather remains clear up here.”


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