Disclaimer: If you follow my columns much, you know I’m a walker. Not because I like walking… hardly… but because my good friend, Doctor Chuck, and my wife insist they would rather me lose weight than die. I say all that to say one of the worst things about walking… it is BORING! So, I have these cool ear buds that connect to my phone and I can listen to podcasts. One of my favorites is “The Way I Heard It” by Mike Rowe… the Dirty Jobs guy. The following ghost story is not the way I heard it but the way I remember it. It has been nearly 40 years so some of the details might be… well, a tiny bit fuzzy… like a ghost on a foggy night… but you will get the point.
Back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s I worked in the creative department at WBKO making commercials. This was in the dark ages and once a commercial was completed it was copied onto a two-inch wide video tape on a big plastic reel. Each thirty-second commercial was put on a separate reel and stored on a shelf in a box with a number on it. The guy playing the commercials on air would read the number off a list, find the matching numbered box, load it on the big video tape machine and play it on air. Sounds a lot more complicated than it was.
Anyway, as I said, I worked with a bunch of guys who made the commercials and we had made a pretty good one for a local restaurant… which is no longer in business, by the way… and the owner of the restaurant liked it and it was playing on air… a lot.
Shortly after the commercial began airing, sadly, one of the girls who worked for him, who was in the commercial, passed away. I think maybe she was killed in a car wreck. Remember… this is all the way I remember it and my memory often sucks. Anyway, Mr. Restaurant Owner, out of consideration for the girl’s friends and family, called the station and asked that we redo the commercial and remove the dead girl from the spot. No problem. We had several other pictures we could use and as quickly as possible we did just that. Problem solved… right? Not so fast.
A few days go by and Mr. Restaurant Owner calls again. “I thought I asked you to take the dead girl out of my commercial.” Now, just like any complicated business, mistakes happened at WBKO and it was very possible the original spot got stuck back on the shelf instead of the corrected one. Being in charge of part of that area, I got the call from the sales guy and I personally went and found the new spot, removed the one on the shelf that indeed still had the girl in it and replaced it with the new spot. Again, problem solved.
The following week another call comes in from Mr. Restaurant Owner. This time he got a call from the family. Not happy because they just saw their daughter on TV in the commercial. Mr. Restaurant Owner is using creative language to get the point across that this is unacceptable. “Perhaps if I invested my money in radio advertising I would not be having these issues!”
As you have probably heard… poop almost always flows downhill and this time the sales manager and the sales guy come to visit me. We go together to the control room and to the shelf, pull the box with the correct number, load the tape on a video machine and watch it. You guessed it… the girl is back again. Both these guys had worked with me for a few years and did not question that I had done what I said I would do but they were still, understandably, upset. They didn’t want to lose a good customer but, more importantly, nobody wanted this girl’s friends and family upset.
We all three went and found a backup copy of the new commercial without the girl. I relabeled the box while they watched and we all took it back to the control room and put it in the proper slot on the shelf. Then I handed the old spot, in its box, to the sales guy, who took it back to his office. Finally, no doubt, problem solved.
A few days went by with no phone calls and we all started to relax until the day before Halloween. You know where this is going. Phone rings. Yelling on other end of words that don’t make sense but get the point across just the same. I went to the control room, got the commercial, played it. No. It was the newer spot without the girl. I told both the sales guy and sales manager that I had personally checked it and it was correct. I asked the sales guy where the copy of the old commercial was. “I took it out to the dumpster, unspooled the tape off the reel and threw it all away myself.” We figured whoever saw the commercial had just been confused about what they saw and it wouldn’t happen again.
The next night, Halloween night, after enjoying all the little trick-or-treaters who had visited, I was sitting at home watching the news when a commercial break came on. The second commercial in the break was for the restaurant. Even now I get goosebumps. The girl WAS in the commercial. I got up, drove to the station, got the box off the shelf, looked at it and it was the spot with the girl in it. I took it home with me and destroyed the tape and the next day we went back to the restaurant and shot a totally new commercial. The girl never showed up again.
