DEAD HAND
After a tornado struck Cincinnati in 1974, Sears floor manager Joe Fishbourne attempted to call his ex-wife from a downtown payphone with the excuse of checking whether or not she was okay. When he opened the attached phonebook, however, his attention was diverted to the unusual name “Philistine Causeway,” which he doubted belonged to a real person. When he dialed the number, the other end was an unresponsive recording of a woman’s voice reciting the same four numbers, repeated thrice before disconnecting.
Fishbourne could not find Causeway in his own phonebook at home, and a further inquiry with the operator determined that no such number had ever been registered in Cincinnati Bell's directory. Unable to shake his curiosity, Fishbourne cut the phonebook from the payphone later that night and began tracing its thin, water-damaged pages for any other differences. Inside were several other unusual entries with names like "Misery Halfway" and "Holding Instrument" which, when called, played the same strange recordings. The numbers changed every day or so, though not at any particular fixed time.
His findings appeared in several local radio hobbyist newsletters and magazines, but didn’t receive any widespread attention until 1994, long after his death, when an anonymously published document on Usenet described the Philistine Causeway phonebook as part of an extensive Soviet intelligence relay network for deep cover operatives which now served as part of a stay-behind operation. According to the author, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, these operatives remained as part of a fifth column network, and through proper decryption of their counterfeit phonebooks, anyone could functionally direct and give orders to these spies to do their bidding. By simply calling the right combinations of numbers in the right order, anyone with a handful of change could hijack this relay to order an assassination, drain a bank account, or even initiate an act of war.
The instructions in this communique went well beyond the political and diplomatic, however; there were processes for identifying numbers to call which could cause hailstorms to ruin crops, or to compel a target to file for divorce. The phonebook had become something closer to a grimoire in the author's claims, with "spies" similar in nature to Solomonic demons. Because of this, it was largely dismissed as a hoax propagated by Discordian internet pranksters.
Payphones and phonebooks are now vanishingly rare due to their obsolescence. If this method ever worked, it is unlikely to still work today; but, if it does, whatever is on the other end of the line is unlikely to be friendly.