Lifestyle

Stan, 68, Kept His Late Wife’s Voice on Their Voicemail for Years. Then a Phone Line Upgrade Wiped It, Until the Company Got It Back

By Mike Harper · November 13, 2026

For years after Ruby Beaton died, her voice still answered the phone.

Her husband, Stan Beaton, of Mirfield in West Yorkshire, England, had kept the outgoing voicemail greeting she recorded on their line. When he felt low, he would listen to it. In early 2015, his story reached BBC News, and the moment it came back to him was caught on camera.

According to the Huddersfield Examiner, Ruby died of stomach cancer in May 2003, at age 63. The couple had been married for 20 years. Stan, a retired forklift truck driver, was 68 when the story aired.

He had worked to keep that greeting. The Independent, citing his interview with BBC Radio Leeds, reported that he never switched phone companies because each one told him the message would not carry over. The Examiner said he once tried to record it himself and ended up with blank tapes.

Then, in December 2014, an upgrade to his phone line by Virgin Media wiped it out. The Examiner reported that Stan had been assured the recording would survive the upgrade. He told BBC Radio Leeds he was devastated, according to The Independent, and also very angry.

His plea got the company’s attention. In the BBC footage, Stan is told that 10 people at Virgin Media had worked on recovering the greeting, and that they had found it. Asked whether he wanted to hear it, he agreed, though he admitted he was not sure how he would react.

“I’m staggered by that,” he said of the effort.

Then the recording played. Asked how it felt to hear his wife’s voice again, he managed a single word. “Marvellous.”

“It’s just a wonderful, wonderful sound that I thought was lost forever,” Stan said. He added, with a nod to how it might look, “thank you, Virgin Media.” He said the company had “made this old-age pensioner extremely happy.”

The Examiner reported that the company apologized for the deletion, offered to donate to Stan’s favorite charities and planned to send him a CD of the recording. Stan said he had a bottle of Glenfiddich set aside for the engineer who finally found it.

His story struck a nerve because so many families now keep a loved one’s voice in the same fragile place: a voicemail box run by a phone company.

A greeting or saved message is often stored by the carrier, not on your phone. Apple’s support guide for iPhone says voicemail messages are saved until you delete them, “or until your carrier erases them, if they’re not stored in iCloud.” It also warns that in some countries or regions deleted messages may be permanently erased by the carrier, and that messages may be lost if you change your SIM card.

The same Apple guide shows a Share button on each voicemail message, which lets an iPhone user send or save a copy outside the Phone app. Android phones and carrier voicemail systems vary, so it is worth asking your carrier or a family member how to save a copy on your device.

A few simple steps can help. Save important messages to your phone or computer, keep a backup copy somewhere else, and ask before switching carriers, changing plans or getting a line upgrade whether saved messages and greetings will be kept.

Stan got Ruby’s voice back because a company was willing to search for it. Most families will not get that chance, so the time to save a copy is now.

This article is for general information only. Stan Beaton’s story is from BBC News footage and reporting by the Huddersfield Examiner and The Independent; phone guidance is from Apple Support. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.