Widower Is Stunned to Tears When Reporter Plays a Recovered Recording of His Late Wife’s Voice

A British widower named Stan Beaton in the West Yorkshire town of Mirfield was stunned when a BBC Leeds reporter informed him that the voicemail recording with his late wife Ruby’s voice, thought to be lost forever, had been recovered by a team of 10 people at Virgin Telecom. Beaton was moved to tears once he heard the actual recording, stating “They’ve made this old age pensioner extremely happy.” Ruby had passed away in 2003 from cancer and he had been listening to the recording on and of through December 2014, when it suddenly disappeared from the system without any warning.

I’ve always resisted changing companies because whenever I mentioned that my wife’s voice was our voicemail message and would it be retained and each company said no, so that’s why I never changed. Sadly it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry. In the early days [I listened to it] quite often. Basically it came to the point when if I felt low then I would listen to it. In December I learned that it had disappeared. I just could not tell people how it affected me at that time. It really did devastate me.