FRIGHTLY! Scary Stories and Tales of Terror
Sep 28, 2026 · 12 min · 8 segments
Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says…
I bought the machine from a widow in Trenton in the winter of 1906 for a great deal less than it was worth, which ought to have told me something, and did not.
It was a graphophone of the better sort, mahogany-cased, the brass of its horn gone the soft brown of a chestnut, and the widow would not look at it while she named her price.
She kept her eyes instead on the snow coming down past the window, fine and steady, the way ash falls.
Her husband had been a man of recordings.
He had liked, she said, to keep his own voice.
She said it as another woman might confess that her husband liked to keep snakes.
I was, in those days, a solitary creature.
I clerked for a firm that does not matter now, kept three rooms above a Chandler's, and spoke aloud to no one from the closing of the office on Saturday until its opening on Monday.
So I understood the dead man at once, and felt a kinship with him I did not examine.
A man who keeps his own voice is a man who has decided that someone, someday, will want to hear it.
A man who keeps his own voice is a man who has decided that someone, someday, will want to hear it.
I carried the machine home through the snow myself, and I did not feel the cold.
The first night I recorded my diary onto a fresh cylinder, as I would do almost every night thereafter, and there is a particular pleasure in that that I will not pretend I am ashamed of.
To speak into the horn, to crank the playback, to hear oneself returned, thinned and tinny, and yet unmistakably oneself, it is the nearest thing a lonely man has to company.
and the company is reliable, and it agrees with everything one says.
I bought the machine from a widow in Trenton in the winter of 1906 for a great deal less than it was worth, which ought to have told me something, and did not.
It was a graphophone of the better sort, mahogany-cased, the brass of its horn gone the soft brown of a chestnut, and the widow would not look at it while she named her price.
She kept her eyes instead on the snow coming down past the window, fine and steady, the way ash falls.
Her husband had been a man of recordings.
He had liked, she said, to keep his own voice.
She said it as another woman might confess that her husband liked to keep snakes.
I was, in those days, a solitary creature.
I clerked for a firm that does not matter now, kept three rooms above a Chandler's, and spoke aloud to no one from the closing of the office on Saturday until its opening on Monday.
So I understood the dead man at once, and felt a kinship with him I did not examine.
A man who keeps his own voice is a man who has decided that someone, someday, will want to hear it.
A man who keeps his own voice is a man who has decided that someone, someday, will want to hear it.
I carried the machine home through the snow myself, and I did not feel the cold.
The first night I recorded my diary onto a fresh cylinder, as I would do almost every night thereafter, and there is a particular pleasure in that that I will not pretend I am ashamed of.
To speak into the horn, to crank the playback, to hear oneself returned, thinned and tinny, and yet unmistakably oneself, it is the nearest thing a lonely man has to company.
and the company is reliable, and it agrees with everything one says.
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