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I counted 47 dead payphones in one trip through the Dover Mall and now I can't stop seeing them
Went to the old Dover Mall in Delaware last month because I heard the food court still had that 90s tile. The place is maybe 85% empty, but the weird part was the payphones. I counted 47 of them, all dead, some still with the phone books hanging from those metal cords. One near the old Sears entrance had a note taped inside that said "call mom, she's worried" and I just stood there for like 5 minutes. Has anyone else found a spot where one specific dead thing just keeps showing up everywhere you look?
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ivan_perez8d ago
Did you ever go back and check if the phones still worked after that? I had a thing like this with the old Chuck E Cheese on Route 13, not the phones but the animatronic stage, the curtain was stuck half open for years and every time we drove past I had to look. Then they tore the whole place down and I felt weirdly sad about it, like I lost a pet I never even liked. Dead payphones hit different though because they used to be where you called for a ride home when your plans fell apart, and now they just hang there waiting for a job that doesn't exist. That note about mom got me, someone wrote that as a joke or maybe not a joke and it outlived whoever made the call.
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elliotshah8d ago
What did the handset smell like when you picked it up? That's the thing I remember most about dead payphones, that mix of old plastic, rain, and whatever got spilled on it. Did the cord still have tension or was it totally slack, just hanging there like a dead animal? And when you picked it up, was there any dial tone at all, even a weak one, or just that empty nothing sound? I'm asking because there's a difference between a phone that's cut off and one that's still connected but nobody's on the other end. That note about mom makes me wonder if the line was still live when somebody wrote it.
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