The number first appeared on a South Korean internet forum in late 2002. The post was brief: a string of digits, a warning not to call it, and the claim that three people already had. The original poster had not called it themselves. They said a friend had told them. The friend could not be reached.
The thread was archived. It was translated into Japanese and circulated on 2channel. It spread to Singapore message boards, then to Philippines, then, fragmentarily, to the early English-language web. Each retelling added a new casualty. By the time it reached me, the number had supposedly claimed nineteen lives across four countries.
I am a skeptic by nature and a journalist by trade. I spent two weeks trying to trace the original post, the original poster, any of the named victims. I found nothing verifiable. I found a great deal of secondhand testimony from people who claimed to know someone who had called the number and subsequently died of an unrelated cause — a car accident, a sudden illness, a suicide.
What I did not find was the number itself.
Then a source, who asked not to be named, sent it to me. He had received it from a contact in Seoul. He said three people he'd been in contact with in the previous year, all of whom had called it as a test, were dead. He named the causes: one heart attack at age 31, one vehicle accident, one apparent drowning in a bathtub in which the man had been found sitting upright with his phone still in his hand.
I sat with the number for four days before I called it.
It rang twice. Then a sound came through that I can only describe inadequately: it was like the sound of breathing, but reversed — as if air was being drawn in on the exhale and expelled on the inhale — and under it, a low, continuous tone that sat just below the threshold of hearing but which I felt in my molars and behind my eyes. The call lasted eleven seconds. Then it disconnected.
There was no voice. No message. Nothing that could be explained as a prank, a recording, a misdial.
I have been trying to write this account for six days. I am not sleeping well. I am not sure that detail is relevant — I often don't sleep well when I am working on a difficult story. My editor says I look pale. I have a doctor's appointment on Thursday.
I want to be clear: I do not believe in curses. I believe in psychology, in the power of suggestion, in the nocebo effect. I believe that people who expect harm sometimes find it.
I am going to keep believing that.
The number, which I will not reproduce here, has been disconnected as of this writing. A telecommunications researcher I contacted said the number does not appear in any carrier database she has access to. It should not have been callable.
I called it. It answered.
Thursday cannot come fast enough.