The Ghost Telegrams

The excerpt below was discovered in the case files of Doctor Apis Tahuti, psychoanalyst, paranormal investigator, and head of the Department of Psychic Research at Miskatonic University. It is the final entry in a much larger file on The Carrington Event.

Doctor Tahuti died under mysterious circumstances the following week, at the age of 44, before he could share his troubling insights with the world.

April 30, 1936

I’ve long held in our records a curious set of telegrams which were sent during the height of the Carrington Event.

On September 1, 1859, two Richards, a Hodgson and, the event’s eventual namesake, a Carrington, noted while studying the sun that there was a huge eruption on the surface.

The term “solar flare” is now being thrown around by many of my colleagues in the astronomy department. I like it.

With insincere apologies for the pun: it has flare, so I’ll use it here.

Following the Carrington Event, the entire planet witnessed an aurora that lasted two days and the electrical grids, which at the time were thankfully meager compared to now (but unfortunately very poorly grounded) went haywire. Some people suffered electric shocks, and fires broke out.

Telegraph operators the world over reported that their instruments would continue working even after they unplugged them from the batteries. One widely reported case involved two hours of transmission between operators in Boston, Massachusetts and Portland, Maine.

Apparently, the solar flare created some sort of atmospheric event that powered things through the air.

Even at the time, the scientific work of Micheal Faraday pointed to an understanding of the event, and the inventions of Nikola Tesla have since reproduced the terrestrial electrical phenomena, albeit on a smaller scale.

More interesting, however, than the Boston/Portland exchange, was a series of messages which traveled between Berlin and Cologne in what was then the Kingdom of Prussia, but which we now think of as Germany.

What was remarkable about this correspondence is that, according to the operators present at the time, there was no one tapping out messages on the telegraphs.

The machines were operating without operators.

Those present nevertheless recognized an intelligible exchange and wrote it down.

This is in and of itself remarkable, but since the events of March 7 in the Rhineland, this “ghost” correspondence from 1859 kept coming back to me. One might even say it haunted me.

Below is my English translation of the original German telegrams, with C indicating Cologne and B indicating Berlin.

C: THE RHINE WILL BE TAKEN EASILY AS A LAMB BY A HUNGRY LION BUT BECOME AS A MOUTH WHICH VOMITS BLOOD

B: IT WILL BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END

C: MANY WILL RETURN TO US AS ASH BUT HER WOMB WILL BE STUFFED WITH CORPSES

B: HER FLESH DRENCHED IN BLOOD AND WE THE CENTER OF THE WOUND

C: O WOE FOR THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES

B: WOE AND BEWARE FOR TIME HAS NO FIXED POINT AND THE DISASTER MAY YET BE AVERTED

C: THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE MUST BE STOPPED BEFORE THEY TAKE THE RHINE

B: DEFEND THE RIVER OR WADE THROUGH RIVERS OF BLOOD

C: THEY WILL NOT HEED

B: THEY DO NOT HEED

C: THEY WILL NOT HEED

B: THEY DO NOT HEED

This correspondence repeated in a loop for several hours.

I maintain a healthy skepticism as to whether this seeming coincidence indicates some sort of precognition of events.

However, I fought in the Great War and don’t think much of policies of appeasement, especially when it comes to the Germans.

But surely, we won’t get into that mess again?

A lot of good men died. Some of them right next to me.

A tenuous connection but could THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE mean the Nazis?

I saw a lot of strange things in my years here at ol’ Misk, but even the most devilish apparition can’t make my skin crawl like the thought of another Great War.