Laura Wright 
The warning arrives from someone you know.
A friend.
A coworker.
A relative.
They didn’t write it themselves. Someone sent it to them, and they are passing it along because the message sounds urgent.
Do not answer your phone if a certain number appears.
People already have.
They’re dead.
Sometimes the number supposedly appears in red.
Sometimes answering the call produces a frequency capable of causing a brain hemorrhage.
Sometimes television news stations are said to have confirmed the deaths.
And almost invariably, the message ends with the same instruction:
Tell everyone you know.
Warnings about supposedly deadly telephone calls began circulating widely during the early years of mobile phones. By the middle and late 2000s, versions were spreading internationally through text messages, emails and forwarded messages.
Naturally, nobody wanted to test them.
After all, what if the warning was true?
The Killer Number
One version circulating in 2011 was remarkably simple.
Recipients were warned not to answer a call containing the number 09141 because doing so supposedly resulted in instant death.
Seven people, the message claimed, had already died.
The recipient was urged to warn everyone else immediately.
There was no explanation of how answering a telephone could kill someone.
Apparently, there didn’t need to be.
The important ingredients were already there.
A specific number.
Dead victims.
Urgency.
And the instruction to spread the message.
That is almost the perfect formula for an urban legend.
The Numbers in Red
Other versions became considerably more elaborate.
Messages circulating around 2007 and 2010 provided lists of supposedly dangerous telephone numbers. Recipients were warned that calls from these numbers would appear in red on their mobile phones.
That was only the beginning.
According to the warnings, answering one of these calls exposed the recipient to an extraordinarily powerful frequency.
The result?
A brain hemorrhage.
Twenty-seven people had supposedly already died.
And unlike an ordinary rumor, the message provided what appeared to be verification.
Major television news outlets had supposedly reported the deaths.
That sounded convincing.
Unless someone actually checked.
“Watch the News”
One of the cleverest characteristics of this particular urban legend was its use of recognizable news organizations.
The forwarded messages claimed stations including Aaj Tak, DD News and IBN 7 had reported the phenomenon.
That gave the warning apparent authority.
Most recipients weren’t going to search television archives to determine whether such a report existed.
They didn’t need to.
Someone had already named the news station.
Surely whoever originally wrote the message must have seen it.
Except the person forwarding the message hadn’t seen it.
Neither had the person who sent it to them.
And perhaps nobody had.
This is one of the oldest tricks in rumor.
“I heard…” becomes “They reported…”
Then someone supplies the name of an institution.
Suddenly hearsay looks like evidence.
Could Answering a Phone Kill You?
No.
The supposed mechanism doesn’t make sense.
A mobile telephone cannot suddenly transmit an acoustic signal through its speaker powerful enough to produce a fatal brain hemorrhage merely because someone answered a particular telephone number.
Nor does displaying an incoming telephone number in a particular color transform the device into a weapon.
The original article came to the straightforward conclusion that these messages were hoaxes intended to frighten people and encourage them to spread the warning.
And the forwarding instruction was essential.
Without it, the legend died.
“Tell Everyone You Know”
Look closely at the wording of these messages and they begin resembling another familiar phenomenon.
The chain letter.
Older chain letters promised good luck if they were copied and sent to a certain number of people.
Failure to comply supposedly brought misfortune.
Later email versions operated exactly the same way.
Send this to ten friends.
Don’t break the chain.
Something terrible happened to the last person who ignored it.
The killer-phone warning merely modernized the mechanism.
Instead of:
Forward this or something terrible will happen to you.
It became:
Forward this because something terrible may happen to your friends.
That is psychologically much more effective.
Ignoring a ridiculous warning is easy.
Ignoring something that might supposedly save someone you care about is harder.
Technology Creates New Folklore
Every major communication technology eventually acquires its own supernatural stories.
Letters became chain letters.
Radio produced mysterious broadcasts.
Television produced stories about forbidden transmissions.
The internet created cursed websites and emails.
And mobile phones inevitably produced cursed calls and text messages.
The technology changes.
The underlying story barely does.
There is always something dangerous traveling through the network.
And eventually, someone answers.
One Missed Call
There is an especially interesting coincidence in the timing of the killer-phone legend.
The Japanese horror film One Missed Call was released in 2003, with international releases following afterward.
Its premise was remarkably similar to the later urban legend.
Characters received mysterious calls from their own telephone numbers.
The messages were dated in the future.
When victims listened to them, they heard sounds connected with their own approaching deaths.
When the predicted time arrived, they died.
Your original article noted that widespread killer-phone warnings began appearing around 2004, shortly after the Japanese film appeared, and suggested that the movie might have influenced the legend.
That’s certainly possible.
But there’s an important distinction.
We don’t have enough evidence to say that One Missed Call created the killer-phone rumor.
The resemblance and timing are intriguing.
They aren’t proof of direct descent.
Fiction Becomes Folklore
If the movie did influence some versions, however, it would hardly be unprecedented.
People absorb stories without always remembering where they first encountered them.
A fictional concept appears in a movie.
Someone modifies it.
The altered story circulates.
The original source disappears.
Eventually, people begin repeating the story as something that supposedly happened to a friend, a relative or someone in another city.
The story has crossed an invisible boundary.
It isn’t fiction anymore.
It’s folklore.
And mobile phones provided perfect conditions for that transformation because the device featured in the story was also the device being used to spread the story.
There is something wonderfully circular about that.
Your telephone warns you that telephones are killing people.
Naturally, you use your telephone to warn everyone else.
Why People Believed It
Today, a warning about a lethal telephone frequency sounds rather silly.
It didn’t necessarily sound quite as silly during the early years of widespread mobile-phone adoption.
People were already hearing legitimate discussions about electromagnetic radiation and possible health effects.
Technical terms such as frequency, wavelength and radiation were familiar enough to sound scientific while remaining poorly understood by most people.
That created fertile ground for rumors.
A hoax didn’t need to explain precisely how the technology worked.
It merely needed a few scientific-sounding words.
High frequency.
Brain hemorrhage.
Add a list of telephone numbers and the names of television news organizations, and nonsense suddenly acquired a thin laboratory coat.
Death by Phone
Nobody died because they answered one of the supposedly cursed numbers.
There was no mysterious collection of telephone calls capable of producing fatal brain hemorrhages.
There was no deadly red number.
But the story spread anyway.
And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the legend.
The killer wasn’t the telephone call.
It was fear.
One person received a warning and forwarded it to ten people.
Those ten sent it to another hundred.
The numbers changed.
The death toll changed.
The explanation changed.
Eventually, the warning crossed countries and continents.
Nobody needed to know where it originated.
Nobody needed evidence.
They only needed to think:
What if it’s true?
Then they pressed Forward.
And the legend made another call.
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