Audible Phantoms Near Ashland
We arrived just outside Ashland shortly after midday, following a detour through La Grande the day before. That visit yielded little—our intended contact had moved out of state two years ago—but we were able to get an old forwarding address. The professor, who’d insisted on the detour, didn’t seem especially disappointed. He said the important thing was “tracking the pattern,” though when pressed, he didn’t elaborate.
The Ashland case involved a string of reports we’d pulled together from radio call-ins, a few archived police dispatch logs, and an obscure article in a Southern Oregon college paper. Over the last six months, three families living within a six-mile radius had reported hearing clear human voices in or around their homes between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. The voices were never identified and never matched anyone living in or near the property. More notably, they never showed up on recording devices.
Robin and I conducted preliminary interviews while the rest unloaded gear at a campground west of town. Josh stayed behind at the vehicles, organizing notes and laying out the night’s monitoring schedule. Donna and Jennifer walked the property lines with two of the homeowners, noting that the reported auditory events tended to occur near window sills or open basement vents.
I took second-round interviews. One man, a retired theater technician named Leslie, said the voice he heard was female, mid-30s, and “sounded like she was pacing and talking to someone else I couldn’t hear.” Another man—Paul, an assistant groundskeeper for the local university—reported hearing his own name whispered repeatedly from a corner of his attic. He now keeps that area padlocked, though he admitted it felt like a formality. “If it wanted in, it’d be in,” he said, before offering us lukewarm coffee and a dish of butterscotch candies.
Santa-Pops was particularly curious about the acoustic profiles of the homes. He had us take careful EM readings, barometric pressure notes, and perform low-frequency audio sweeps around each structure. He also insisted we set up a directional parabolic mic at the third house, which had seen the most recent report just eight nights ago.
We conducted a full overnight observation. Nothing was recorded that matched the witnesses’ experiences. However, two of us—myself and Vernon—reported faint whispering between 2:14 and 2:17 a.m., heard from opposite ends of the third property. We logged it. We both wrote down what we thought we heard before sharing: Vernon got “no, don’t wake him,” and I got “just past the hollow fence.” Both of us heard it from what we thought was the eastern edge of the lawn. Neither of our devices picked up anything but ambient wind.
In the morning, Caleb and Donna did a comparative sketch of the three property layouts. There’s a slight triangulation between the structures, all roughly equidistant from a now-abandoned covered well site off Dead Indian Memorial Road. The Professor plans to revisit the spot after checking some old geological records.
There’s a quiet consensus that the source—whatever it is—isn’t mechanical. It’s too specific. Too pointed. Egiel suggested a kind of auditory hallucination caused by low frequency or infrasound—but that theory doesn’t account for overlapping witness timelines or the consistency of the voice descriptions.
We’ll head out by noon. Plans are forming to follow up with another witness outside Medford who recently reported a “singing woman” near a dry creek bed. For now, though, we’re tired, mildly unsettled, and still sifting through what we did and didn’t hear.
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Miles Traveled from Pendleton: 212
