Black Noise

During World War II, more than half of Europe was either threatened or taken over by nazi Germany, and just about every other country was affected in some way. But, I think it's safe to assume that you all know this. So, back then, there were many radio channels made with the sole purpose of broadcasting information about the war, although the broadcasters were punished severely if found out. One of these many, many channels, was "Síochána i gCogadh", or "Peace in War". It was a channel broadcasted in the southern regions of Ireland. After the war, Síochána i gCogadh decided to try and host their own TV channel, and changed their name to "Peace in the World", and was now broadcasting shows in English with the sole purpose of saying how good the world is and why we shouldn't start wars and all that kind of stuff. After about a year of broadcasting, they ran out of funding, and were replaced by some other Irish channel about cooking or something. It makes sense, they broadcasted stuff that people either already knew or didn't care about.

In the late 1970's, ITV had received some tapes, apparently all from Peace in the World's shows. They had a group of video editors take a look at the tapes, to see if they could find any interesting material for a two hour show they were going to broadcast, giving info on the war and the impact it had on society. The editors took a look through the tapes they had, most of them being shows for children and telling them how to be nice to others and all that generic crap you would expect from such a preachy station.

After a few days of looking through the unbearably boring shows, one tape they were about to play had a dent in the corner of it and was covered in dust. Strange, as all other tapes seemed to be in mint condition, but when they're almost three decades old, the alternative is more surprising. When they started up the tape, everyone jumped slightly, as all they could hear was white noise and the screen showed only static. They ignored this, figured the tape was broken, and moved on. The next tape had the exact same sound, only there was something viewable on-screen. It was a woman, sitting in a blue chair surrounded by children as she read a book. The show never displayed a name, although they had seen it before on the other tapes. The woman would always read two stories to the children per episode. The first one telling them about how a kid was bad and got punished, and the second telling them about how a kid was good and got rewarded. After that, she would talk briefly about "what we learned today", and then she would say in unison with the children sitting around her, "...And remember, in order to be safe, we must have peace in the world."

This particular tape played out as normal. You could kind of make out some words, if you looked hard enough at the blurry screen. But the sound was just white noise, playing on throughout the entire episode. All the other tapes after that were all displaying static and white noise, and all had dents in the exact same places. Except for that one tape. Upon further inspection, the editors found that it wasn't white noise, but rather highly distorted speech. They decided to play the tape in reverse to see if they could hear anything differently. One of the editors ran out of the room. Another almost fell out of his chair. The audio was... Indescribable. It sounded like a low, creepy chanting that was highly shocking, seeing as they weren't expecting to hear much more than a few words. During this, a very low static sound was heard, what the editors could only describe as "black noise". And on the screen, there was no woman, no children, and no background. Only that blue chair, with the book sitting on it, while they were both on fire. The two editors that actually stayed at this point listened carefully and could make out some words in Gaelic. One of the two remaining editors quit his job after this. But the one editor that remained edited the reversed audio and found that it said: "Let the world burn. Let the peace be diminished. Let the lands wage war." Over, and over, and over, until the episode was finished. The editor destroyed the tapes and also quit his job.

Years later, the editor was mugged and beaten by an unidentified street gang, and was then set on fire, as the gang sang menacingly "let the world burn, let the world burn, let the world burn..."