The Cellphone Tower

Near my house there is a dense forest, and in the middle of that forest, a cellphone tower stands tall among the trees, rising higher than any other structure. Now, a cellphone tower is nothing extraordinary in 2015, but the legend that surrounds ours is… unsettling at best. Because of the tower’s location within the forest, it is rather inaccessible to most people; even those who service the thing have a hard time getting to it with all their equipment. Nevertheless, it has been effectively dubbed the tower of death by our town.

The tower was state of the art for when it was built, and replaced an older tower, which was smaller and nearing the end of its life cycle. As the legend goes, just two days after the tower was built, a young couple who obviously were under the influence climbed to the top of the tower in hopes of taking a picture of the sunset as it descended over the town. As they reached the antenna cluster at the top, the girl was suddenly snagged on a cable and lost her footing, causing her to fall to the ground; she was killed upon impact. The male, devastated, also flung himself off, but instead of dying instantly like his lover, he survived just long enough to drown in his own blood. They died in agony and panic, never having even said their last words.

Ever since, the tower refused to operate normally, and would sometimes inexplicably cut out when the sun is setting. People have reported hearing faint sounds that resembled screams when calling on their phones, and would even get texts from unknown numbers with the words "help" and "please help us". The various carriers which the tower served were soon notified of the strange occurrences, and went to investigate. When they opened up the transceiver at the base of the antenna, they hastily replaced a lot of servers, switches and other equipment that controlled the tower. One of the technicians claimed that they had found droplets of fresh blood on the electronics, which were sealed inside a solid steel enclosure that was completely watertight. This all happened well after the death of the couple and the structure and surrounding area was well cleaned from top to bottom long ago. Many assumed that maybe an animal had been killed near the antenna, or that the technician was making this whole thing up for attention, but others suspect something a bit more disturbing. Despite the best efforts of the ISP, the tower would not operate reliably.

I personally never believed in any of that, but what happened yesterday made me become a bit more open-minded about the whole thing.

I was taking a walk, enjoying the beautiful sunset one last time before winter sets in, when I looked up at the supposed tower of death. And that was when I saw the silhouette of a person, barely visible, hanging from one of the horizontal bars on the antenna cluster. The person was clearly struggling, and his/her grip was failing. I watched in horror as the person fell from the structure, probably hundreds of feet, to the ground. Panicking, I called 911 and ran toward the tower, but deep down knowing that whoever it was probably was long dead. It took me almost half an hour to arrive at the base of the enormous structure, and when I arrived, the entire scene was spotless. There was no body to be found, no blood, no evidence that anyone has been here in ages. The emergency services arrived just minutes later, and all they found was me, frozen in shock. I tried to explain to them what I saw, but they likely thought I was either drunk, or crazy, or probably both. They walked around the tower once, found nothing, and left.

That night, I was beginning to relax and assumed that it was probably just an optical illusion, when I received a text from an unknown number, all it said was one word: "Help".