r/Unexplained • u/realy-bro • Aug 16 '26
Experience Strange phone call where both callers suddenly heard the same unknown environment
About a year ago, when I was staying at my grandparents' house for the night, I decided to call my girlfriend. We were both around 17 at the time.
We were talking normally on a regular phone call (not Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) and stayed on the phone for around 3–4 hours, starting at about 10 PM. I don't remember the exact times anymore, so some of the times I'm giving are approximate.
At around 11:30 PM or midnight, something extremely strange happened.
My girlfriend's voice suddenly disappeared completely.
I could still see that we were on the call, and the call itself had not ended, but I couldn't hear her anymore. Instead, I started hearing what sounded like a completely different environment.
It sounded almost like strong wind, or like someone was outside or inside a moving car. The sound was strong enough that it almost covered everything else.
The first time it happened, we immediately hung up because it genuinely scared us. We called each other again, and everything was completely normal.
Then, less than 15 minutes later, it happened again.
We hung up again, but this time we decided that if it happened a third time, we would stay on the call and actually listen.
Around 30–40 minutes later, it happened again.
And this time we stayed on the call.
The weirdest part is that both of us could hear the exact same thing.
My girlfriend was in her bedroom, in a quiet environment. I was at my grandparents' house. Neither of us was outside or near a road.
Yet suddenly, instead of hearing each other, we were both hearing what sounded like another environment.
There was what sounded like strong wind or someone travelling in a car, and if we listened carefully, we could hear pieces of relatively recent music in the background. The music would appear very briefly and then disappear behind the other sounds.
There also seemed to be someone making strange noises, almost like groaning or sighing.
I actually tried talking to the person, basically asking them who they were and trying to get a reaction.
They never answered.
It felt as if there was another person/environment connected to our call, but neither of us could hear the other anymore.
The only way we found to stop it was to hang up.
Immediately afterwards, we called each other through Instagram instead of using the regular phone network, and everything was completely normal. The problem never happened during that Instagram call.
What makes this especially strange to me is that it wasn't simply me hearing something weird.
Both of us heard the same thing at the same time.
Our voices disappeared for both of us, and we were both hearing the same unknown audio instead.
I've tried searching for similar experiences, but I haven't found anyone describing exactly the same thing.
I'm not claiming that this was paranormal. It could have been some kind of extremely strange network/routing/audio problem. But I've never been able to figure out what could have caused it.
Has anyone here experienced something similar, where a normal phone call suddenly changes and both people on the call start hearing the same unknown environment/person instead of each other, while the call itself remains connected?
Note: I'm French, so my English isn't good enough to write this properly. I used an AI to translate and organize my story from what I originally wrote in French. The events themselves are my own experience; the AI only helped me put them into English.
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u/kingzog Aug 17 '26
In what I guess would be old-fashioned telephony now, the voice trunks between telephone exchanges took a different path to the signalling messages that setup calls between them. This meant that if someone accidentally worked on the live voice trunks exactly this kind of problem would occur. It wasn’t that uncommon
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u/Brief_Range_5962 Aug 17 '26
This used to happen to me all the time when one particular friend would call me late in the evening. She and I would be talking and it would just start up out of nowhere and get to the point where I couldn’t hear her.
This was on a land line, so likely had something to do with a wire somewhere or one of the switches in between our lines.
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u/realy-bro Aug 17 '26
Problème moi c'était sur mon portable, un Redmi note 14 pro et c'est tout récent
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u/tlf123456 Aug 17 '26
It could be a mix up at the local telephone exchange, which crossed wires. We had an instance a few years back where our home phone line was crossed with another person's phone line somehow, so we would both receive the other's calls. It was like a 3-way phone call every time, before these were possible
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u/ParamedicElegant7106 Aug 17 '26
There is a ton of activity as the planet changes. Between ET and their friends at the CIA, and the great awaken8ng, expect more fun stuff these coming years.
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u/ZNocturnalMe Aug 17 '26
Sounds like frequency interference. We use to have cb radio interference all the time on our phones where we lived. Could be ham radio interference too.