Katie Couric's late husband's phone is making 911 calls at 2 a.m.

The mystery

Every Tuesday at 2 a.m., a home phone registered to Jay Monahan — Katie Couric's husband, who died of colon cancer in 1998 — was dialing 911. Each time, a patrol car was dispatched to Couric's Park Avenue apartment. At least ten such calls had come in over the preceding month, and the NYPD was investigating, according to police sources quoted by the New York Daily News in February 2013. Read the original report: NYPD probes 911 calls from Katie Couric's late hubby's line.

Couric herself told her daytime talk show's studio audience about the calls during a taping break. She said she had been woken by the mysterious dialing, then received the automatic callback from an emergency operator — and that on one Tuesday morning, the police had already come and gone by the time she got downstairs in her bathrobe to ask the doorman what was happening.

Why it rattled her

Most of the calls came when Couric was out of town — including stretches when nobody was home at all. She told the audience it had happened "three times the last three weeks," always at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and that it was especially disturbing because the line was Monahan's, kept in his name all these years. A friend told the Daily News there was nothing sentimental in that: "It's simply their home phone. There's no special reason she never changed it out of his name."

Worried, Couric called NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly directly — "one of the perks of being well-known," she joked to the audience — and Kelly had a colleague take up the investigation.

Swatting or spoofing?

Couric referred to the calls as a possible "SWAT" prank, in the style of the hoax emergency calls that had recently sent Los Angeles SWAT teams to the homes of Ashton Kutcher, Tom Cruise, and Charlie Sheen. Police were investigating whether someone was "spoofing" her line — hijacking the number to place the calls remotely. "The matter is under investigation," a police source said. "We're trying to determine if it's a malfunction or not."

The takeaway

A ghost in the machine, or a prankster with a phone trick: either way, the image is hard to shake — a dead man's landline, ringing 911 into the small hours, week after week, with no one on the other end.

Archive summary, February 2013, based on the New York Daily News' original reporting.