What Could Cause a Phone to Ring Once Every Night?

This is going to sound really off-the-wall, but: do you live in a gated community ( with a guard house, with entry keypad at the gate--one in which there's a system with which you can "ring in" a visitor from your phone?).

We lived in one a few years back and our phone began doing the one-ring thing at precisely 5:30 pm every weekday. It turned out -- after a couple of weeks of this-- that a new resident must have been mis-entering our access code rather than his own ( off by one digit) and then immediately entering the right number in order to get in.

A gate guard with some smarts --who happened to be in the management office the day I went there hoping to possibly find answers--remembered a resident who held up the line at the keypad every day at that time, and thought there was too much of a time coincidence to be a coincidence.

They ended up changing our access code to a totally different number and the one-ringers stopped.

May just have been a strange, isolated glitch for us, but you never know :)

If you have overhead cables, a tree branch might be rubbing against your telephone cable.

With some telephone systems you can dial *69 and it will call the last number that called you. If you do that you might be able to find out where the call is coming from.

Is your phone line hooked to your cable or Dish TV? Perhaps it rings when they are checking their equipment

Do you have the "do not call " feature, maybe it rings through, and then disconnects. Or you have a spirit sending a message?

Unless you live alone, it's probably meant for someone in your home.

Got enemies? Funny to think of but if you did, they could set it up to call you in the middle of the night. Some call it a "ping ring" like a sonar on a ship will send one ping to signal a ship but not a response.

You can often contact the phone company and they won't charge you for a number change. Or, if your phones have a ringer "on/off" then use that, and just turn it back on in the am. Good luck. There is nothing worse than being awaken by a phone.

PBP

Mine used to do that and the caller ID said "Line error" whatever that meant. It eventually stopped.

Change the channel if it's cordless, if this does not help change phones. Years ago I had the same problem, the phone company told me that they needed to readjust something on their lines and it never happened again. I think it was connected to my answering machine. Do you have one? Good luck:)

http://ask.metafilter.com/113663/Cordless-phone-mysteriously-rings
My guess is that your handset is at fault and is experiencing an interference issue. Have you had the very same handset during this 3-month period? Ask Verizon if they will loan you another phone for a week to see if the ring continues or not.