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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/CatDadMilhouse on 2024-10-31 14:36:46+00:00.

tldr at the bottom. This happened about a decade ago, and something else I was just reading reminded me of it so I thought I’d share.

I had just moved into a new place about a week prior. I was renting a bedroom in a small house, and the only other person who lived there was the owner. It was a great setup for me, because his work schedule and social life meant I was often the only person home. As such, for the first time in years, my music-loving self could set up a decent pair of speakers and a subwoofer and listen to music at levels that would be pretty inconsiderate in a shared space, but not screamingly loud or anything. Well, the subwoofer itself was pretty much turned all the way up, but that’s because it was much smaller than the other speakers, so that was how I got it to be at an appropriate match. This setup was in my bedroom, not a shared space.

One night, I was listening to music while lying in bed. It turned into one of those nights where I went from wired to tired pretty quickly, and so I just hit the remote for the stereo to turn it off before passing out. That doesn’t turn the subwoofer off, but whatever, I’m not worried about the couple of pennies it’ll cost to keep that thing running overnight.

I was worried, however, at about 2:00AM when I suddenly heard someone screaming in my bedroom. In my utterly discombobulated state, it took me a few seconds to realize that the screaming was coming through my subwoofer. I double checked, and my stereo was off.

As I relayed this to someone at work the next day, they asked where my new place was. When I told them, they started laughing. They said “when you go home tonight, take a look at the house next to yours. And take a look at their back yard.”

I get home that night, and what do I find? Behind their modest ranch house is a 30’ tall antenna mast that apparently everyone in town knew about except for me. Turns out the guy is an amateur radio hobbyist who loved playing with CB and ham radio equipment. And my crappy thrift-store subwoofer was picking up his transmissions because of the way things were wired.

tl;dr - left a subwoofer on overnight and was jarred awake by the sound of an amateur radio hobbyist next door screaming through the speaker