Shortly after midnight about three Sundays ago, a 52-year-old woman at home with her 14-year-old son heard her telephone ring. She was already in bed. She knew it had to be a wrong number. No one would call her that late.

She decided to let the answering machine pick up. She heard a voice she did not recognize on the other end of the wire making lewd suggestions. Frightened, she called the police. She said she wanted the incident documented.

The police came and wrote up a report on the incident. They attempted to comfort the woman and told her to call again if she needed further assistance.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “Too many things happen nowadays to take anything too lightly. And to get something like that at night when your mind is liable to wander anyway is probably one of the worse things in the world. All I could think about was he knows who I am and where I am and I don’t know a thing about him; who he is or what he might do.”

Her mind created the worst possible scenarios for days. She said anytime anyone came to her door, she wondered if it was the caller. She even started imagining that the caller was, in fact, someone she knew who was disguising his voice.

A few nights later, well before midnight, her phone rang. She answered and it was the voice that she would never forget. He asked for someone by name. She told him he had a wrong number. He politely apologized and hung up. She hasn’t heard the voice since.

“When he asked for somebody, I felt relieved,” she said. “Then, for a little while after he hung up, I started wondering was he trying to make me take down my guard, so I called the police again and told them what had happened. They came back out and talked to me a while. I feel pretty sure now that he was calling for the person he asked for. That’s been a while and it hasn’t happened anymore.”

In another incident, another woman received a phone call from her fiance’s ex-wife. When she answered the phone, she heard threats of bodily harm and profanity of every kind.

“I’ve never heard such blatant hate from anyone,” she said. “She doesn’t even know me and you should’ve heard the things she was saying to me. My fiance had been separated from her for more than a year before I met him.

“They had already filed for divorce. But if someone else had heard the things she said to me, they’d swear that I was the reason they broke up. I really felt sorry for her after I got over being angry. But I had to report it to the police because I wanted her to know that I would take some action.”

The police contacted the former wife and informed her that she had been placed on trespass warning and was not to make any more calls to her number or come to her house.

Personal threats made by telephone are against the law, said Major Barbara Walters of the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office. “We pursue them as if they were made in person because, no matter how they’re made, it is against the law to threaten someone.”

Walters said with the proliferation of cellphones, authorities are seeing a rise in the number of telephone crimes with which they have to contend.

“Cellphones have just made it so much easier to be in touch with someone or to get in touch with someone,” she said. “And most cellphones have voice mail, so people are more prone to leave their messages or threats on the voice mail.

“We have to take them seriously. We can’t assume that they’re harmless.”

Walters said she has found that threatening calls are made by nearly every age group from adolescents through adults. And more often than not, they have a common theme.

“They’re usually motivated by jealousy,” Walters said. “It’s usually about an ex-girlfriend, ex-boyfriend, ex-husband, ex-wife. It’s always some frustrated emotion. But, I have to say again, it’s against the law to make threats toward someone.”

Making personal threatening calls is classified as a misdemeanor, Walters said. But making bomb threats is a Class E felony and can be punishable by up to 10 years in prison on the first offense, according Bamberg County Chief Magistrate R.C. Threatt in the bond hearing of a 17-year-old charged with making bomb threats last month.

Walters said she has personally noticed that the threatening calls come in waves. She said for a while there will be rash of them and then they tone down only to pick up again later. She said she has found that obscene phone calls follow the same trend. But she pointed out a difference between threatening calls and obscene calls.

“Probably 70-90 percent of obscene callers don’t know who they’re talking to. And they probably don’t care,” Walters said. “And many of them are copycat callers. Whereas callers who make threats usually know their victims. They want their victims to have some reaction. It’s personal with them.”

If you receive an obscene call and you do not recognize the caller, Walters’ advice is to hang up. She said the caller will probably move on to someone else. But if you receive a threatening call, contact the authorities, she said.

“We feel that they should be dealt with accordingly. That’s an invasion of privacy and no one should be exposed to that kind of behavior. We treat them all as threats, even the obscene calls,” Walters said. “And we take them all seriously and will prosecute to the extent that the law allows.”

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