Cameri Airport is about 8 miles out of Novara, a small industrial town in northern Italy, midway between Turin and Milan. The airport - formerly a bleak detention base for hotheads and other disciplinary cases - is surrounded by rice-paddies in every direction, and is home to the 53rd Fighter Wing (aka "Tiger Wing", "The Ace of Swords" or more formally "G. Chiarini Wing").
Within the bounduaries of the base are a few corn fields and a small wood. Lost in the wood and out of sight from the main body of the complex, is an old hangar that originally housed the - never used - Nuclear Decontamination Unit.
The "haunting" began in June '94, in the switchboard room, and as I was serving there with seven other guys, I went through much ot the story personally.
It all began after an extremely violent downpour that really played havoc with our phone lines, and caused a black-out in the whole Novara area. During the storm, a few people swore they saw _green lightning_. Two or three days later, as things were finally getting back to normal, we received our first ghost-call.
It was around seven in the evening; the heavy traffic was over for the day, and almost all of the incoming calls were personal ones for the guys on the force; nothing official or priority, so no sweat at all. But someone was playing the fool: both operators on duty complained about someone that was calling the switchboard from a phone in the Technical Section and then did not speak.
These silent calls kept coming, at about five minutes intervalls, for the whole of the evening, and then stopped at about ten o'clock. We traced the calls to the Pilot Decontamination Shack - whatever that might be - and tried calling a nearby phone to work out what was happening. Our calls were not answered.
The next morning we filed a report and forgot about the thing. But in the evening, around seven, the calls began again, and kept coming for about three hours again.
This went on for three or four days: every evening, every five minutes or so, for two or three hours, the Pilot Decontamination Shack would call us. We filed another report and positively asked for explanations; we were told that it really was not a problem: the whole Nuclear Decontamination Unit was out of service, and not only there was nobody there, but there was actually not even a phone!
The line ended in a socket, not in a receiver. So we could not receive these calls, right?
This explained why our attempts at contacting them had come to nothing: there was nothing to get our calls, out there in the wood! However, the top brass sent a phone tech over there, and he found nothing out of order.
A pair of days later, the bleary-eyed night-watch operators greeted us in the morning with the bad news: our phone-that-was-not-there had been calling all night long, at about three minutes intervals. We filed another complaint and again were told that a check had shown nothing.
Late that night the senior operator on watch found a way to silence the ghost-caller: he simply connected the incoming line with a notoriously dead line, so that the phone-that-was-not-there could spend the night ringing another non-existent phone.
This trick worked for about a week, giving us quiet nights. As soon as the sun went down the ghost phone would call us and we would connect it with its virtual counterpart. Everything was fine again.
The following week, the ghost learned how to hang up and call us again. The switchboard terminal started ringing again in the night, this time at longish, irregular intervals.
One of the guys started actually to listen to the silence at the other end of the line, and said he heard something, like a distant, hollow echo, and a rasping sound.
As soon as he used the word "voice", we told him to cut it and go back to work.
This was getting weird.
Another week dragged on, with the ghost-calls starting at sundown and stopping at dawn, and the non-existent caller at the not-existent phone in the Shack hanging up after a while if we put him on hold, and calling us again.
We filed complaints daily, and were told not to worry, and were generally very nervous.
Then two of the switchboard guys actually took a hike to the Nuclear Decontamination Unit late one afternoon, finding only a run-down hangar and a small prefab hut with a very short stretch of landing strip. They were intercepted by a patrol car and had to explain they were jogging on their free time. They were told by the sargent to go and jog another way next time.
Then the thing stopped dead, so to speak, for two full days (and nights). We were about to celebrate our newlyfound quiet night shifts, when we started receiving complaints from all over the base: someone was apparently ringing random mumbers on the base phone directory and then giving his silent treatment to the unfortunate listener. By night. The ghost had learned how to bypass the switchboard and call any number direct.
Our nights now were haunted by the distant obsessive ringing of a phone somewhere in one of the empty offices in the administration and command building. Then the ringing would stop, and we knew that the "ghost" was dialling another number, somewhere else in the base. It was downright spooky.
This time the Tech branch of Communications moved real fast - the complaints came from officers disturbed in their houses at night, not from airmen on duty. They worked three days down at the Nuclear Decontamination Unit without results. One of the technicians spent an evening with us on the switchboard to try and figure out what the heck it was, but again it came to nothing.
Then, we had another tremendous thunderstorm, with both energy and communication blackout. And we did not ear from the Pilot Decontamination Shack again. No investigation followed.
