Phone Calls from the Dead isn’t my title, but that of a 1979 book by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless.  It’s one of the scariest books I’ve ever read, outlining rather dryly the specifics of a phenomenon that may been in existence since the invention of the telephone.  This involves impossible phone calls received from or made to friends or relatives who subsequently prove to be (or are remembered to be) dead.  The book was written at a point where people still could remember operator-assisted calls (the operators assisting might prove to be real or unreal), but in checking out internet accounts, I see that there's been some adaptation to newer technology - voice mail, caller i.d., and cell phones.  I already find cell phones disturbing, and this creeps me out even more.

My general attitude towards ghosts is as there is almost nothing they can do to you, there isn’t much to fear.  So for the life of me, I cannot explain why the idea of  peculiar, staticky calls coming in by phone freaks me out, but it does. I hope to experience more ghosts in my lifetime, and my dearest wish is to see one, but I never ever want to get one of these phone calls. However, I do love to hear about them.  I met Carol E. in the course of researching another ghost story in the 90s.  As an extra treat, I got to hear the following account:

Carol E.’s friend Margaret told her a story a number of years ago that Carol would have believed came from the mouth of a lunatic if it had been anyone else but Margaret.  Margaret had figured this would be Carol’s reaction, and had held back on telling Carol for several months, until she had gotten a grip on herself.  They were spending the weekend together after some trying times, and ended up sharing various confidences.  Margaret’s teenaged daughter had been killed instantly in a winter car accident in Waterford, Vermont not long before, and Margaret was devastated by the tragedy.  What had made it even more difficult to bear was a series of horribly upsetting phone calls that Margaret received at her house in the days immediately following the girl’s death. 

Margaret said the telephone was otherwise working normally at the time, as they were getting regular calls, but they kept getting these strange ones, which by their very strangeness were frightening.  She would answer a ring only to hear what sounded like long-distance static, and then a garbled voice, deep, trying to speak but making no sense.  The voice would change in tone level, up and down, similar to the effect of a record being played at the wrong speed, but if it was saying words, nothing could be understood.  Margaret was sure it was connected to her daughter’s recent death, but how or why was a black hole of mystery she didn’t want to look inside.

The whole aspect of the calls (which kept coming in several times a day) was so unnervingly alien that Margaret told her son to unplug the phone and put it in the closet.  Unfortunately, the phone continued to ring several times, even when disconnected and shut away.  Margaret told Carol it had only stopped when she had taken herself in hand and told herself she had to accept that her daughter was gone, and move on.  She told her story in front of her adult son, who agreed that he’d been there when the phone calls had come through.  But Margaret didn’t need to work to convince Carol.

As soon as Carol heard Margaret’s description of the odd garbled voice, all the hairs on her arms and neck stood up straight, because it was much too eerily familiar.  Carol had never told Margaret this before, and in fact, had never discussed it with anyone because it frightened her so much, but she had had an almost identical experience when her mother had died in Island Pond a few years before that.  Her mother had been ailing, but her death was sudden and took the family somewhat by surprise.  Carol had gone to her father’s house to stay with him that day, after she had stayed a while at the funeral home with her mother’s body.  Her father, distracted, had not notified the relatives yet, and told the family someone had better call Carol’s aunt in Maine to let her know.  Carol went to the phone and picked it up, but to this day, the shock of what ensued blocked out her memory of exactly how it began. 

She doesn’t know if she got through dialing her aunt, or if the number was ringing, but suddenly what came on the line was a sound of distant static.  Then there was a voice, only vaguely human-sounding, because it was fluctuating in tone, going down to bass and up again, speaking gibberish.  Carol stood there frozen, with the receiver to her ear, feeling she was hearing something she shouldn’t be, and not wanting to hear it.  She finally managed to hang up, and then dialed again, terrified she’d reach the same voice, but knowing she had to go through with the call, and feeling unable to tell any of the already upset family around her what she had just heard.  To her extreme relief, this time she reached her aunt.  But she never forgot the incident, and never told anyone, either, until Margaret started talking about her own awful phone calls.

A few years before, I had heard another acquaintance describe a phone call his two sisters had received while staying at their family’s old home in Cabot, Vermont.  They had both picked up extensions when the phone rang, and had heard their grandmother’s unmistakable Scottish voice asking for their mother.  That was the extent of the conversation.  The problem was the grandmother had been dead for some time.  But both women swore to their brother that they were certain it had been her voice, precisely pronouncing their mother's name, accent and all. 

In my collecting of ghost stories, I have never been terribly interested in so-called “crisis apparitions,” because they seem to be of such a different nature than true “ghosts.”  Typically they involve family members  or friends being contacted briefly, usually only once, by a loved one who has recently died, although the contact may not know that and may think the apparition is the real person at first.  Thus, they seem to be a sort of farewell on the part of the departing personality rather than a haunting where the personality lingers on in some abbreviated form, with less success at communication.  The crisis apparition is usually comforting to the person who sees or hears the apparition. 

A phone call from the dead  seems superficially similar, but it can deteriorate quickly into something that feels more alarming. Perhaps this is because it is going through a physical object and is less easy to rationalize away, especially if other people hear the call, or at least the ring and its after-effects on the recipient.  And although these phone calls sound really bizarre, they all seem to follow a pattern, however weird.  (For more discussion of this phenomenon, barring getting that scary book, you could go here.)

The Island Pond/Waterford/Cabot incidents are typical, in that they weren’t particularly successful if they were attempts at contact.  There seems to be no good consensus on whether such calls are made by who you’d like them to be from, or by other  - um – entities taking advantage of an open line created by emotional stress, or by something else entirely – psychokinesis by the recipients themselves, for example.  But this last gets so convoluted in terms of the cause and effect scenario that it’s hardly worth the headache to consider.  It’s the idea that they might be made by entities just hanging around waiting for someone else to put the quarters in that gives me the creeps.  It’s bad enough having to avoid telemarketers.  Do we really want the other dimension to have automatic dialing? 

Whatever the reason may be behind these phone calls from whomever, I view them as a useful reminder that we don’t know what the hell is really going on in whatever Twilight Zone this existence is.