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Phone Call From The Dead

I used to get something like that happen, I'm fairly sure in my case it was some sort of sleep disturbance and the phone wasn;t actually ringing... it always stopped as soon as I became consciously aware of it.

Still scares the living heck out of me to wonder what I would have heard if I'd answered it. :shock:
 
OneWingedBird said:
... I'm fairly sure in my case it was some sort of sleep disturbance and the phone wasn;t actually ringing...

ive had that a lot especially when im super tired ... on the other hand exactly 5.00.00 in the ayem may have been an alarm call from some service or other ...
 
Something like this happened to a friend of mine. It's actually quite a long story, but I'll stick to the relevant part (for brevity's sake).

He ended up in what he thinks was a haunted hotel room when he was backpacking round the Ukraine. Among lots of other weird stuff happening was that he got a phone call from a Ukraine landline on his mobile phone in the dead of night, even though he hadn't given his number out to anyone in Ukraine. When he answered, there was no one on the other end
 
At my dad's funeral wake, the phone rang repeatedly, with no-one there when answered. On dialling 1471 we could only get the usual "we do not have the callers number". The calls only stopped after the last guest left.My dad was a telephone engineer. Some years later I found a message on the answerphone that sounded very much like both my departed parents, mixed in with static, asking where Jane (my wife) was. This freaked me out a lot and I must admit to making a recording of it before I wiped it.
 
Sounds like a classic case. People use phones to contact each other while alive, and I suppose old habits die hard.
 
The link in post #1 is long dead. Here's the complete text, salvaged from the Wayback Machine ...

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Phone call from the dead

In 1991, my mother was killed in a tragic auto- pedestrian accident. Funeral arrangements were made, family gathered in the city where she lived, and we all returned home and carried on.

About a month later, I was sleeping at home when the phone rang, about 3:00 a.m. I had to get up to answer it, as the only phone was in the kitchen. There was a lot of static on the line, and then, amazingly, I heard my mother's voice! She had a very distinctive voice - she sounded like Lucille Ball, so I could tell who it was.

I was so shocked, I couldn't make sense - I remember that I said, "Mother, where are you?" All kinds of things were going through my mind - was there maybe a case of mistaken identity? Was she not dead, but maybe hurt, and couldn't remember anything?

She seemed very confused and frustrated - wouldn't answer any of my questions, but kept saying she "Had to find June". She had lived on a road called Lake June Road, so I thought that was what she meant. I was frantically trying to get her to say where she was, telling her I wanted to help her. But after mentioning "June" a couple of more times, there was more static, and the line went dead.

I sat in the dark for a long time, wondering what to do, and what had happened, and if possibly I had imagined the whole thing. Finally, it was time to go to work, and I got ready and went.

When I got to work, my dear friend and co-worker was a little late that morning. When she arrived, she told me she had had a really bad night. I said, "Tell me about it - you and me both!"

Then my face went white and my hair stood on end, as she told me, "Yeah - last night about 3:00, my Aunt June passed away."

--------------------------------------------

SALVAGED FROM: https://web.archive.org/web/20011109081256/http://forteantimes.com:80/happened/phonecall.shtml
 
I left home when I was 22 but, for many years, I spoke with my mother most Sunday afternoons by phone. She's been gone 11 years now and I still find myself wishing the phone would ring some Sunday after lunch. :)
 
I left home when I was 22 but, for many years, I spoke with my mother most Sunday afternoons by phone. She's been gone 11 years now and I still find myself wishing the phone would ring some Sunday after lunch. :)
I would phone my parents every Wednesday morning without fail. Now both gone I still occasionally wake on a Wednesday morning and, before I'm fully awake, think must remember to phone and then, of course, I remember them .
 
Nine years ago, when I was twenty, I received a very strange call that bothers me to this day.

My gran had passed away a few months previously and one afternoon, feeling depressed. I lay on my back on the living room floor just thinking about her. I was so lost in thought that when the phone rang it seemed really loud and it startled me.

When I answered the phone, I was spooked further by the sound of crackley static. However, when I heard my gran's voice, I froze. I remember my heart started thudding loudly and I felt very, very panicked.

My sense of panic heightened when the caller told me that she had a letter for my gran, and she wanted to know if I wanted it forwarded to me. I was confused because the voice coming clearly through the static was my gran's voice. The caller seemed to pick up on my sense of panic and was nervous and hesitant. She told me that the letter was about life insurance.

This was too much. I told them that I did not want the letter and I put the phone down on them.

Then I sat on the stairs and stared at the phone in a state of shock. I hadn’t even asked who the caller was.

The obvious identity of the caller would be the occupants of the house my gran had left behind her. They may have been receiving mail shots addressed to my gran. However we did not know the new house owners and they did not have my mom's number (why would they?). I checked this with my mom some time later, although I've never told her about the call.

I still feel upset by this memory. If I hadn't already been spooked before I answered the phone, I could have had a reasonable conversation. I do wonder though that if I hadn't been lost in thought thinking about my gran, whether that phone call would ever have happened at all.
Reading through old threads and I found this post, which was written by me in a previous incarnation, before I re-registered that time we were all locked out!

I was 29 when I wrote it, and I'm 46 now, but this is exactly how I still remember it all unfolding. Heightened sense of awareness, almost surreal feeling as I answered the phone, and the absolute panic when I heard what I thought was my gran's voice. Blimey.
 
What are the chances...as if by magic a guest post on Michael Prescott's blog in the last few days is from a reader who had classic haunted house/sounds of movement in his late mother's room in the months after her death, culminating after several vague and static-y attempts in an apparent vocal communication through the intercom.

Here are the relevant passages
"The intercom that we used to listen for my mother at night was still turned on, although it had remained silent since mom’s passing. I don’t know why I kept it turned on. I guess the act of turning off that intercom had a symbolic “finality” to it that I could not yet accept. It was a good thing that I left it on. As I lay in my bed, right next to the little intercom on my nightstand, it crackled to life. Here is the notation I made in my journal right after it happened:

7/5 I hear a voice on the intercom. It sounds like a woman, but crackly, distorted. It tries one word and “crackles” off.​

I jumped out of bed and searched for Cathy. I told her of the incredible thing that just happened. I promptly began to try and figure out how this could be. My skepticism got the best of me and I managed to explain it away. I thought that a “stray” radio signal might have been picked up and “broadcast” over the intercom, although this had never happened in the year and a half that we had used it. I thought it would surely not happen again. But it did! Here is what I wrote the next morning.

7/6 Morning. The voice again! About 6 AM the intercom crackles, then one word. Unintelligible. It sounds more like a woman’s voice now!​

Okay. Two days in a row. The sound that I called a “crackle” was the sound of the intercom suddenly projecting a loud static-like interference. It erupted from dead silence to emit a short stream of static. Within the static was a woman’s voice, sounding like she was attempting to talk through a bad telephone connection. All she could get out was one word, and then the “connection” appeared to be lost. I could not make out the word.


(............) The intercom, however, remained silent. It was as if my mother had given up trying to initiate a voice communication with us.

Then it happened. On July 27. We had gone to sleep for the night. It was about 10:30 PM when the noise started to come from that room. There were loud knocks and bangs. Once again it sounded exactly like my mother was struggling with her walker, banging into the door and the doorway, trying to get out of that room and get to the bathroom. I listened intently. This may sound strange, but like several times before, I decided to ignore the noise and get some sleep. I rolled over on my side and said to my wife, “We have a lot of activity happening down there tonight.” “We sure do,” Cathy responded. Immediately after we spoke, the intercom began to hiss and crackle. It got louder and, clearly, within the static came a woman’s voice, once again only one word, but this time it was “Cathy!” It was clear! We both heard it clearly!

Chills ran up and down my spine. “Did you hear that?” I almost shouted to my wife. “I did, and I’ve got goosebumps all over my whole body,” she responded. So did I. The voice was clear, and it said my wife’s name. My mom, when she was alive, would regularly call Cathy on that intercom. It seemed like she had managed to do it again. It seemed like she had answered the request that I made to her in the hospital. She had come back to let us know that she still survived. Just like in life, she never quit trying. She tried until we both heard her voice and could verify to each other that she was there."

I commented on the similarity between this account and phone calls from the dead stories.. which in turned prompted Prescott to post a link to a PCFTD account by the author Dean Koontz which you can find here:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201309/phone-call-the-dead
 
Intriguingly the original Twilight Zone did two stories about phone calls from the dead, the first and most famous - Long Distance Call (1961) - predates, i seem to recall, any publicised account of such phone calls in real life. It involves a young boy getting messages over his toy phone from his domineering dead grandmother.

The second and less familiar episode - Night Call (1964) - is both far more accomplished as a tv drama (its directed by Jaques "Cat People/Curse of The Demon" Tourneur) and is far more directly akin to the accounts of PCFTD that people report here and elsewhere, with its static and struggling one word messages, suggesting the writer was aware of such cases...which seems highly likely as it's Richard Matheson who wrote What Dreams May Come.

You can watch the full episode here.
 
Intriguingly the original Twilight Zone did two stories about phone calls from the dead, the first and most famous - Long Distance Call (1961) - predates, i seem to recall, any publicised account of such phone calls in real life. It involves a young boy getting messages over his toy phone from his domineering dead grandmother.

The second and less familiar episode - Night Call (1964) - is both far more accomplished as a tv drama (its directed by Jaques "Cat People/Curse of The Demon" Tourneur) and is far more directly akin to the accounts of PCFTD that people report here and elsewhere, with its static and struggling one word messages, suggesting the writer was aware of such cases...which seems highly likely as it's Richard Matheson who wrote What Dreams May Come.

You can watch the full episode here.
Cool, thanks for sharing and I'll be watching that later.
 
Intriguingly the original Twilight Zone did two stories about phone calls from the dead, the first and most famous - Long Distance Call (1961) - predates, i seem to recall, any publicised account of such phone calls in real life. It involves a young boy getting messages over his toy phone from his domineering dead grandmother.

The second and less familiar episode - Night Call (1964) - is both far more accomplished as a tv drama (its directed by Jaques "Cat People/Curse of The Demon" Tourneur) and is far more directly akin to the accounts of PCFTD that people report here and elsewhere, with its static and struggling one word messages, suggesting the writer was aware of such cases...which seems highly likely as it's Richard Matheson who wrote What Dreams May Come.

You can watch the full episode here.
Thanks, gattino! I look forward to watching it.
 
I love this topic and I'm glad it has been bumped. There is something I find creepy about telephones anyway - especially if the call is unexpected or late night etc.

I think it's the sense of anticipation, not being sure what might be lurking at the end. In a similar vein, my local cattery used to offer webcam rooms for overprotective cat parents to check their little bundles of joy were sticking to their usual sleep/eat/sleep routine. You could log in, and move the camera around. At night I found it especially creepy - much more than I ever would have expected. The idea that the camera might pan round and find something unexpected. I think it's the same idea with phones. Anything could be on the end of the line, and you have no control over it - but worse you're in a dialogue with it. Brrrr!
 
This may or may not fit here but...an inability to use tech, crackles and static on the line, seems to be a marker of dreaming. Even when lucid dreaming (dreams where I know I am dreaming) telephones and lights don't work properly.

Last night I had the first ever dream where my mobile seemed to work during the dream, but had insufficient charge to connect the call (I'd got around the 'not being able to use/read the buttons by using voice control, which I thought was pretty clever of me).

So is there some 'liminal zone' perhaps shared with dreams, that the recently dead occupy and mean that technology just won't co operate for them?
 
So is there some 'liminal zone' perhaps shared with dreams, that the recently dead occupy and mean that technology just won't co operate for them?

We've heard how phones generally don't work in dreams. I've had a dream where a dead person successfully rang me though so I dunno!
 
We've heard how phones generally don't work in dreams. I've had a dream where a dead person successfully rang me though so I dunno!

Well there goes that theory! :rollingw::rollingw:
 
What an intriguing subject. If I ever received ''the call'', I have no idea what I would think of it. Whilst not one to be scared easily by such things, I find the whole idea a little unsettling though I can't really tell you why.
 
What an intriguing subject. If I ever received ''the call'', I have no idea what I would think of it. Whilst not one to be scared easily by such things, I find the whole idea a little unsettling though I can't really tell you why.

Yup, people either slam the phone down or don't realise till afterwards who'd apparently called.

I'd talk their ear'ole off with about a hundred questions and listen carefully to the answers.
 
Well there goes that theory! :rollingw::rollingw:

Thinking about it though, the dead person in the dream called ME, I just picked up and chatted. So as I was responding rather than 'working' the phone it still holds.

(It was weeks after a very much loved person died and went thusly:

Phone rings - I pick up. I immediately recognise Deceased's voice.

Deceased: Scargy! Scargy! Can I come back?

Me: Yes! Of COURSE you can! Come NOW!)
 
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