Editor’s Note: The following piece is a fictional narrative created for entertainment purposes. While set in Rapid City, the radio station KBYE (96.9 FM), its quoted figures, and the events described in this article are works of fiction and do not reflect actual historical events, real FCC filings, or verified public records.

Ask most people in Rapid City about KBYE and you’ll get a blank stare. Ask the right person, though, and you’ll get a story, and depending who you ask, not quite the same one twice.

“96.9, right there on the dial between two stations everybody still listens to,” said longtime downtown resident Carol Iversen, 71. “It wasn’t on for long. Year, maybe less. But if you were around back then, you remember it. Mostly you remember how it ended.”

According to old FCC filings and a handful of yellowed clippings tucked away at the Rapid City Public Library, KBYE signed on sometime in early 1977, broadcasting out of a small studio downtown. Records on exactly who owned it are thin, and city business licenses from the era don’t paint a complete picture. What is clear is that the station didn’t last the year, and that whatever happened on its final night has never been fully explained.

“It just wasn’t there one day,” said Walt Pruitt, who worked at a competing station downtown at the time and asked that his former employer not be named. “No announcement, no sign-off that anybody heard, not officially anyway. You’d turn the dial and there’d just be static where a station used to be.”

Officially, the story is a fire that took out the station that night. Unofficially, Pruitt says almost nobody who worked downtown that year actually believes that’s the whole of it. “Funny thing is, everybody remembers the flames. Ask around, plenty of folks will tell you they saw the sky lit up downtown that night. What nobody can tell you is which building burned. There’s no fire department record of it, no insurance claim anybody’s ever tracked down, nothing standing today with so much as a scorch mark to show for it. Whatever burned, it burned without leaving anything behind. My own cousin swore up and down she picked up voices on 96.9 driving through downtown that same week, days after the thing was supposed to be off the air for good.”

Library records list only one staff name tied to the station with any consistency: a late-shift announcer by the name of Alan, no last name given in any surviving document the Post could locate. A single classified ad from October of 1977, buried in the archives, lists a part-time booth engineer position, “immediate need, ask for Alan,” and then nothing further. Whether that ad was ever filled, or what became of whoever answered it, isn’t recorded anywhere the Post could find.

“I always figured somebody local would eventually write the real story down,” Iversen said. “Nobody ever has. Every year around this time somebody brings it up again, and every year it just kind of trails off, same as the station did.”

Efforts to reach any former KBYE staff for this story were unsuccessful. The FCC has no formal record of the station’s license being revoked or surrendered, only that its call sign eventually lapsed from inactivity, standard procedure for a station that simply stops transmitting and never explains why. Whether that’s the ordinary bureaucratic footnote it appears to be, or just the only part of this story anyone was ever willing to put in writing, is harder to say.

Whatever happened to KBYE, downtown Rapid City has moved on in the decades since, new businesses, new buildings, new call signs on the dial. But every so often, someone digging through an old filing cabinet or a box of donated documents turns up another scrap of the station that vanished.

Lately, those scraps have been turning up in one place. A fan-run archive of Rapid City radio history, rapidcityradioarchive.com, has started collecting what’s left of KBYE’s final broadcast, and whoever runs it claims there’s more coming. According to the site, the last of it surfaces downtown on Friday, October 30, sometime after 6pm. Anyone hoping to be there when it does can find out where to start at rapidcitycreepycrawl.com. What anyone finds there, and whether it finally explains what happened to Alan, is anybody’s guess.

The Rapid City Post occasionally publishes original fiction, speculative stories, and local folklore alongside standard news coverage. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or actual historical organizations named within this feature is purely coincidental.