Have you ever had your phone ring without the jack being put in?

Question

First time it happened I bought an 250 year old home and found an old rotary phone. I was walking down the stairs with it and the plug wrapped round the phone and it rang,,very freaky. Now it happened again. So what do you think?

Answer 1

Your house is haunted.  I think I'd be outta there!!!

Answer 2

Old rotary telephones with an actual bell as the ringer have a transformer which is susceptible to electrical currents.  Couple this with an old house that probably has old two wire electrical wiring which does not have a ground and therefore is putting out an electrical field.  The telephone cord wrapped around the phone is acting as an antennae picking up this electrical field and causing the bell to ring.

Answer 3

Not buying it.

First, it takes 90v from the telephone company to ring the phone.  Modern electronic phones now use a speaker instead of a bell, so a stepdown coil is used to generate the tone through a speaker, but it still takes the 90v from the phone company to make it work.

Second, a 250 year old house would have been built long before the Revolutionary War, which would have required incredible cost over the years for upkeep.  Such a house in standing condition would be an historical site and quite expensive.

Electric distribution has only been around for a little over 100 years, but various methods became standardized and regulated in the 1930's.  Even so, wiring still deteriorated as did houses.  Maintenance included replacement when problems came up.  It's very doubtful that the electrical wiring in your home is more than 40 years old.

Either the story is highly embellished, or someone went through extreme difficulty to set up such a scenario.