SPOOKY SPA
‘Haunted’ phone lines terrorized town
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in a continuing series of articles in October relating to ‘spooky Spa’ legends leading up to All Hallows’ Eve. Local historian and former staff writer for The Sentinel-Record John Archibald recalls a time in Hot Springs when telephone lines, and not a pandemic, terrorized the town.
The rumor of haunted telephone lines in the late 1800s had most people living in fear of this new invention called “the telephone.”
Being the historian that he is, Archibald notes that “a bit of history is in order” before the telling of the haunts heard by those picking up the telephone in 1880.
“Years ago in the 1800s, when the telephone was new, people didn’t trust electricity, they weren’t
real sure about it — it was a new thing in their life,” he said. “In today’s environment we use cellphones, and we don’t think twice about electricity, but in the life of the American citizen in the 1870s and 1880s, electricity was a very new phenomenon.”
While Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone in 1876, Archibald said it had one major flaw: It used an electromagnet. This resulted in Thomas Edison later inventing an “improved” telephone that used a carbon receiver.
“Hot Springs was a unique place in history and time in America; many of the first inventions available in America were brought to Hot Springs; it was a place where novelty was popular,” Archibald said. “So it’s with no surprise that four years after the telephone was invented, in the year 1880, the first telephone came to Hot Springs.”
The first local telephone was located at the William J. Little Grocery Company, formerly located at the intersection of Central and Prospect avenues.
Archibald said this first phone was “not of any particular quality.”
The phone line “went from Little Rock, through the woods, to Hot Springs,” he said. “It covered trees, it went over hills, it went on rocks and in some cases it also went on poles. It had a unique construction, in that the line itself was connected with hooks — and that’s pretty important for a very particular problem that soon cropped up after the first telephone was installed.”
That “problem” turned out to be the voices of the dead on the other end of the line.
“People would call Little Rock and they would swear that they would hear haunts: Moans, groans, shrieks; even clapping and music, particularly fiddle music. This came across as a great, fearful event to people in Hot Springs; keeping in mind that electricity was a phenomenon that was not quite understood.”
Archibald said people immediately began to believe the phone line to Hot Springs was haunted and that what they were hearing when they talked on the telephone were the voices of the dead. This concern resulted in the Western Union Telephone Company sending a lineman out to inspect the line to find out if people were actually talking with the dead.
What the lineman found out, Archibald said, was that the wires hooked together connecting the telephone line from Little Rock to Hot Springs had carbon building up in them, and in effect turned the wires into “microphones” that picked up the sound of people clapping, singing or having conversations nearby.
“So the initial question about ‘Were ghosts of the dead communicating with the living?’ seemed a little less likely as a result of this investigation,” he said. “It was solved by adding more insulators along the line between Hot Springs and Little Rock.”
“But does the question really end there?” Archibald said.
“We know in 1920 that Thomas Edison announced in the very popular American magazine ‘Scientific American’ that he was starting to work on a device using electromagnetism to communicate with the dead,” he said. “In fact, the curiosity that began here in Hot Springs in 1880, became a lifetime fascination for Thomas Edison.
“It is known that when he died in the 1930s, that in the last year of his life he was still working on a device to try to use electricity to communicate with the dead.
“So the Hot Springs telephone line: Was it really haunted, or not? You decide.”