7-Minute Less Taken I: Dead Air in Des Moines (IA)

What if a vanished girl’s voice slipped through your radio, years after she disappeared, and no one could explain how it got there? Tune in to the broadcast that Des Moines was never meant to hear. 

In our first 7-Minute Less Taken, "Dead Air in Des Moines," we explore a spooky tale about AM stations, including whether the reported eerie sounds comes from ghosts or something else. 


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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
This take and contains content that may not be suitable
for all audiences.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Listeners discretion is advised.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
On June twelfth, nineteen seventy seven, during a late night
show on Katie RD AM thirteen sixty, the signal cuts
out thirteen seconds of total silence, no static, no emergency tone,
just absence. And when it comes back, it isn't music,

(00:43):
It isn't the DJ. It's a voice, a girl's voice, faint, crackling,
like it's trapped under ice, and she says five words.

(01:08):
KDRD was a small station on the south side of
Des Moines, Iowa, mostly soft rock and local sports. The
overnight DJ that night, Mike Greiser, swears he never left
that booth.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
I looked back at.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
The clock and the blinked and the board just went dead,
not a flicker, like like.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
You forgot it was alive.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
When the single comes back, the shift tape captures something,
not an error, not a glitch, but the girl's voice.
The tape goes to the police, but no technical explanation

(01:55):
is found, no edits no interference. A detective thinks he
recognizes the voice. A missing girl, Kelly Grieves, vanishes sixteen
months earlier, her car is found, keys inside, but no
trace of her. Her mother listens to the tape and

(02:18):
she swears that's Kelly, but authority is labeled at a hoax.
The station erases the segment. The original tape gone until
nineteen eighty two, when a janitor finds a shoe box
hidden in the basement fuse cabinet inside the reel to

(02:39):
reel the full broadcast the voice untouched. Audio experts confirm
no splices, no digital fingerprints, and the voice it wasn't
recorded in the studio. It echoed off metal like a freezer.

(03:08):
Kelly has never found, but for years DJs across Iowa
report brief drops and signal followed by whispers and then
the same familiar phrase.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Before silence. What if it wasn't a ghost?

Speaker 1 (03:49):
Without existing evidence of this tale, we must consider what
if it was something else? Because those who comb the
AM bands at night have heard something stranger. Number stations
fow broadcasts of numbers, tones, unchanging voices, reading endless strings

(04:17):
in multiple languages Russian, English, Spanish, Czech, often with eerie
musical signatures like the Lincolnshire or Swedish rhapsody.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
No one officially claims them, but the.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Theory their spy signals cold War era dead drops for
agents in the field, one time pads encrypted into shortwave
signals and they're real. Hundreds of recordings exist, some have
played for decades. One of them it's known as E
zero three The English Lady, and it's still monitored today.

(04:58):
In fact, several were picked up by Hamm radio operators
in the Midwest Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska farmhouses receiving Cold WARF
spy data through kitchen radios. So maybe the voice wasn't
a ghost. Maybe it was interference, a rogue frequency, a code.

(05:20):
But still, if you're driving through Des Moines late at
night and this single cuts out, wait because sometimes the
static isn't empty, it's speaking. I'm Seam Humphreys and this
has been the first seven minute Let's taken real life

(05:41):
horror stories from the Midwest. We're at Let's taken pod
on Facebook and Instagram. Let's takingpod dot com for everything else.
See show notes for additional details and thanks for listening.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
We have a U. We have a nice We have
a U. We have a nice leather boom, leather, nice
glomy box, groop x X wedding brow boom, Nice Star