Previously: The Zioptis Foundation’s Dial-A-Trip.
There are, it’s said, a set of telephone numbers from which you should never answer any calls. They’re called red numbers — and although no one knows who owns them, it’s not hard to see how they got their name. The most obvious reason for their name, of course, is that when they appear on your mobile phone’s display, they show up not as white text on a black screen, or black text on a white screen, but as red — bold, bright red. But more concerning than the color of the numbers is what’s said to happen to you, should you answer a call from one of them. If you do so, you might fall ill. You might suffer a brain hemorrhage. You might, in a word, die, all due to specific sounds and frequencies transmitted over the phone through the call.
These numbers, it’s said, have been responsible for dozensof deaths.
They’re not called “red” simply because of their literal color.
They’re called “red” because of the bloody deaths for which they’re said to be responsible.
[Like what you read? Check outDangerous Games To Play In The Dark,available from Chronicle Books now!]
Of course, red numbers aren’t real; they’re a modern urban legend — one that’s proliferated over the past 15 years or so, as mobile phones have become a bigger and bigger part of our lives. But they occupy an interesting space, right at the intersection of the kinds of classic urban legends spread by word of mouth and the modern ones designed to take advantage of technology as a means of dispersal. Red numbers stories aren’t quite as complex as, say, Lucia Joaquinor Sad Satan; however, they’re more complicated than the old Killer in the Back Seat or the Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs stories — and, accordingly, they reflect our fears about the world around us and how those fears are changing with the advent of technology.
A Legend Begins
One of the earliest versions of what would become the red numbers story began circulating in Nigeria in 2004. According to a report from the Associated Press assembled inBrian Bernbaum’s “The Odd Truth” feature for CBS News on July 23, 2004, mobile phone users in the African nation had been receiving text messages warning them not to answer any calls originating from several specific numbers. The text messages tended to read as things like, “Beware! You’ll die if you take a call from any of these phone numbers: 0802 311 1999 or 0802 222 5999.”
At the time, both the Nigerian police and telecom firms announced that the messages were hoaxes; indeed, according to telecom firm VMobile, only one of the numbers was an actual phone number at all — the other didn’t even exist. Still, though — many feared receiving a call from one of the dreaded numbers, double- and triple-checking any incoming calls before answering them. Earlier that month, the BBC had reported that a full-on “panic” had arisen from the rumors.
What’s interesting about this version of the story is that severalessential details of the current version are missing: There’s no mention ofexactly how these phone calls aremeant to kill you, nor the color of the alleged killer numbers as they appearedon your screen. It’s the tale in its most basic, nascent form.
Around the same time as the Nigerian death number story was making the rounds, though, something similar hit the UK: An alleged “leaked internal memo” made to appear as if it had originated from then-CEO of Nokia Jorma Ollila purported to confirm rumors that “use of our mobile phones can cause spontaneous death to the user in certain circ*mstances.” The letter, of course, was not a leaked internal memo, and Jorma Ollila did not write it; Nokia issued a statement repudiating the whole thing in 2005, saying according to the Sunday Mail, “Like many other claims circulating on the internet, this is a hoax. The letter has absolutely nothing to do with Nokia. We regret any inconvenience caused to our customers by this work of fiction.”
It’s here that the method of death from a killer phone call is first described: Reads the letter, “The problem manifests itself when the phone is dialed from certain numbers. The mobile base sends out massive quantities of electromagnetic energy, which resonates from the mobile phone’s antenna. As the user answers his phone, the energy surges from into his body, resulting in both coronary heart failure and brain haemorraging [sic], generally followed by severe external bleeding and rapid death.” The issue, the letter alleged, was not limited to Nokia, but rather affected any and all mobile phone manufacturers, caused by “an inherent fault in the system design.”
You’ve Got Red On You
From there, the legend spread, rapidly picking up speed throughout 2006 and 2007. In India, talk of “devil numbers” emerged; these numbers were said to have anywhere between 11 and 14 digits in them, rather than the 10 digits typical of the country, with negative repercussions of answering a call from such a number rumored to be illness, death, or an exploding phone. In Afghanistan, the story centered around a mysterious virus that could allegedly spread through mobile phone calls. In Ghana, answering a call from one such number was said to cause damage to the brain or death.
The color red began appearing in reports about the rumors: In Pakistan, one report called it simply the “Red Virus”; another report, also from Pakistan, specified that the calls were allegedly accompanied by a “red-colored apparition of a woman” appearing on the phone’s display; and in Kuwait — finally — we got word of an actual, literal red number: According to one report, a “warning sign” was said to be “the killer number [appearing] in red on the screen.”
By late 2007, reports regularly included the detail about the allegedly deadly numbers appearing on phone displays in red — and that detail is perhaps what cemented the story in the public’s imagination: They weren’t just killer numbers; they were red numbers. They were the color of the blood they allegedly spilled.
The story still circulates today. It exists in South Africa. Indonesia. Egypt. The Maldives. Kenya. Tanzania. The Sudan. And more.
And it’s not showing any signs of slowing down.
The Evolution Of Technology AndOurGrowingFears
Like a lot of modern urban legends, this one is notable for how it reflects newfound fears surrounding the rapidly evolving forms of technology that have so quickly become not just a part of our lives, but essential to them. What’s more, the red numbers legend could only have been born when it was. It couldn’t have existed much earlier than the mid-2000s because the technology simply didn’t exist yet.
Now, it’s true that smartphones weren’t yet the norm in 2007, let alone 2004; although the first phone-integrated BlackBerry devices hit the scene in the early 2000s, the original iPhone — arguably the device responsible for the rise of smartphones as we know them today — wasn’t even introduced until the end of June 2007. We weren’t yet at the point would arrive later — where we are today — the vast majority of us with a tiny yet powerful computer tucked in our pockets at all time.
But mobile phones in and of themselves were common. The Nokia 3210, the Nokia 3310, and the Motorola RAZR are each among the top-selling mobile phones of all time — and all of them were released between 1999 and 2004. What’s more, mobile phones with color screens were readily available in 2007, when the color red became attached to the story. The first-ever device with a color display, the Siemens S10, debuted in 1998; and within three years, three more landmark devices in this arena would arrive: The Nokia 9210 Communicator in 2000, the Sanyo SCP-5000 in 2001, and the Ericsson T68 in late 2001. By 2007, the majority of the best-selling mobile phones worldwide had color displays.
But, then as now, there’s so much we don’t understand about mobile phone technology — so even though there isn’t really a way for someone making an incoming call to change the way that number appears on the recipient’s display, it’s not surprising that the vast majority of laypeople might assume there would be a way to make that happen.
What’s more, concerns about whether radiation from prolonged mobile phone use can be a danger to our health have been under examination since at least 1982. There’s no consensus yet; recommendations go back and forth between “your phone is probably fine” to “your phone might cause cancer” with some regularity. And, honestly, that’s probably making the potential fears surrounding mobile phone use and our health even worse: The uncertainty itself makes us even more anxious about it.
Logically speaking, it makes no sense that a deadly phonecall would alert its target to the fact that it’s trying to kill them in suchan obvious fashion. If you wanted to kill someone with a phone call, you’d wantto do whatever you could to encourage them to answer it — spoofing the call tolook like it was coming from someone the target knows, for example — not sendup a big ol’ warning sign in the form of a ghoulish red display. But within thecontext of where we were at in relation to the role of mobile phones in ourlives, it’s perhaps not so surprising that so many would assume it to be true.
Like A Bullet To The Brain
But what about the specific claims of the effects of answering a call from a red number? Can sound actually give you a brain hemorrhage — or, in more dramatic terms, make it explode? Well, yes… but probably not through a mobile phone.
We do know that certain kinds of sounds do weird things to our bodies. It has to do with decibels, or how loud a sound is, and hertz, or the pitch or frequency of the sound. Relatively safe decibel levels for humans are considered to be those below 85 dB. Meanwhile, humans can hear sounds that are within the range of 20 Hz to 20,000 HZ or 20 kHz. Anything outside of that range is classified as either infrasound (if it’s below 20 Hz) or ultrasound (if it’s higher than 20 kHz) — but even if you can’t hear it, you might still be able to feel it, and it’ll feel pretty strange. As Seth S. Horowitz explained over at Popular Science in 2012:
“If you sit in front of a very good-quality subwoofer and play a 19Hz sound (or have access to a sound programmer and get an audible sound to modulate at 19Hz), try taking off your glasses or removing your contacts. Your eyes will twitch. If you turn up the volume so you start approaching 110 dB, you may even start seeing colored lights at the periphery of your vision or ghostly gray regions in the center. This is because 19Hz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The low-frequency pulsations start distorting the eyeball’s shape and pushing on the retina, activating the rods and cones by pressure rather than light.”
“If you sit in front of a very good-quality subwoofer and play a 19Hz sound (or have access to a sound programmer and get an audible sound to modulate at 19Hz), try taking off your glasses or removing your contacts. Your eyes will twitch. If you turn up the volume so you start approaching 110 dB, you may even start seeing colored lights at the periphery of your vision or ghostly gray regions in the center. This is because 19Hz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The low-frequency pulsations start distorting the eyeball’s shape and pushing on the retina, activating the rods and cones by pressure rather than light.”
(For what it’s worth, Horowitz also pointed out that some reports of alleged hauntings can be explained by this phenomenon — but that’s perhaps a discussion for another time.)
To be clear, you can cause some damage with the right kind of sound — sonic weapons are a thing, and research into them is ongoing. Theoretically, if you find a way to make a sound that resonates at the same frequency as a human skull in hertz and turn it up to a loud enough volume in decibels, you should be able to make someone’s head explode.
In practice, though, it’s not that simple. As Horowitz explained, death by brain-exploding sound is neither a likely nor practical way to try to kill someone. First, there’s the problem of resonance: Although a dry skull “has prominent acoustic resonances at about 9 and 12kHz, slightly lesser ones at 14 and 17kHz, and even smaller ones at 32 and 38kHz,” a skull that’s actually in someone’s head has all sorts of tissue, blood, and other… uh… stuff in and around it that dampen the resonant vibrations. And second, in order to get around the dampening, you’d need to up the decibel level of the sound to about 240 dB “to get the head to resonate destructively.” 240 dB is roughly equivalent to the frequency of an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale if you were to stand right at is epicenter, the explosion of nearly 32,000 tons of TNT, or the blast of an atomic bomb — which is, uh, the kind of sound that’s pretty much impossible for a mobile phone speaker to transmit. As Horowitz put it, “At that point it would be much faster to just hit the person over the head with the emitter and be done with it.”
What It All Adds Up To
Ultimately, the red numbers legend is just that: A legend. There are no devil numbers randomly calling people with the intent to cause harm, and you can’t give someone a brain hemorrhage through sound produced by a mobile phone.
It’s worth noting that red numbers can appear on your phone — just not in the way the legend mighthave led you to expect: On many current phone models — the iPhone, for example —any incoming call you’ve received is listed in your “Recent Calls” tab as red.In that sense, every number that callyou is a red number.
But I’m sure there are still those who believe — those whomight still check to make sure they know who’s calling them before they pickup. If that’s you perhaps this list might be of use to you:
- 7888308001
- 9316048121
- 9876266211
- 9888854137
- 9876715587
- 9888308001
Those are the number associated with the red numbers legend.
So, even if you don’tbelieve…
…Maybe you’ll think twice before you answer a call from oneof them.
Just in case.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine onTwitter @GhostMachine13and onFacebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And don’t forget to check outDangerous Games To Play In The Dark,available now from Chronicle Books!.
