The "Phone Whisperer" Is Back

In a series of incidents, it appears that the "serial caller" who plagued Hollis residents last year is at it again. But this time around, he's calling all over campus and has been dubbed the “phone whisperer.”

Mather resident Emma W. Wood '12 received a call at 7 a.m. on Monday morning.

"I talked to him for like, one minute. I thought that it might be my boyfriend," Wood said. "He whispered 'I can't sleep. Can we just talk for a while?' Then I realized that it wasn't my boyfriend, so I asked who it was. He whispered, 'It's me. Who else would call you this early?' Then I just hung up."

Leverett resident Kaoru Takasaki '10, an inactive Crimson editor, received a similar call on Sunday also at 7 a.m.

"Some guy whispered 'Hello? Are you awake?' to me, and I was half-asleep and got kind of freaked out so I hung up on him," she said. "He called again, and—in my half-asleep state—I couldn't get the phone to stop ringing, so I ended up unplugging the phone."

This is definitely not the first time that the mysterious "whisperer" has plagued the campus with his eerie calls. According to the same article linked above, Harvard University Police Department identified a man in south Florida as the original “serial whisperer” in 2001. Similar calls were reported in 2003. But police could not take action because making phone calls was not illegal.

In fact, this recent caller seems to resemble the one who called female Hollis residents in the fall of 2008. At that time, this "phone whisperer" made early-morning calls to tell students he was "crazy about you."

Mather House administrators declined to comment on the incidents.