That time I gave a toaster an exorcism.

[cvanc]

Dateline: Late 70's. My first job in broadcast, a 3KW FM/5KW AM radio station.

The station was built on farmland but the suburbs had grown to surround it. One day I got a call from a very upset but very sweet and very old woman. She was mad that she couldn't NOT hear our station. She had a lot to say so I heard her out, and it turned out she was convinced her toaster was possessed because it was speaking to her.

She lived at the back corner of our property. I had to go see for myself.

The AM station was a four tower array with different daytime / nighttime patterns. Both patterns had a lobe pointed straight through her house. The closest tower to her was all of three hundred feet away.

I was met with the specter of a vintage chrome toaster singing Cher's "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves", clearly and unambiguously, directly to me. It. Was. Haunting. The lady was right!

Now I don't know if Satan exists or not but I was damn sure he wasn't gonna use my radio station as his unholy vessel. And I can't speak for Cher's relationship with the evil one but I suspect she was an innocent in all of this. Then the toaster told me the weather.

I was fresh out of garlic and crucifixes so I did some LC thing on the powerline and cleansed all the souls involved. Sadly it was before the movie Poltergeist so I didn't think to say "this house is clean".

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Tho power of Toast compels you!

 

[cvanc]

LOL toast! It's a true story but I came up with a few great fake punch lines. Which of these is real?

"Anyway, that's how I met my first wife"

"Cher is living the exact life of someone who signed one of those famous deals with the underworld. Coincidence?"

"Sometimes life offers you biscotti"

 

[KenECoyote]

You need to counter it with Jesus toast!

 

[rfjustin]

Dateline: Late 70's. My first job in broadcast, a 3KW FM/5KW AM radio station.

The station was built on farmland but the suburbs had grown to surround it. One day I got a call from a very upset but very sweet and very old woman. She was mad that she couldn't NOT hear our station. She had a lot to say so I heard her out, and it turned out she was convinced her toaster was possessed because it was speaking to her.

She lived at the back corner of our property. I had to go see for myself.

The AM station was a four tower array with different daytime / nighttime patterns. Both patterns had a lobe pointed straight through her house. The closest tower to her was all of three hundred feet away.

I was met with the specter of a vintage chrome toaster singing Cher's "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves", clearly and unambiguously, directly to me. It. Was. Haunting. The lady was right!

Now I don't know if Satan exists or not but I was damn sure he wasn't gonna use my radio station as his unholy vessel. And I can't speak for Cher's relationship with the evil one but I suspect she was an innocent in all of this. Then the toaster told me the weather.

I was fresh out of garlic and crucifixes so I did some LC thing on the powerline and cleansed all the souls involved. Sadly it was before the movie Poltergeist so I didn't think to say "this house is clean".

Fantastic Carl, thank you for the laugh!

 

[les]

Not a toaster but....
There was a piece of equipment we were developing that required an amplifier to boost and audio signal to a speaker.

So - just an audio amp - no receiver

But the techs working on the equipment found they could listen to a local AM radio station that was just down the block....

 

[teepot]

The voices in my head might not be real. But they do have some interesting ideas.

 

[KenECoyote]

The voices in my head might not be real. But they do have some interesting ideas.

I wish the voices in my head would tell me the weather!

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

The voices in my head might not be real. But they do have some interesting ideas.

You know, the more I listen, the more they make sense!

 

[John Kemker]

True Story (in the South, we sometimes start these stories with "No Sh*t, there I was!"):

Back in the late 90s through 2010, I lived in Tucker, GA. Not two miles away was WSB, 750 AM, a 50,000 watt station. When I first moved to Atlanta from Houston, the transmitter tower was in the middle of a field with a small cinder-block building at its base. Now, it's surrounded by Northlake Tower Festival, an open-air shopping mall built by Trammel Crow, the same guy that built The Galleria, in Houston.

Shortly after my ex-wife and I moved into our house in Tucker, we noticed that a touch-lamp that we owned would cycle on, brighten, brighten, brighten, then off, repeatedly. Didn't matter which outlet we plugged it into in the house, it would rapidly cycle through the whole on, bright, bright, bright, off thing. We finally figured out that it was WSB. Later, I got my amateur radio license and noticed that I could hear WSB on 750 kHz above the fundamental frequency across the bands. (ie: 1.750 MHz, 3.750 MHz, 7.750 MHz, 10.750 Mhz, etc, right on up through 30.750 MHz) I ended up having to purchase a custom broadcast-band filter with a notch right at 750 kHz in order to be able to hear anything other than WSB on those frequencies.

 

[cls]

Just be glad the AM rectification wasn't happening in your dental filling!! That happens sometimes, must drive a person crazy until they get those fillings replaced.

 

[NTP2]

I just confirmed that this can happen with my grandpa as he is a ham he actually met someone who this has happened to!

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

I remember hearing as a kid that certain people could hear radio stations through the metal braces on their teeth. Because the sound vibrations went through their teeth and skull, not from the outside through their ear canals, it was like the sound was in their head. Imagine if the station was commercial free Norwegian death metal — you really would think you had a demon in your head.

I‘m wondering how this all works physics-wise. I know the basic idea of how a radio receiver circuit works, but what acts as a speaker to actually make the induced current into sound. What is vibrating in the toaster that you can hear?

 

[NTP2]

I‘m wondering how this all works physics-wise. I know the basic idea of how a radio receiver circuit works, but what acts as a speaker to actually make the induced current into sound. What is vibrating in the toaster that you can hear?

+10

 

[SDramstad]

I lived upstairs from a Ham radio operator. In my room was a stereo receiver with 2 separate speakers with maybe 15 feet of unshielded cable. Doing homework in my room one night with the stereo off I suddenly started hearing voices.... Took me awhile to figure out where it was coming from. Finally looked out the window to find his directional antenna was pointing right at my room. Signal was strong enough to be picked up by the speaker wires and drive my speaker.

 

[NTP2]

I lived upstairs from a Ham radio operator. In my room was a stereo receiver with 2 separate speakers with maybe 15 feet of unshielded cable. Doing homework in my room one night with the stereo off I suddenly started hearing voices.... Took me awhile to figure out where it was coming from. Finally looked out the window to find his directional antenna was pointing right at my room. Signal was strong enough to be picked up by the speaker wires and drive my speaker.

Did you tell him that you could listen in?

 

[4regt4]

Many years ago working in an auto repair shop, a lady came in insisting her dome lamp was singing to her. Turns out it somehow rectified and played a local high power radio station.

Hans.

 

[NTP2]

Seriously does anyone have any idea about how it makes noise???????? I see how it can direct the signal but not how it can make noise????

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

Seriously does anyone have any idea about how it makes noise???????? I see how it can direct the signal but not how it can make noise????

Yeah. That’s what I want to know too.

 

[ThirstyBarbarian]

You’re listening to “Toaster Talk” on KTST 750 AM! K-Toast! Broadcasting a red-hot 5-kilowatts of power, focused like a laser beam directly on your kitchen! K-Toast! Stay toasty!

 

[4regt4]

Seriously does anyone have any idea about how it makes noise???????? I see how it can direct the signal but not how it can make noise????

Educated guess: An AM signal basically needs rectification and then a speaker. I still have my old crystal set made some 60+ years ago. It had a tuning coil and capacitor, germanium diode, and then it directly powered a headset. The energy received was enough to power the little speaker.

In a toaster, I'm not sure about the rectification part, but the nichrome heating coils could easily work like the coils in a headset. Sometimes an electrical junction of two dissimilar metals can act as a rectifier, so perhaps the junction between the nichrome and the copper conductors is doing the job. As for the tuning circuit, a very strong signal can induce itself into a conductor in an uninvited manner.....

In the musical dome lamp I mentioned earlier, replacing the light bulb seemed to fix it. I'm guessing the filament in the bulb - which takes the form of a small coil - acted as the speaker.

Hans.

 

[NTP2]

Yeah. That’s what I want to know too.

Ok I thought that google would not be helpful here but I did find This, and This, both are fillings because I can’t find anything on any other form of this.

A bit more research appears to confirm that it’s real but an extremely rare occurrence, since all the pieces have to be just so or it stops working.

 

[Lugnut56]

I just remembered seeing this on YouTube while reading this thread. Not that I think people have electric arcs shooting between their fillings, but still interesting.

 

[cvanc]

Fillings: It only happens with AM stations and it's gross. Corrosion and rot under a filling can act like a junction, a detector diode. Whole damn body runs on electricity. Somehow gets perceived as auditory.

As for the toaster, yep it was the nichrome heating elements singing. Old toasters had a fine curly nichrome wire. (This was my first clue something was wrong - we all know Cher's hair is long and straight.)

None of this is unfamiliar to an old AM broadcast engineer. The little shacks at the base of the towers (the 'tuning units') had huge air core inductors that would shake hard enough from the current going thru them you could hear your programming.

It was dangerous in those tuning units, you were trained to keep your hands in your pockets and your elbows tight to your sides. RF burns HURT and they will come out to meet you.

 

[James Duffy]

The power of Toast compels you!

Your mother Pops Tarts in hell!