Radio Songs #48: The Ghost (Part 2)

The Phone-In ended at 2am, as did The Love Zone. It seems strange to me now that so many people would be up listening to the radio and calling the station at such a late hour, but I was young and I was a night person so back then I was one of them. My body clock quickly adjusted to going to bed at 3am after getting home from work. It was easier than getting up at 6am has ever been.

After the live shows ended, we switched to an overnight feed that came from another station. Every night we set the burglar alarm and left the building empty until 5.30-ish when the breakfast show jock and early morning newsreader arrived. On Saturdays, I set the alarm myself... and got out of there as fast as I could, because there were times I felt really unnerved by being the last one in there, on my own.

(Sometimes the alarm wouldn't set properly or there'd be some other technical hitch that delayed us. Then we'd have to call the station engineer. He was a great bloke, but nobody likes being called at 2.15 in the morning and hearing they have to come in to work to fix something. His wife hated us.)

So there was no one in the building for about three hours overnight. The place was locked and alarmed, and yes, I suppose someone who knew the alarm code might have come in, mucked about with things, then set the alarm and gone home again. But really... what sort of loser would do that, regularly, in the small hours of the morning?

For example. Every night, we'd turn off the speakers in the record library. Turn them off and switch off the light. Only the next morning, when the early people came in, they'd be on again. Sometimes at full blast, shaking the walls.

"Why'd you leave them on making that racket all night?" they'd ask us. They suspected we'd done it, on purpose, to scare them. We suspected they'd done it, on purpose, to freak us out. It wasn't all the time. Days, weeks would go by without it happening. Then it would again. Three nights in a row.

Things would move too. Tape reels would be on the floor. Those old tele-printer sheets with the holes in the side would be unspooled. One time - I didn't see this myself, but the engineer swore it had happened - the artificial ceiling in one of the rear studios caved in. "Someone could have pulled it down," he said, "but the way it fell, they'd have been trapped in the middle."

And sometimes the speakers in the record library didn't wait till we'd left the building. They'd be on at full blast when we came out of the studios at 2. Nobody else had been in the building. Electrical fault? Maybe.