Date Collected
Fall 10-25-2018
Place item was collected
Logan, Utah
Informant
Lori Keeling
Point of Discovery/Informant Bio
Lori Keeling is my mom. She doesn’t have the same last name as I do because she remarried in October 2006. She grew up as a Latter-Day Saint in San Jose, California to Bill and Lucy who had seven children in total. She was exactly in the middle and has four brothers and two sisters. She now lives in Corning, California and has two kids, both of which are currently going to USU and UVU. She has a bachelor’s degree in nursing, worked as a home health nurse for more than 20 years and is now a nurse for the Tehama County School District. She enjoys horseback riding, reading, and going to the movies with her kids.
Context
She had just gotten home from work when I called her to collect her ghost stories about our property. Usually this is not how she shares her ghost stories. This particular story only gets shared with members of our family. My brother and my mom usually will tell it to our grandparents, really close family friends, or to my husband. They will tell this story after we've been talking about dad. It is not a scary ghost story.
Text
I remember that even before you dad died there were weird things that would happen in the house. THat your dad always said it was--that the house was haunted. ODIE! Odie?[yelling for dog] So didn’t someone say somebody had died here beside your dad?
A-That’s what the neighbors told us.
L-So I unfortunately can’t remember all the things that happened before.
A-Well you could talk about the radio.(That’s weird).
L-So when your dad was alive he liked to listen to the radio in the garage while we was out working--it was on the workbench in his garage cause he liked to listen to the radio while he was out there and um...at one--so somehow it got set to the alarm mode where it would just come on and be the buzzing annoying alarm--well first actually I should say--come on as the alarm to music out there in the garage. Or radio station. SO one time it got set to that. And then it got--it changed and all the sudden it was set to buzzing. So we’d come home every now and then and it’s going off in the garage.
EEEEHHHHHH[imitating buzzing sound]. But we were just--neither of us ever fixed it. It just buzzed and it would turn off after an hour. So then after your dad died I remember one day going out there and it changed back again to music. All by itself. So I can’t remember-- I think it was a significant song but I can’t remember. It was weird. And nobody ever changed it. It just changed itself.
Texture
Once she started, she kept on talking with very little breaks or interruptions. Clearly this was the one story she remembered the best. She spoke quickly, almost like she wanted the story to be over with. It seems as though she believes this one very strongly, because she reinforced the fact that she doesn't know who changed it, but it's not a scary story. I think for her this is kind of a sad one. But also happy too. I think she believes Dad has stayed with us, even after death.
Course
ENGL 2210
Instructor
Dr. Lynne McNeill
Semester and year
Fall 2018
Theme
G7: Unexplainable Phenomena
EAD Number
2.2.2.2.1.18
Recommended Citation
Utterback, Amber, "Dad's Radio" (2018). USU Student Folklore Fieldwork. Paper 579.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/student_folklore_all/579