There's a ghost in the radio.
So there are only two real radio stations down around my way. They're the worst kind of radio - constant ads, annoying announcers, boring news, and only the most begrudging music. Like 70% faff 30% music. They're also both owned by the same company so the jerks sync up their ads so that even channel flipping doesn't get you out of it.
So when I discovered that my town was just baaaaaarely in range of the radio signals coming from the next town over I was ecstatic. That doubled my choice in radio! Two good stations, too - one was a dance music radio station that alternates between weird garbo and amazing trance stuff, and the other is the country music station. I prefer the dance station but sometimes it's playing extended weird garbage so I flip over to the country music station and as a result I have developed a weird appreciation for country music. There's something about a man singing to his tractor - to his tractor, not about his tractor - that just speaks to me, you know?
But with out of town radio there's a catch. The signal is patchy. The country station is a little more distant so it gets weaker around my house and stronger as I head west. But the dance station? It only fails in one area. Around the new hospital.
It's like the radio is haunted and it has been ever since the new hospital started construction. It's the dead centre of town and the dance signal comes in firmly in every other direction. But around the new hospital it stars layering over with garbage and gibberish, distorted voices breaking through the pounding club music or harmonic trance until I'm clear of it. I started taking to a longer route around the building because the vibes it gave me were unsettling.
Directly across the road from the new hospital, after all, is the creepy old abandoned naval intelligence signal complex. It's a vast area the size of an entire suburb through beautiful rolling hills and golden long grass that a picturesque little red and white house sits on, surrounded by towering antennae. I found a hole in the fence one time and went exploring and found an abandoned military barracks where fifty soldiers would have lived, worked and exercised. It's rotting and empty and hasn't been lived in for ten years but all the doors are open and the beds are still there and a single wheelchair sits in the empty basketball court which is cracked and overgrown with grass. If I'm ever homeless I could move in there, sweep the floor, and have a roof over my head no problem.
So what do you call it when your favourite out-of-town radio station goes out to be replaced with crackling static and eerie voices in the gap between the abandoned military communications array and the brand new gleaming hospital?
Well, when I got into my car two weeks ago it was tuned into a radio station I didn't recognize. It was .2 points down from where my dance station normally is, 87.6 to 87.8, so practically adjacent. This station isn't listed. It plays exactly my kind of music - weird quirky indie-ish stuff - with zero downtime for commercials or announcers, so I've got no idea who runs it. And the sounds I heard around the sigint site are clearly the sounds of that station overlapping my dance station - that's the only place in town where that happens, so that must be the location they're broadcasting from. Just the other day I listened to a song from a weird AMV, go to my car, turn the ignition, and the exact same song immediately comes on the radio.
So I'm haunted by the ghost in the radio and she wants me to know that she shares my taste in music.