The Ghost on the Phone
/This is the fourth in a series of blog posts created by the PhD students in my Public Intellectuals seminar.
The Ghost in the Phone
By Simogne Hudson
October 2, 2020
I got my first cell phone when I was twelve: a Nokia 3310 (pictured here). After begging for a cell phone for years, my parents finally got me one a few years after their divorce (I remember, in my tween mind, feeling conflicted over my excitement at the phone and the knowledge of why I had it -- so my parents wouldn’t need to communicate directly with each other). As was usual at that time, the affordances of the phone were pretty limited. I don’t even think I had texting; it was for emergencies only. Nevertheless, the glee of a first cell phone in one’s hands will surely be relatable to anyone reading this.
Years later, I upgraded to my first flip phone, which was (if my memory serves me correctly) a Samsung Gusto (also pictured). Many phones followed, including QWERTY slider phones, Blackberries, and iPhones. One thing that’s remained consistent, however, is my phone number. I have had the same phone number for almost fifteen years now, which gives me an odd sense of satisfaction given the never-ending flux that defines the technology industry. At the risk of coming off cyborg-like, I feel like the phone number is a part of me. However, phone numbers are not actually so individual:they get recycled,maybe even more so than the physical cell phones they’re attached to, which most often end up at the dump.
My phone number was inherited from somebody else, a man by the name of Bradley Holsclaw.
For most people, the question of their new number’s previous owner would never come up. But in the first few weeks of calling this phone number my own, I started receiving calls of a particular sort that persist to this day. For years, I simply looked at the calls as a minor annoyance, ignoring them and writing off any voicemails as spam. A few years ago, when I started thinking more critically about technology (an interest that then blossomed into my PhD research), I got increasingly more curious about where these calls were coming from and who they were for. So I started listening.
My first step was to figure out who these calls were intended for, which was more difficult than one might imagine. Those who were technologically active prior to the iPhone era will likely be able to distinguish the difference in audio quality between then and now. However, after some sustained and attentive listening, I was able to catch the intended recipient’s name: Bradley Holsclaw.
The calls came from debt collectors, an industry I was unfamiliar with until I began this detective work. The short of it: debt becomes “delinquent,” debt collection agencies can hire debt collectors, or sell the debt to debt buyers,both of which result in these types of calls.
Over the last few years I’ve begun archiving the voicemails -- you can listen to them here.
At this point in my investigation, two things were clear to me: someone named Bradley used to have my phone number, and Bradley owes somebody a lot of money. So, I looked Bradley up on Google. What I found in that search has stayed with me ever since:
SE Portland man dies a day after devastating house fire
Posted Jan. 28, 2008
A man died today, a day after inhaling smoke and suffering burns in a fire that gutted a home in Southeast Portland.
Firefighters arrived at the home in the 4400 block of Southeast 65th Avenue just after 7:45 a.m. Sunday as smoke poured out of the eaves.
Two men in the home at the time were not harmed, said Kim Kosmas, a Portland Fire Bureau spokeswoman. But the third roommate, identified as 28-year-old Bradley Holsclaw, died of his injuries the next morning.
The home, valued at $330,000, was a total loss, Kosmas said. And the fire's cause may remain unknown because of the extent of the damage.
Bradley, the former owner of my phone number, died in a house fire only a few weeks before I received my cell phone.
Put differently, I have a haunted phone number.
In technology discourse, we often talk about death as it relates to the objects themselves. Concepts like planned obsolescence, hyper-consumerism, and innovation dominate, and user vitality takes a backseat to its technological counterpart. A phone without a charged battery is “dead,” they are released in “generations,” and earlier models are referred to, with a sense of owners’ misfortune, as “old.”
I don’t claim to exist outside of this construct; as I stated earlier on in this post I have personally participated in the rapid consumption of cell phones. Seeing these photos, though, and reading these articles, brought my thinking back into the human-embodied elements of life and death that technology exists alongside. Instead of huffing about the annoyance that is automated debt collection calls, I am now shaken each time I get a call and remember the traces -- the ghost -- that lives inside of my phone.
The intersection of technology and ghosts is one that, while I think undertheorized on an academic level, comes up consistently in popular media. Take for example the South Korean film Phone (2002):
Soon after Ji-won gets a new cell phone, her friend’s young daughter, Yeong-ju, puts it to her ear and immediately begins screaming in terror. When other strange things start happening in connection with the phone, Ji-Won does some investigating and discovers that of the people before her who had the same number, almost all of them died suddenly under unusual circumstances. As Yeong-ju’s behavior becomes increasingly alarming, Ji-won digs deeper into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the number’s first owner, a high school girl named Jin-hie. (Horror News Net)
Media like this depart from utopian ideas about technology and what it can do for us. Instead, they point out the fears that surround technology, specifically in how, in its operational opacity, can take on a life of its own. How can we read the “life cycle” of a technological object (whether via material form of a cell phone or immaterial form of a number) to look for themes of the uncanny or the haunted?
In thinking about how the traces of Bradley manifest in my phone number, I also have to ask about the significance of the signs. Given that his ghost is coming through not in direct communication, but refracted through the communication of debt collectors, I would argue that what is exposed is another particular (and troubling) aspect of technology and haunting: he only exists in my life because of his debts. In other words, Bradley’s existence in the technological plane of reality is informed, and catalyzed, by harmful capitalist practices of the debt chase: when somebody dies, their debt does not go away. Instead of being exposed by Ghost Hunters (a la the A&E program Ghost Hunters), or, in a more expected fashion, eulogized and memorialized by his family, he is instead kept alive through debt.
I suppose in some odd way I’m honored to have inherited Bradley’s phone number. In all of my detective work I’ve never been able to track down family members or anything more detailed than the two news articles referenced in this post. In his 1919 writing on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud articulates that terror comes from the idea of the “double.” Might the double here be the phone-body connection? In that case, it would certainly seem like the possession I feel is at least in part because I’ve replaced the latter half of that connection, and I’m now faced with a reflection that is not my own.
Many phones and one number after Bradley’s death, I feel a certain amount of responsibility to continue his legacy, even if only by keeping this phone number for as long as I possibly can. What if the next owner didn’t realize the significance of (what I’ve now termed) the Bradley calls? The East PDX News article includes a photo of a “rain-soaked makeshift shrine” for Bradley.
My only hope is that my shrine, which is really just my phone’s voicemail folder, might do something to carry on his memory (no matter how insignificant).
