I work assessing risks for an insurance company in rural Southern Illinois
I'm probably not supposed to be sharing any of this, and I'm definitely not supposed to be typing it at my office. I don't know how many confidentiality agreements and licensure rules I'm violating by posting here, but please know that my intentions are only to let someone, anyone, know some of what's happening around me before they take away my access to the assessments & claims systems.
You can call me Anna. It's not my real name, not even close, but I wanted to give myself a moniker so the dialogue makes sense. I've always instinctively disliked short womens' names that start with a vowel. Maybe it's a jealousy thing - maybe I was just tormented by some super average white girls in elementary school in the early 90s. Either way, I'm adopting it now because it's the furthest thing I can think of from my true self. I need to make sure my identity is protected, both from the company and from anyone who is or was kin to the claimants in the following stories.
If you've ever been to the great state of Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, I'd bet $100 cash on the spot that you've been to northern (or, at a stretch, central) Illinois, and most likely the Chicagoland area. The metropolitan sprawl of the Chicago suburbs are, truly, massive, rolling 50 to 60 miles away from the lakefront to the north, west, and south. If you keep going due west, along Rte 47, you'll eventually run into DeKalb, home of Northern Illinois University. Roughly speaking, if you cut south from there on 55 for about 2 hours, you'll drive past Illinois State, then U of I in Champagne/Urbana. But if you keep going south, for about another 5 hours, you'll start getting into my area of the woods: Southern Illinois, and specifically Carbondale, home of Southern Illinois University, in the heart of the Shawnee National Forest. Honestly, it's closer to Paducha, Kentucky than it is to any other "major" metro area in Illinois, and is generally considered to be part of the south by those that live there. On some maps, you can see that parts of this area did claim to fall below the Mason-Dixon Line during the Civil War (something that certain locals will not let you forget easily).
**Note: At this point, it would be super helpful for you to look some good maps of the area for reference. Here are a couple of links, along with what they're helpful for. These will do more to teach you about how weird this place is than I can explain in words. If you have any questions, I'll try to answer in a follow up. Just trust me, all of this will become relevant as I go on.
Forestry service map: https://www.roseandacompass.com/s/Shawnee-national-forest-trail-map.jpg
Storm track map: https://www.weather.gov/ilx/tropical_climo
Fault line map: https://www.nprillinois.org/statehouse/2019-10-15/iema-fema-be-prepared-for-illinois-earthquakes
2017 & 2024 eclipse map: https://blog.wolfram.com/2017/08/14/double-eclipse-or-why-carbondale-illinois-is-special/
Map of Native Tribes: https://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/post/htmls/popups/index_terr.html
1818 (first year of statehood) map (you can really see how the state developed from the south up in this one): https://mapsofthepast.com/products/historic-state-map-illinois-melish-1818-23-x-31-74-vintage-wall-art?srsltid=AfmBOooCiwv22OUG5z4q5uvuuO9U7ogMoAzKQ_eaeav54ScnuujTFZ5T
So my office is in Carbondale, one of the largest "cities" in this part of the state. It boasts a population of 22,223 permanent residents, plus the university. The surrounding towns are mostly a mix of unincorporated villages and townships, with a few larger towns like Marion closer to the interstate. It's an awesome college town, famous for it's downtown strip of bars, clubs, and restaurants, which harken back to the city's busier days, when the university was at its peak in the 70s and 80s. John Belushi based Animal House on his experience at school here, and I'm proud to say that the real Animal House was very real, and that I'd been there before it burned down in the 2010s. Students, largely from Chicago, always joked that they loved going to SIU because it was the furthest away from home they could get and still get in-state tuition.
I work for a major insurance carrier, one you've definitely heard of, with a celebrity mascot and a catchy phrase and everything. There's a very good chance you have a line of insurance with us or one of our subsidiaries/partners, if you have auto, homeowners, small business, or life insurance. We do all kinds of other stuff too, like boats and RVs, which are super popular in this area with the National Forest right here, but I'll come back to these later. My main point is that this isn't some shady 2-man operation or anything - it's a huge company, and I work at a local agency. I'm licensed nationally and by the state, and I work under a main agent. It's his name on the door, not mine, but I still bind policies, file claims, and pre-assess for underwriting. I'll call him Ben Easterly. I love Ben; he's the best boss I've ever had, and I maintain that through all of this. Ben has always had my back.
We run a tight ship of an office. Ben is ex-Marines, and sounds more like John Goodman than he realizes. Bigger guy, with a very calming and confident presence. I imagine him getting along well with my dad. His son, Caleb, works the front desk as our main customer service person, and there's been a slow rotation of other sales staff that have come and gone over the years. Ben, Caleb, and I are really the only old timers. This month's fresh meat in sales is named Shelley, but she's only been here about a week so far. We'll see how long she lasts.
Strange things always happen in Carbondale - there's even a Facebook page about it called WTF Carbondale that posts all the crazy happenings. Since the economy in this part of the state is severely depressed, tech isn't always up to date, and things like phone & internet service are not constant. Between that & the geography, mail moves slowly, calls drop, emails don't go through. We have outages all the times, but that never explained the thing with the phones to me.
The calls started happening around Christmas, right after I joined the agency years back, maybe 2012. I had just gotten to the office in the morning before we opened, around 7:45 in the morning. It had been a cold, misty drive in, with lots of slick patches covering the poorly-repaired blacktop of Giant City Drive. I lived out closer to the state park back then, in a small apartment that was remodeled from a hunting cabin into a duplex sometime in the '80s without rennovating the split-pea green bathroom fixtures. I unlocked the front door of the office and flipped the lights on, making sure the coffee maker was starting up on my way back to my desk. I dropped my bag onto the floor next to my ergonomic chair and sat with a resigned but vaguely optimistic sigh; just another innocuous, normal Monday morning.
Within moments, the sales line rang, which leads to my desk phone. Strange, I thought. Usually the automated phone system doesn't let any calls through until after our morning meeting is over at 9am, when office hours officially start. I grabbed my headset so I could take the call and have both hands available to type in the caller's policy information.
"Good morning, thank you for calling Easterly Insurance Agency, how can I help you?" My voice came through clearly, without the reverb you sometimes hear on a poor-quality or failing call, but there was no reply, only silence. "Hello? Hellooo?" I asked in my best professional-but-lively voice; still no answer. I looked at the caller ID on the desk phone, which read, clear as day:
CALLER/EASTERLYINSAGE/6185552151ex005
Our agency. Our number. My extension. I was somehow receiving a call from myself.
I quickly regarded it as a fluke - either a tech error, or some spammer spoofing our number - and it faded into the routine of the day. I forgot about it for about a week, until the same thing happened again. Monday, the first day of Winter Break for the students, 8:09am this time. Ben, Caleb, a sales girl named Jess, and I were having our morning meeting. The sales line rang, and I jumped up to get it - you never want to miss out on a hot lead. "Good morning, thank you for calling Easterly Insurance Agency, how can I help you?"
Silence.
I hung up, checked the number, and came back into the meeting.
"Just so you guys know, I think there might be an error in the phone system. This is the second time the caller ID has said I've gotten a call from myself."
"Weird," said Caleb. "I'll make a note and look into it more if it keeps happening." Ben nodded in agreement, satisfied that this would suffice to address the issue. We moved on.
The next time it happened, it was different.
It was just after lunch. 1:12pm, to be exact. I remember, because I was stuck in that minute on that phone call for what felt like hours.
It had been a while since the last mystery-internal-call. The sales line rang. I already had my headset on, having just replaced it after coming back in from my lunch break. It was December 23, two days before Christmas. It hovered around the freezing point all day, with consistent cloud cover threatening to start flaking snow at any moment and casting a dark pale to the dead, wintery world outside the office windows. We'd been getting lots of service calls for people looking to change and renew their policies before the holidays and the new year, and this day was no different. When the call rang, I hit my answer button, and cheerfuly recited my greeting into the headset. There was silence on the other end. I checked the caller ID, seeing that it was another of these calls, and repeated myself. This time, I thought I heard something.
I pressed the earpiece tightly against my left ear, and could barely make out a scratching sound. It was almost inaudibly quiet at first, but very clear and sharp, as if the audio was being recorded in a professional production studio. Little scratching sounds, like rats in a wall, slowly became louder and more distinct. It wasn't regular enough to be made by anything mechanical, and wasn't random enough or staticy enough to be electrical interference. I pushed the end call button, and the caller ID vanished from the screen. The scratching, however, got louder. It's almost-pattern quickened to a frenzied, panicked pace, like something trying to dig its way out...out of what, I'm not sure, and I didn't want to know.
I hit the end call button again, and the scratching only intensified, its volume hurting my ear at this point. I felt sharp nails digging against my skull, as if struggling to tear through into the outside world. I ripped off my headset, desperate to put space between myself and that sound. Something about it was deeply, horribly wrong, like a frequency out of place in our percieveable dimension of reality. It sounded like something trying desperately to claw its way out, or up. I sat at my desk, staring at the headset laying silent in front of my keyboard, red light flashing to indicate that it wasn't currently on a call. The sound echoed inside my head, sending bolts of pain through the crown of my head and waves of nausea accross my abdomen. I gagged, barely keeping down the gyro and fried mushrooms I'd had for lunch from El Greco. Eventually I lost my composure, and vomited into the trash bin behind my desk. Good thing I was good at doing that quitetly (a story for another time). No one else in the office noticed.
It took a good 15 minutes for me to recover physically, and a little longer to gather my wits about me. I can only imagine what even low-level radiation exposure is like, but to me at the time, that was the closest analogy I could find to how I felt. The skin all over my whole body ached as if it were bruised, or had just come down from a high fever. My head throbbed, and I could still feel and taste the bitter acid in my esophagus. I was exhausted and out of breath. I reached for my inhailer, feeling the familiar tightening of asthma begin in my bronchials.
It had been what felt like a good two hours by the point I looked up at the wall clock again in any meaningful way. At first, it didn't register, but the time showed 1:12pm - no different than it had when the phone rang. I checked the wall clock against the digital clock in the corner of my computer, my desk phone, and then my cell. 1:12pm. The last 2 hours, or what felt like the last two hours, apparently hadn't happend.
I freaked out. At this point, I'd been really good about only using a Klonopin when I really needed it for a panic attack, and I was down to .5mg only a couple of times a month; a huge contrast to the 4mg/day I was taking before I was properly diagnosed (again, a story for another time). I popped the pill through the foil, bit it in half, and placed half under my tongue. I went to Ben's office, and asked to go home sick. I was clocked out and on my way back to my apartment by 1:25.
From then on, the calls started becoming more frequent, and once, Caleb even got one. We could never hear anything besides silence and the quiet scratching, and Caleb didn't seem to be affected in any way. It didn't get loud enough to really make anything out again for a long time after that, but the calls never stopped coming. Sometimes three or four a day.
About two weeks later, just after New Year's, the university was getting ready to start up again for the spring semester. For us, that always meant a sharp rise in renters' quotes and auto claims due to the students moving back in to off-campus housing. The mystery calls were a commonplace occurance at this point, so it didn't phase me that much when they came through. I accepted the calls, dictated my greeting, and then hung up when I heard the silence on the other end.
It was a Friday, I think the 5th or 6th of January, when I got the next really weird call. This one was different. It was from a local number, a landline by the looks of it, with a semi-original Carbondale phone number probably assigned during the days of switchboards. I accepted the call, expecting an elderly customer or perhaps someone from out of city proper.
"Good morning, thank you for calling Easterly Insurance Agency, how can I help you?"
"Hi," said a perky, student-aged female voice. I could tell she was from the city from her accent. "Could you please look up my renters policy? It's number 008523225."
"Absolutely, thanks for that, and can I have the name on the account?" I asked. My system was still searching for the policy, displaying only a spinning wheel over a grayed-out screen. I picked up a pen, quickly transcribing the policy number, poised to take her name down in writing while I waited for my computer to catch up.
"Sheppard," said the voice over my earpiece.
I froze.
"I'm sorry, could you spell that last name for me?" I hoped that she would say SHEPHERD, like the traditional spelling, but her voice neatly spelled out the name with no possibility of confusion. "SHEPPARD. Deborah Sheppard."
That was I name I knew. Not personally, of course, I was too young for that, but everyone knew that name. Infamous Carbondale and SIU history, along with the Hundley House murders of the 1920s and the more recent Dardeen family killings in 1987.
Deborah Sheppard had been violently murdered in her off-campus apartment in 1982. The case was famous. It had gone cold for decades, only for evidence to come forward in 2007 that linked the murder to serial killer Timothy Krajcir.
"I'm...I'm so sorry," I stammered. I didn't know what else to say. Either this was someone's idea of a sick joke, or there was another girl with the same name who also had a renters policy through us that expired in September 1983. "Could you please repeat that?"
My heart felt like it was beating up out of my chest and into my throat. I was filled with an overwhelming sensation of dread, like I knew something awful was about to happen, but I didn't know what or when. The most anxious part of my brain almost expected to hear the scratching sounds again, but nothing followed. The call dropped. The air in my office felt hollow, as if some great gravity well had sucked all of the ambient energy into the desk phone and caused it to vanish into a pinpoint-sized black hole.
I didn't answer any more calls that day. When I checked my call logs and recordings the next day, it didn't show up in the log as having been received or placed - there was just a gap in the timestamps between Caleb's incoming call at 2:06pm and the next outbound call I placed at 2:34pm to a Mr. Joe Butcher II.
I have to go for today, but there is so much more I need to write. Next time, I'll tell you a little about Makanda. I haven't even gotten to any of the assessments or claims I've processed yet, let alone some of my experiences going out to people's homes in the woods and surrounding farmland in Jackson and Union Counties. I'm currently expanding my research into what I've experienced, but there really isn't as much online as I'd hoped besides some TikToks and old blog posts. If anyone reading this is from Southern Illinois and wants to connect, I'd love to hear from you. Honestly, it would be nice to know I'm not crazy...or, I guess, the only one still sane enough to recognize the strangeness that's going on here.
- Anna Bigelow, Insurance Agent, May 2026, Carbondale, IL 62901