I AM NOT OP. THIS IS A REPOST SUB.

The first post was posted 4 years ago.

The second post was posted 3 years ago.

The final post was posted 3 days ago.

All on r/RBI

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Everything I've got on the 1800-GOLF-TIP mystery

This isn't about a crime, at least I don't think. But it is strange and seemingly unsolvable.

In Canada in the 90s there was this weird number: 1-800-GOLF-TIP. If you called it, there would be a looping recording of a man counting from 1 to 10. If you let it go for long enough it would eventually stop, and then after a bit longer a really loud synthetic siren-type sound would go.

They paid for a billboard in my town. The billboard made it sound like it was supposed to be a legit golf thing so I never called it until my friends went on and on about it.

There was something really compelling about it to us back then. People would talk about it at school, you'd call it with your friends when you were hanging out together, and if you were bored and alone you'd call it from a payphone.

Apparently it wasn't just known in my hometown. Looking around in forums it seems like it was all over Canada that people were calling it on a regular basis.

The payphone thing especially... I've been looking and found a bunch of conversations where people talked about calling it from multiple phones and leaving them all off the hook. I remember kind of doing something similar... Don't really remember if I left them off the hook but I remember being in the mall and calling the number.

The consensus is the man's voice was East Indian. But then again, what did we know about accents when we were in our teens and twenties?

The thing everyone disagrees about is when the guy took a breath... Some say it was after the 5, some the 6, and I distinctly remember it being after the 7. I used to imitate his voice, try to get it down perfectly.

Also some people remember a gap between the 1 and 10, but I remember it being pretty seamless.

I've been trying to get to the bottom of a few questions here: Who's behind this? Why did they pay all that money for it? What was it for?

And... Are we all brainwashed now? I mean, why were we all so fascinated in the first place?

Mentions found so far:

• /u/cunnilyndey found a mention of it in a 1993 listicle here: https://archive.org/stream/thecharleton23carl/thecharleton23carl_djvu.txt
• An old thread from r/WTF - lots of off-topic chatter but no new info
• It's loosely mentioned in this thread, with one person having no first-hand knowledge but positing it was a social experiment
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on the Tribe forums (1) (2)
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on the Civic forums (1)
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on Fark (1)
• Hulver's site, in a discussion about number stations, mentions that they used to call random 800 numbers. His description of 1-800-FISH-TIP is the same as 1-800-GOLF-TIP. (And yes, they're different numbers!) So, logical next step is to look into the other number. Unfortunately I haven't found anything about that either.

Dead ends:

• Nothing on Atlas Obscura, Wikipedia
• Have posted to other subreddits in the past, including mystery and telephony subs... nothing beyond what's listed above
• I have sent personal one on one queries to various "phone phreak" and "telephone nerd" individuals but nobody ever replies
• I sent it off to the Reply All podcast but never heard back

So all I know is this: it happened. I'm not crazy. But nobody even has an educated guess on why, how, or by who with this whole thing, and have hit a brick wall. If anyone can dig up anything even vaguely related I would be eternally grateful.

Update - Thanks /u/meltysandwich for the silver! Didn't know there was such a thing lol

Update 2 - Something jogged my memory about that sound that would play at the end: there used to be a feature on land lines (I honestly don't know if they still do this) where if you leave the phone off the hook by accident after the other side hung up, after a few minutes a really loud sound like that synthetic siren would play. I think it was just the phone company's way of telling you the phone was left off the hook by accident. So in this case 1-800-GOLF-TIP was probably hanging up on us and, after a while, that sound would play. Wish I knew how many iterations it completed before cutting off... I remember the last one being cut off at the count of 3 or 4...

Update 3 - Found 2 mentions on Usenet - first in late 1999 from someone who just kind of remembers it, has no idea what it was, and the second from someone in 2000 who never actually called the number but their friends did, and who has no info about it at all beyond some casual paranoia.

Update 4 - holy crap /u/Totally_TJ just found a website about this: https://1800golftip.com Don't know anything about this website yet!

Update 5 - Looks like 1800golftip.com was registered this last March and Archive.org has a capture from August. I reached out via their contact form but it seems like another dead end for now. (And no, I'm not in any way affiliated...)

Update 6 - /u/jamesironman had me make a recording of my imitation of what it sounded like. I was a bit fast here (because embarrassing) but fwiw: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uempquo2u9rhuvh/2018_12_14-12_20_38.ogg?dl=0

Update 7 - /u/OldString asked about what the billboard looked like. This was 20 years ago but to the best of my recollection: full-color with a close up of a golf ball and a club angled away from the camera - green grass, some blue in the upper left, 1-800-GOLF-TIP in big yellow 3D lettering.

Update 8 - Nobody appears to be reading this post anymore so I'll put this here for any future researchers. There was some good activity in the comments but, beyond some interesting speculation and the discovery of a few more mentions from people who called the line, there are no new leads or feasible avenues of investigation.

This mystery is still, for the time being, unsolvable.

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1-800-GOLF-TIP - UPDATES at the end of 2019

A quick note for those who've followed this mystery in the past: I originally posted this last night. This morning we have our first real, solid theory. So... If you'd rather preserve your sense of wonder, stop reading when you get to the point where you see "UPDATES".

For everyone else:

You can imagine my surprise when, after years of asking questions and looking into things, my "final" post about 1-800-GOLF-TIP somehow caught on. I still get messages about it to this day, and there have been some new developments in the investigation.

This post will recap things and integrate the new discoveries along the way.

The YouTube Video:

Barely Sociable from YouTube got in touch with me, we discussed it, and he made a great summary video:

https://youtu.be/_28b0P_6VvY

Please forgive my horrible imitation of his voice. I'll make it up to you below.

Now, his video omits some details and I believe he may have gotten a few things slightly wrong (it's a big topic so that's hardly his fault), so let me recap in detail and correct for what we've discovered since his video went up. Much of the text that follows is taken from the original post, although I've made some adjustments for increased accuracy.

Summary:

Back in the 90s there was this weird phone number: 1-800-GOLF-TIP. If you called it, there would be a looping recording of a man counting from 1 to 10. If you let it go for long enough it would eventually stop, and then after a bit longer a really loud siren-type sound would go.

Now, an update (already!) since the last post: that siren sound has been found!

It was, in fact, the original No Such Number AKA "Cry Baby" tone that was created by Bell Telephone. (See here for a reference on this tone and others.) If you'd like to know more about this tone and its history there's a great article here: Kitty Carlisle sings ‘No Such Number’ and other telephone test tones. Her recorded voice has since been replaced by a synthetic tone (which can also be found on the page above) but when I listen to both it's her voiced version that I remember.

I always wondered why that siren tone was so disturbing to me and now I know: it was a human voice.

Back to the story:

They paid for a billboard in my town. The billboard made it sound like it was supposed to be a legit golf thing so I never called it until my friends went on and on about it.

This was 20 years ago but to the best of my recollection here's what the billboard looked like: full-color with a close up of a golf ball and a club angled away from the camera - green grass, some blue in the upper left, 1-800-GOLF-TIP in big yellow 3D lettering.

There was something really compelling about calling the number for all of us back then. People would talk about it at school, you'd call it with your friends when you were hanging out together, and if you were bored and alone you'd call it from a payphone.

Apparently it wasn't just known in my hometown. We've found old forum posts and articles that confirm it was being called from all over Canada on a regular basis. In the last thread u/contikipaul mentioned that he used to call it from Washington in the US so it's possible it was available across the US as well.

A common theme among many mentions: payphones. I've been looking and found a bunch of conversations where people talked about calling it from multiple phones and leaving them all off the hook. I remember kind of doing something similar... Don't really remember if I left them off the hook but I remember being in the mall and calling the number.

I've been trying to get to the bottom of a few questions here: Who's behind this? Why did they pay all that money for it? What was it for?

And... Are we all brainwashed now? I mean, why were we all so fascinated in the first place?

The Recording:

Montreal, 1994, some experimental musicians decided to use the voice they recorded from 1-800-GOLF-TIP through their phones. Here was the result:

https://youtu.be/r7miXlC0C_s

A bit too distored? Well, good news: u/retracicle got in touch with me on December 1st 2019 with this message:

Some guy was messing with sounds and trying to make a song type thing out of it and remixed it in this (video), then someone cleaned the audio and removed all of the effects

What we're left with is a recording of a recording, but considering how crappy payphones used to be this will give you a pretty faithful sense of the experience. Bottom line though: we have his original voice! So, if you're feeling up to it, I've looped it and put it together with the "Cry Baby" tone at the end to give you the best possible sense of what it sounded like to call 1-800-GOLF-TIP back in the 90s:

https://youtu.be/8Fg_PjiLmB8

About the Website:

Much has been made of https://1800golftip.com/.

But... I'm not seeing the mystery there. Someone remembered the number and banged out a 1-pager about it. I signed up to their mailing list a year ago and never heard back - unless perhaps the spam filter caught it, I don't know.

Anyway, there's nothing indicating that the website was built by the creators of the phone number. Seems like a fan site someone immediately got bored with. But... maybe I'm wrong? Maybe it's another piece of the puzzle that I'm just not seeing? If so, let me know.

Location of the Billboard:

I've received an odd number of questions about this so let me go into detail: it was the billboard that currently is between the McDonald's and Trail's End Landscape Supplies on Welland Ave, St Catharines. This was across from the Lincoln Theater (since torn down and replaced with a Wendy's / Tim Hortons). Someone mentioned a "Bijou Theater"... there was no theater by that name but there was an arcade under the Lincoln called Bijou so maybe that's where they got that.

So that's the billboard but... again, 20 years ago. Apart from what I've said above I don't know how much I can really tell you about a billboard that I didn't think much of at the time. All I can tell you is that I remember it existed.

Mentions found so far:

• 2 mentions on Usenet - first in late 1999 from someone who just kind of remembers it, has no idea what it was, and the second from someone in 2000 who never actually called the number but their friends did, and who has no info about it at all beyond some casual paranoia.
• /u/cunnilyndey found a mention of it in a 1993 listicle here: https://archive.org/stream/thecharleton23carl/thecharleton23carl_djvu.txt
• An old thread from r/WTF - lots of off-topic chatter but no new info
• It's loosely mentioned in this thread, with one person having no first-hand knowledge but positing it was a social experiment
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on the Tribe forums (1) (2)
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on the Civic forums (1)
• Some personal anecdotes of calling it on Fark (1)
• Hulver's site, in a discussion about number stations, mentions that they used to call random 800 numbers. His description of 1-800-FISH-TIP is the same as 1-800-GOLF-TIP. (And yes, they're different numbers!) So, logical next step is to look into the other number. Unfortunately I haven't found anything about that either.

Dead ends:

• Nothing on Atlas Obscura, Wikipedia
• Have posted to other subreddits in the past, including mystery and telephony subs... nothing beyond what's listed above
• I have sent personal one on one queries to various "phone phreak" and "telephone nerd" individuals but nobody ever replies
• I sent it off to the Reply All podcast but never heard back - others have reached out as well to no avail.

That's everything I've got. Hope you enjoy the few updates I've been able to fit in there, and thank you very, very much to all of those who've reached out over the past year with things they've found.

Please let me know if you have any new information!

UPDATES:

What you see above is everything I had when I made this post on Dec 27, 2019. I'll add more as it is discovered below.

• u/charlesmans0n found some cool stuff! First an ad in The Tampa Tribune, December 3rd 1994 - http://imgur.com/gallery/I0oTcQS

And also, this:

Another reference appears in the December 1, 1994 issue of USA Today. That article refers to (800) GOLF-TIP as the “USA TODAY/PGA OF AMERICA HOT LINE”. I’d like to see the printed version of this, but a link to a text-only PDF version of the USA Today piece, found on ProQuest, is here.
Based on the Tampa Tribune blurb and the USA Today piece it looks as if the ability to call (800) GOLF-TIP and hear golf advice from “nearly 100 PGA members” was only available for the weekend of December 3 and 4, 1994; and only from 9am to 9pm at that.

• See his full write up with linked references at (edit: cleaner link): https://www.payphone-project.com/my-take-on-the-1-800-golf-tip-mystery.html - please keep in mind conjecture is mixed with fact in this article, but it's great and worth a read.

HUGE UPDATE (SOLVED?):

YouTube user Number 5ESS commented:

That is a number unobtainable/Vacant Level "Cry Baby" Tone used on step-by-step (Strowger) switches in the U.S, Sounds like it came from an Evan Doorbell tape.
My best guess is 1-800-GOLF-TIP was just going to a sort of test message possibly a supervision message or a switch verification or something that had that voice and then once the trunk timed out it just went to the number unobtainable tone.
I found this a while back, Here is the actual real number that I think 1 (800) GOLF-TIP went to (229) 430-0002
That is a real test message on a CO Switch that has that exact same voice, Although it never times out to that tone I think because they since removed that older switch that made that tone.

I called the 229 number he mentions above and, while it isn't exactly the same, it's definitely similar enough for me to believe it's a more modern iteration of what we originally experienced. (Side note: his offhand comment about Evan Doorbell tapes is a rabbit hole of its own and will make anyone looking for old fuzzy voice recordings extremely happy!)

What he says dovetails very well with what we learned from the Elmer Cat page about the "Cry Baby" tone and, if we combine this with the Payphone-Project article's findings, finally leads us to our very first solid theory.

THE COMPLETE THEORY:

Past theories have discussed number stations, mind control, arguments among business owners, etc... But the thing is, this was all conjecture. We just didn't have enough facts to build a theory that we could be certain about at all.

But now we do.

If we combine all of the facts above, what we arrive at is this: originally we had the "USA TODAY/PGA OF AMERICA HOT LINE" at 1-800-GOLF-TIP. At the time it had real content, something to do with golf.

This was clearly originally planned to be a very big thing. My town of St Catharines has an absurd number of golf courses per capita, which was actually a big part of an ad campaign in the 90s to attract commuters from Toronto. So it only makes sense we'd end up with a billboard around here.

There was a kind of rush to 800 numbers in the 90s. Every phone book had a huge section near the front with free numbers to call for "Joke of the week", recipes, movie listings (Moviephone!) or whatever, all of course heavily laden with ads. It was Internet before Internet, YouTube before YouTube.

But eventually the bottom fell out. Bored kids would call those numbers but that was it. And adults with actual spending power? Or kids with money to actually go out and do things other than call random 800 numbers? No interest.

So I expect what happened was the PGA launched 1-800-GOLF-TIP, the numbers weren't promising, and they dumped it. We do know, for a fact, that they only actively supported it for a very narrow timeframe.

Meanwhile, there's this billboard in some smaller city in Canada. This part we need to guess at. Either they forgot about it, originally paid for it to be up for too long, or the billboard company couldn't be bothered to take it down. Who knows. But either way, the number was in the air.

But 1-800-GOLF-TIP was dead, and it was redirected to a No Such Number line that was handled through step-by-step switches in the US. A 1994 version of what you'll hear if you call 229-430-0002.

And a myth was born.

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The 1-800-GOLF-TIP mystery - SOLVED

I'm making this post because ever since I wrote about this years ago (see Everything I've got on the 1800-GOLF-TIP mystery and 1-800-GOLF-TIP - UPDATES at the end of 2019) I've received pretty regular messages about it from Internet sleuths and general curiosity-seekers. Not only do they always have the same questions, but they often miss important details, offer the same wild speculations, or just plain miss stuff.

This will not, however, be a comprehensive list of all of my sources, etc. This post is meant to serve as a "nail in the coffin" for the mystery so I can just have something convenient to point people at whenever I get messaged.

Warning: If you hate the experience of having mysteries spoiled, or have had the disappointing experience of having a magic trick explained, do not read this! The truth, as it tends to be with most "creepy" mysteries in life, is frikkin boring.

Fair warning.

For those of you unaware of the 1-800-GOLF-TIP mystery...

Back in the 90s there was this weird phone number: 1-800-GOLF-TIP. If you called it, there would be a looping recording of a man counting from 1 to 10. If you let it go for long enough it would eventually stop, and then after a bit longer a really loud siren-type sound would go.

Here's a recreation of what it sounded like using actual sound samples:

https://youtu.be/8Fg_PjiLmB8

How this video was created: I made this from scratch after years of research, thanks to the original counting having been recorded and put into the song Peabody - Golf Tip (and cleaned up by another user whose info I can't seem to find now), and Bell Telephone references and this article here for the "Cry Baby" (the official name) siren effect at the end. I can confirm this is pretty much exactly what it sounded like.

They paid for a billboard in my town. (This billboard on the corner, but there might have been more of them.) The billboard made it sound like it was supposed to be a legit golf thing so I never called it until my friends went on and on about it.

Little did I know, there were other ads out there too, like this ad in The Tampa Tribune, December 3rd 1994 - http://imgur.com/gallery/I0oTcQS

And from this article: "Another reference appears in the December 1, 1994 issue of USA Today. That article refers to (800) GOLF-TIP as the “USA TODAY/PGA OF AMERICA HOT LINE”. I’d like to see the printed version of this, but a link to a text-only PDF version of the USA Today piece, found on ProQuest, is here."

EVERYBODY called this phone number. You'd talk about it at school, call it when hanging out with friends, and if you were bored and alone you'd call it from a payphone.

And, night or day, there was the voice: "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10..."

And this wasn't just known in my hometown. (See the section "Mentions found so far" in the old post for a great big list of places around the web where people talk about having called it from around North America.)

A common theme among many mentions: payphones. I've been looking and found a bunch of conversations where people talked about calling it from multiple phones and leaving them all off the hook. I remember kind of doing something similar... Don't really remember if I left them off the hook but I remember being in the mall and calling the number.

Unanswered Questions:

• Who's behind this?
• Why did they pay all that money for all of those toll-free calls?
• What was it for?

And for me, possibly the biggest question: why were we all so fascinated in the first place? Why did we keep calling it?

Recent Media

I'd originally posted about this not expecting anyone to care, just hoping someone out there would know something. However, the opposite was true: nobody knew anything, but an unexpected number of people became interested.

Barely Sociable did a video:

https://youtu.be/_28b0P_6VvY

Someone made a (mostly pointless) website:

https://1800golftip.com/

A recent(ish) article: https://theghostinmymachine.com/2020/01/06/what-happened-to-1-800-golf-tip-strange-history-of-canada-weirdest-toll-free-phone-number-1-800-465-3847-billboard

And more.

Okay. So it's clickbaity (which is partially why I regret having brought it up). But let's get into what the heck was going on with it.

THIS IS YOUR SECOND AND FINAL WARNING: I'm going to spell out a bunch of things from here that each, in turn, make this mystery pretty boring. SPOILER ALERT.

The Billboard

There have been a lot of bizarre misunderstandings about that billboard, so let me clear a few things up about it. Note: this section is incredibly boring if you don't care about the billboard (since the billboard does not, in fact, matter in the slightest) so feel free to skip ahead. It's just some fact-checking stuff since so many ask about it.

Back in 1994 the billboard was across the street from the Lincoln Theater. This was a movie theater (I think it was a Famous Players?) that was its own building on the lot separate from the Lincoln Mall. The only sign on the building other than the movie listings was a bright sign on the side that said "Bijou Arcade", so a lot of people would call it the "Bijou Theater".

And it's gone now. There's a Wendy's/Tim Hortons there now.

Here's the picture of the billboard again (obviously the ad's been replaced): https://goo.gl/maps/qncxtu1bBNmaLLb4A

Not that the billboard matters but wow, do I ever get a lot of questions about it.

This wasn't the only ad either (see above for a few print references, and who knows how many other billboards might have been out there) so, while it served as my personal entry here, it wasn't the sole rabbit hole for this mystery. I'll return to this topic later but hopefully that clears a few things up.

The leading theory: billboard ads were cheap in my town in the mid-90s. It was purchased (well, "rented") and just ended up staying up for a lot longer than originally intended while the billboard company waited for someone else to rent the spot. This was pretty common back in the mid-90s - low demand for this kind of thing back then in my town.

Breakdown - The Two Components Of The Recording

The Voice

People go on about this voice. "Why was it so weird and creepy?"

It's just a technician whose job it isn't to record something for public consumption. He has a pretty regular "fine I'll just record myself counting to 10" voice here.

And if you've got a problem with his accent then you're just racist. (kidding!!)

The "Siren"

This is exactly the sound that would play if you left a phone off the hook for too long in the 90s. Again, see the Bell Telephone references and this article here.

Debunking Theories

Before I dive into the answer here, I should start by getting into the things people frequently send me via email etc as "the mind-blowing answer to the mystery".

All of the following are incorrect:

• It's a number station - No, that doesn't work. Number stations exist over radio airwaves so that the people who need to hear them cannot be detected as listening in the first place. If you call an 800 number, there's a record. It defeats the purpose.
• They're gathering phone numbers - Why would you want to gather a big collection of completely random phone numbers not only of residential lines but of payphones, with no way to identify the callers or their demographic? Phonebooks exist.
• It's a "social experiment" - In theory a marketing company could have decided to create a big enigma for people to pursue (and, in defense of this idea, Red Dog Beer) did have a bizarrely mysterious launch right around then too where they plastered billboards with the logo and no text before they finally got around to their main marketing rollout), but I've never found a record of companies in the mid-90s tossing money at "social experiments" with no direct payoff. The only people who do "social experiments" are people who want to create modern clickbait material, or huge dot-com social media companies (which didn't exist yet). Really wasn't done back then, and there was nothing to "click" back then either considering the Internet hadn't seen any adoption outside of academia at that point.
• Congrats you're all MK-ULTRA'd now - Ha hah yes you're very clever this is the first millionth time I've heard this. There's been no successful attempt at inducing compulsive behaviors through a simple audio signal. It takes a few more steps than that. Our world would be even worse off than it is now if it was this easy to create compulsions, regardless of who possessed that tech.
• It was an alien ghost sasquatch - Well I can't disprove it.

So Then Who... or WHAT... Created The 800 Number???

The PGA did it.

Accidentally.

Well, on purpose, but then accidentally.

According to this writeup (which has a few errors but is still good) reporting on an ad for the number in USA TODAY, the line originally had tips from “nearly 100 PGA members”. However, it was only available for the weekend of December 3 and 4, 1994.

A PGA tour of some sort did blow through this area that year. In the 90s this whole region was being heavily sold as a golf mecca of sorts... which is a bit of a reach but hey, the region was trying to get commuters into moving here from Toronto and Hamilton.

So it was "golf every afternoon" in ads everywhere, and made sense for the PGA to toss a billboard or two up in the area for their line even if it was only going to be valid for a little bit. Like I said, billboards were cheap.

So, what happens when a 1-800 number stops being used by a company that owned it?

There are lots of potentials, but back then there's a good chance that it flips to the test message on the CO Switch. The test message sounds a lot like the recording above. One techie user even gave me this phone number that I could call to hear a modern version: (229) 430-0002

If you call it today (which I think is fine to do??) you can hear... well... sounds like the same guy.

Someone did a YouTube video recently if you'd rather not call it yourself:

https://youtu.be/va_m1WOTZwM

So That Recording Was...

... a placeholder test message from the phone company very similar to the ones they use today, likely recorded by the same person from the sounds of it. And, when the trunk timed out, it played the "number unobtainable tone" (aka the "siren"). This happened because the 800 number was only supposed to be active for a few days.

And The People Responsible Paying For All Those Toll Calls Were...

... the phone company itself. I doubt they charged themselves anything. Which is why it was up in that state for so long.

And there were so many ads for it because...

... the PGA had big ad budgets and could splurge on something that was only going to be active for a short while. Most people called it after it was NO LONGER ACTIVE, thus getting the test message and trunk timeout audio.

And people called it so often because...

... we didn't have the Internet yet and that's how goddamned bored we were all the time.

That's it.

That's the mystery.

I did warn you.

More Stuff

My Sources - At least most of them. I've lost links, references, etc over the years but... it's what I've got.

Evan Doorbell tapes. If you're into telephony, and especially telephone history, this is a trip. Honestly loved this website so much.

Homestarrunner.net - it's dot com!

~~~

Relevant comment:

"I work in telecom and hadn't heard of this story, but it's cracking me up that so many people thought it was mysterious."

OOP responds:

"Damn where were you 4 years ago lol... yeah it's a fascinating study of how enigma works I guess."

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I AM NOT OP. I did not solve this mystery. This is a repost sub!