Chapter 6 : The Dayton Frequency

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

Elias Reed didn’t believe in ghosts.

He believed in resonance.

As a sound coder and amateur historian, he spent his nights scanning long-dead radio bands for hidden tones, patterns left behind by machines, birds, satellites, or people who once whispered into static, hoping someone would hear.

But the signal that came through at 3:17 AM wasn’t part of any known spectrum.

And it wasn’t human.

It sounded like singing. But beneath it, a structure, a pulse, formed glyphs in waveform when run through his spectro-visualizer. Symbols that matched none in any linguistics database. Except one.

From the folder a stranger had left in his locker last fall, labeled only: Cerulia.

Elias played the signal back again, slower this time. The pitch was imperfect but intentional, like it had been encoded through analog decay meant to survive the fall of whatever came before.

“This is not a transmission,” he muttered. “It’s a memory.”

Then the hum shifted, and the sound visualizer glitched violently displaying a frame-by-frame flash of an 1885 newspaper headline:

“A Curious Study: Skeleton Hand Found Clutching Blade Beneath Garden.”

The file corrupted immediately after.

Elias sat back, stunned. That article didn’t exist in any database. But he knew the title. He’d seen it referenced in an old paranormal zine published in Springfield in the 1990s.

He stood, grabbed his coat, and slipped the Cerulia folder into his messenger bag.

By sunrise, he was at the edge of the old canal in Dayton’s south corridor, headphones on, tuning into the same frequency on a handheld rig cobbled from parts of vintage radios and circuit-bent toys.

The tone returned. Softer now. Beneath the birdsong and wind.

He held his breath.

A voice emerged—not a voice like speech, but something encoded in light and decay:

“You are the Keeper of Static. The one who can re-thread the Echo Line.”

And with that, the water rippled.

Elias dropped to his knees. His scanner burst into white noise and then silence.

The concrete under his feet felt warm. He touched it.

A single glyph had appeared etched into the stone not by human hand, but by vibration.

He looked up, eyes wide, as the river fell still and the silence thickened like cloth.

He didn’t believe in ghosts. But ghosts, it seemed, believed in him.