PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD
Parapsychologist D Scott Rogo examined ‘phone calls from the dead’ in his 1979 book of the same name, but THEO PAIJMANS discovers that calls from beyond the grave are as old as the technology itself – and continue in the age of the mobile phone.
Parapsychologist D Scott Rogo collected cases of apparent ‘phone calls from the dead’ in his 1979 book of the same name, but THEO PAIJMANS discovers that stories of telephone messages from beyond the grave are as old as the technology itself – and they show no sign of stopping in the age of the mobile phone.
One evening in May 1943, Mary Cahill was comfortably lounging in an easy chair in her apartment in Endicott, New York. She was listening to her favourite radio show when the phone rang. The operator told her she had an incoming long-distance call and connected her. “In a confusion of sound I heard what seemed to be several persons talking all at once. Then I nearly fainted as I heard the breathless voice of my little girl, Peggy, 12,” she recalled a decade later. Mary heard a “whirring as of many winds” and a “continued mumbling of voices”, but among these sounds was the voice of her daughter: “I talked to Peggy, but it was like talking through a storm. Then silence fell.” After a while, Peggy spoke again: “Her voice called to me through a rushing as of great winds. The winds rose to a roar and then died in sudden silence.” But Mrs Cahill’s daughter had passed away six months before, and when the operator was asked to trace the call, she could find no record of it. 1 Mary had just received a phone call from the dead.
ENTER THE PIONEERING PARAPSYCHOLOGIST
Unique as Mary’s story sounds, there are many more just like hers. Cases like these were deeply buried in the paranormal undergrowth until American parapsychologist D Scott Rogo began to study them systematically in the 1970s. “Today it’s socially acceptable to have certain psychic experiences, precognitive dreams, live in haunted houses or know someone who does,” Rogo said in a rare newspaper interview in 1979. “But some psychic experiences are too bizarre and rare to be chic. They have a social stigma. If a newspaper reporter got a call from someone who said he just spoke to his dead father, that report would be put in the looneytune file.”
Rogo had learned of the phenomenon by coincidence in 1967, when a medium told him of a friend of hers who had received a phone call from her dead son. At first, he didn’t take such stories seriously. “As a parapsychologist, I hear all sorts of tales,” he explained. “However, I soon had cause to change my opinion, when, over the next 10 years, I started coming across more and more of these reports – and found myself totally incapable of explaining them away.”
Had it not been for Rogo’s efforts this strange phenomenon might have forever lingered unnoticed at the farthest fringes of parapsychology. That changed with the publication of Phone Calls from the Dead, co-written with fellow parapsychologist Raymond Bayless. When it rolled off the press in 1979, Rogo was 29 years old and it was already his 16th book on psychic phenomena. Parapsychological reviewers were critical: the authors had not used empirical research methods to collect and analyse their data, they said.5 The media, on the other hand, loved it: “The accounts related in the ‘Phone Calls’ chapter are eerie and mind-boggling. For those having never experienced such a phone call, it is difficult to imagine the stories told by Rogo and Bayless as being true. But, the authors insist that they are, and their documentation is very firm,” one reviewer concluded. 6
Phone Calls from the Dead contains various accounts like Mary Cahill’s, and Rogo checked her story too. He learned that a parapsychologist had received a letter from her several years previously. Her retelling of her experience in this letter was identical to the published report, so Rogo and Bayless concluded that her story was not dramatised or fictionalised. 7
The cases Rogo and Bayless present were gathered through a nationwide survey they started among their peers. The duo discovered something else in the strange accounts they collected: not all the phone calls from the dead followed the same protocol. Despite the fact that the cases represented a wide variety of phenomena, all the reports could be filed in one of two categories. There’s the brief phone call, an interaction often interrupted before the line goes dead or the conversation is otherwise terminated. This was labelled the ‘type 1 call’. In other cases, the phone voice carries on a lengthy conversation with the recipient. “It seems almost as though these communications were well prepared and planned out in advance of the actual call,” they note. They labelled this the ‘type 2’ call. 8
THE DEAD DON’T DEVIATE
What kind of person was D Scott Rogo? In May, 2019, British parapsychologist Callum E Cooper went to San Francisco to visit Rogo’s archive, which is housed in the Californian Institute for Integral Studies. It was 40 years since Phone Calls from the Dead was published,
“I TALKED TO PEGGY, BUT IT WAS LIKE TALKING THROUGH A STORM. THEN SILENCE FELL.”
and sadly Rogo had passed away in 1990. “He kept meticulous records of everything. Even the correspondence he had with various people,” Cooper told me. “Rogo was a walking encyclopaedia of parapsychology. He was very thorough, also in his responses. Wherever he found a negative review of the research they had done or of his book, he replied point by point. He was very precise in explaining things fully as far as he could. Even when sometimes he knew he was in the wrong and he’d try and get himself out of it. Regarding the study of the telephone anomalies, he was extremely thorough. One of the most critical reviews of the book was by Roger Anderson in the Journal of Religion and Psychical Research. The review spanned several pages and Rogo replied point by point. It’s the most extensive response regarding the finer detail about how he and Bayless went about collecting the cases, interviewing the people and then analysing such data by a process of thematic content analysis and explaining how this kind of methodology sits within the social sciences. He was very thorough and dedicated to the research he was doing.”
Cooper’s interest was longstanding: seven years before, in 2012, his Telephone Calls from the Dead was published, reappraising the cases that Rogo and Bayless had collected. Cooper also added new cases. “Do I think that Rogo’s classification in ‘type 1’ and ‘type 2’ calls is still valid? As far as I can tell from my re-analysis, the more modern cases don’t deviate from the ones Rogo and Bayless generated,” Cooper explained to me. “Even when I have a mixture of old and new accounts, the characteristics of how the calls play out remain the same. The ‘type 1’ calls involve someone who knows someone is dead who receives a call that is very short and unresponsive. The ‘type 2’ call involves a receiver who doesn’t know that someone has died, has a prolonged conversation that is a bit odd and they don’t understand some of the things being said. Afterwards they discover this person has died, and yet the call took place well after that had happened. These cases still occur. The classifications remain valid and are clear general characteristics of how these calls play out and how people report them.”
However, Cooper thinks it’s best to take a cautious approach and not to jump to conclusions. “That doesn’t suggest any kind of paranormal process taking place. We just know that in the context of how people perceive and report these to be anomalous, plus the way that they are carried out as telephone conversations, they fall into particularly consistent types.”
During his analysis Cooper also looked at another 50 cases, running a further content analysis to see how the categories of call types developed. “Are these characteristics still appearing some 30 or 40 years on, or have things changed since we’ve had
mobile phones, e-mail, smartphones and text messages? They haven’t really changed all that much. As far as the conversation characteristics go, they remain the same.” 9
A case in point is the phone call from the dead phenomenon in Russia where it is widely discussed on several Internet forums that feature dozens of accounts. Whether these are true experiences, urban legends, hoaxes or creepypasta remains to be seen, but the basic ingredients of the stories are the same as in the West: voices from dead relatives drowned out in static or ‘strange noises’, anomalous SMS text messages, phones ringing at remote cemeteries where there’s no network connection, or, like in Mary Cahill’s case, many voices heard talking at once. 10
DECADES OF DISEMBODIED PHONE CALLERS
But how old is the phenomenon? Rogo and Bayless found it difficult to write their book because nothing about phone calls from the dead had previously appeared in print.11 Greek researcher Thannassis Vembos unearthed two old Greek cases from 1950 and 1953 12 – but were there more?
In fact, phone calls from the dead are as old as the telephone itself. Who, for instance, rang Mrs Wallace Ford 12 hours after the mysterious death of Hollywood star Thelma Todd in Los Angeles on the morning of 16 December 1935? The press called it “a ghost telephone call”, while the police speculated about a prank made on an extension line. But Mrs Ford did not budge. “Despite all evidence which police say points to Thelma’s death early Sunday, I know I talked to her on the
“SPIRITS SPEAK TO US THROUGH THE RADIO, THE TELEGRAPH AND THE TELEPHONE”
telephone at 4.10pm that afternoon… At first I thought the party said ‘Velma’ and I asked ‘Velma who?’ No, no, no, no, Thelma Todd, your little hot toddy. Get ahold of yourself, Toots!” According to Ford, Todd said she would bring a surprise guest over to the party in half an hour, but the famous actress never arrived. 13
Famous Irish ghost hunter Elliott O’Donnell included a case about a ghost ringing a doctor to save a person who had suddenly become very ill in one of his 1920s collections of ghost stories. 14 Although these days O’Donnell has a reputation of making things up, the story demonstrates that the idea of the dead communicating with the living by phone was widely entertained. Ghosts simply moved with the times, as Psychic Power, a Chicagobased Spiritualist magazine, explained: “In this age spirits speak to us through the radio, the telegraph and the telephone.” 15 And in Light, another Spiritualist magazine, one FR Melton recalled the experiences of his son. During the Great War the young man had been attached to a corps of wireless and ordinary field telephone operators. He often received “disjointed messages and parts of strange questions, nearly always unfinished” and was “quite at a loss to account for these peculiar occurrences… Were they trials on the part of our spirit friends, of a new mode of communication? Perhaps someday we shall know,” Melton wrote. 16 The 1920s also saw the press widely repeat the yarn that Edison was working on a ghost telephone to communicate with ‘the next world’. (for more on Melton and Edison’s experiments, see Chris Josiffe, “A Little History of Spirit Technology”, FT363:3037). 17
A few years earlier, in 1917, there had been a wave of phone calls from the dead in America and Brazil. In southern Indiana a ‘ghostly caller’ frightened the phone operators out of their wits. The women claimed that for a number of weeks they received long-distance calls each evening, and when they asked for the number, a female voice said: “Petersburg; I’m the dead operator from that place. I’m in the spirit land and want to talk with you about things on Earth and here where I am.” It then chatted about who else was in the spirit land and how they got along with one another, and it sang religious songs. The voice also seemed to be able to identify who was in the operator room. Despite attempts to find out to whom the strange voice belonged, it remained a mystery. The year before, the head operator had died suddenly, although she apparently had had no personal knowledge of the people in that area, “while the unknown, who has a girlish voice, seems to know practically everybody in Spencer county.” 18
That same year, ‘spirits’ started to contact members of a Spiritualist circle by phone in Brazil. Unknown to Rogo and Bayless, it led to the publication in 1925 of the first book about phone calls from the dead. 19 According to its author, Brazilian Spiritualist Carlos Gardonne Ramos, they either made tapping sounds or spoke with clear and distinct voices, and this went on for years. “A spirit spoke in Italian, over the telephone. As I told him that I did not understand the language in which he was calling, he withdrew, after wasting time for more than five minutes… The spirit of Father Manoel recited, at my request, the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, a language which I and the other members of the ‘Group’ do not know. As soon as the Lord’s Prayer ended, my watch struck nine o’clock in the evening, and the priest said: ‘d’Argonnel, your watch is running slow’. Then he asked me if I wanted to write a prayer. I answered him affirmatively. So I went to get pencil and paper. The priest began to dictate the prayer… the interesting thing is that even the score was dictated by the spirit. As soon as the priest finished dictating, I hung up the phone…” 20
When a voice boomed from a metal relay box connected to a telegraph at the railway station of the city of Barre,Vermont, in 1905, citizens became greatly agitated over this ‘electric ghost’. One night a clerk heard the voice emanating from the relay box. A superintendent with decades of experience with telegraph equipment was called in to investigate, but he could not explain the strange voice: “…he heard two voices emanating from the box. They spoke of different subjects and had nothing in common. Part of the time whole sentences were plainly spoken and other times only a word or two was distinguishable.” Spiritualists who heard the voices agreed that the messages were from another world. 21
HAUNTED TELEPHONE HORRORS
In 1901, a young woman in Oak Park, Illinois, became convinced that her telephone was haunted: “Some of her neighbours agreed with her, and now the instrument is a proper medium for ghosts, and credulous householders are afraid to answer the telephone bell lest some uncanny disclosure greet them,” a newspaper observed. 22 That same year, Mary F Bringman, a medium from
Springfield, Ohio, claimed that a “mysterious phone on the wall of a large room” carried voices from the other world over to ours. Spiritualists were convinced. “I have talked through the telephone in Mrs Bringham’s,” said one. “There can be no mistake in this matter…” 23
British Spiritualist WT Stead was told of an experience that happened in the summer of 1896. A Mr B was at his office, about two miles from his home, when the phone suddenly rang. “He immediately asked what was the matter, and received the startling reply: go to your father’s house at once. Poor Nelly is dead.” He hurried home and learned that Nelly, his sister, had died suddenly. “But what astonished him was that nobody had sent any message of the decease, which, in fact had taken place at the moment he had received the telephonic message.” 24
And if phones can become haunted or turn into portals for eerie voices from beyond, is it wise to actually have one in a graveyard? In 1886, a story circulated of an undertaker who received a phone call in the night, from a cemetery: “…the voice that called him was so strange that it made him shudder. It was so wonderfully distinct, and yet so slow, so cold, so faraway, that it sounded like nothing else he had ever heard.” The ghostly caller only uttered a long drawn out hello before the bewildered undertaker hung up. When he verified the number, it had come from the cemetery – but no one had called from there. This went on for a few nights, after which the undertaker took the telephone out of his shop. He had it replaced afterward, “and though he has not since been called up by the voice from the other world he sits in nightly dread of it.” 25
The oldest account I found is from only two years after the invention of the telephone. Again, it involves a telephone line to a cemetery. It was newly installed between the
office of a Mr O’Connor and the Cemetery of the Holy Sepulchre in East Orange, Newark, New Jersey, some two miles away. At first it worked fine, but three weeks later things changed. At four o’clock a furious ringing of the telephone awakened O’Connor and his wife. But no voice answered his through the speaking tube. The cemetery office was thoroughly checked and closed off, but the ringing went on for several nights. The man who had installed the telephone line could offer no explanation. “I confess the thing puzzles me. A Spiritualist friend tells me he is certain a spirit has sent the signals… Mr O’Connor’s telephone has no connection, except with the cemetery…” 26
The dead continue to call, and they have a habit of ensnaring those who profess more than a cursory interest in the phenomenon, something that was observed by Rogo. For instance, the reviewer of Callum E Cooper’s book Telephone Calls from the Dead noted: “In fact, as I was writing this review, I received an email from my doctoral advisor detailing an account from a nurse who learned of an ‘answer call’ from one of her patients. In addition, a few months ago I had an experience in a play therapy session with a child that seemed to involve an ADC (After Death Communication – ed.) with a toy phone… I personally attributed both the email and my own clinical experience as indications that these experiments do indeed happen and mostly go unreported.” 27
Communication by toy phone? There are even weirder cases to be found. In 2018, French sociologist Laurent Kasprowicz published his book Des coups de fil de l’AUDELÀ? (‘Phone Calls from the BEYOND?’). In it, he details his own experience that prompted him to study phone calls from the dead –evenfor such an outré phenomenon, this was a uniquely weird experience. It happened several years ago and started a few days after the death of Kasprowicz’s dog. It started with a text message. The next day his telephone started ringing incessantly, but when he answered it, nothing could be heard at the other end. Consultation with the phone company revealed that nobody had called him. Sometimes the intercom sounded at the same time the telephone rang. On two occasions the answering machine recorded the sound of joyous laughter. The machine, though, had started recording after the phone was picked up, something it normally didn’t do. On another occasion, the phone rang and he heard a knocking or rapping sound coming down the line.
As in the Brazilian case where
‘spirits’ partly communicated through the phone by tapping, Kasprowicz deduced it was a code for communication. He was able to ask questions which were correctly answered; then he suddenly heard the sound of a dog breathing heavily. This took him aback, as his dog had died of lung cancer. The phone rang once more and whatever was on the other end again used tapping for communication, accompanied by the heavy breathing of a dog. After this, the phone calls stopped for good. 28
Kasprowicz also collected 17 new cases, mainly from France and Belgium. Most involved calls with spoken messages, but there were also examples of phones ringing with nobody on the other end, and two instances of text message communications.
While he confirms elements also mentioned by Rogo and Bayless, such as
the synchronicity of receiving a phone call on the anniversary or time of a death, the inability of the operator to trace the call, the reassurances or warnings the disembodied voices utter, Kasprowicz notes that changes in technology mean that a few things are new: these days, phone calls from the dead can also be received by switched off cell phones or phones with dead batteries.
Author Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, who wrote a lengthy and informative review of Kasprowicz’s book, notes: “I would add that, in the cases of seemingly paranormal phone calls that I came across in researching my book The Source and Significance of Coincidences (2019), I found many of these same patterns, though at the time I collected them I had not yet read Kasprowicz’s book, nor Rogo and Bayless’s or Cooper’s.” 29
She mentions cases from other sources, plunging us into an eerie world of high strangeness. In one case, for example, the light in the room started flickering, two cell phones lit up and flashed on and off and a mechanical voice erupted from one of them. There’s a fair amount of extreme weirdness in the earlier books too. Rogo, for instance, mentions two cases of a UFO witness receiving a phone call from the dead. The first was some 18 months before the witness actually saw a UFO, but the other sighting may have actually prompted a phone call from the dead. It involved a middle-aged woman who saw a UFO while driving in the country. It followed her car for several hours, then disappeared. Some time later, at home, a man rang up claiming to be ‘Roger’. When the witness said she didn’t knew anyone of that name, the voice claimed it was a family secret and that he was her brother. The woman thought nothing more of it until she learned that, years before she was born, her mother had given birth to a stillborn baby, which, had it lived, would have been given the name Roger. 30
Kasprowicz relates a case where a mother recognised someone who rang her as her son’s dead friend. The son had been involved in a car accident two weeks earlier in which his friend had died. The voice on the phone sounded panicky and desperately wanted to talk to her son. “Hurry, put him on please, I don’t understand what’s going on. It’s like the world is turning bizarre…” it said. Then there is the case of a woman named Séverine who received a call on her answering machine three months after her mother died. A mention of the family’s
CELL PHONES LIT UP AND FLASHED ON AND OFF AND A VOICE ERUPTED FROM ONE OF THEM
deceased dog confirmed that it was her mother speaking, but while the quality of the recording was good she didn’t recognise the voice at all. 31
THE FILTRATION FACTOR
Such odd details struck Kasprowicz in particular. Intrigued by the parallels between ADC and poltergeist phenomena, he speculates that these phone calls from the dead are created by the psychokinetic actions of living individuals. In support of his line of thought he cites three cases from Rogo, Bayless and Cooper in which people received telephone calls
from living persons who’d intended to phone
the recipients but hadn’t actually done so. 32 Rogo and Bayless considered such a mechanism as well, but reasoned instead that the dead could contact the living by manipulating electrical equipment. They point out the various stories in the canon of parapsychology and the early years of telegraphy in which several operators in England discovered that spontaneous communications ‘from the dead’ sometimes occurred over their equipment; they also state that “the ‘phone calls from the dead’ phenomenon is probably only one of many mechanical ways the dead can reach us.” 33 They conclude: “A person who receives ‘a phone call from the dead’… might be witnessing the end result of an organised experiment on the part of the dead as they continually try to make contact with us. These experiments are bound to continue.” 34
Cooper, on the other hand, believes there is no “one sweeping explanation”. He suggested to me: “What we have to do is to take each case of telephone anomalies on its own merit. We need to look into it, interview the people involved, look for the conventional explanations that we know of in terms of psychology, and also the dynamics of how telephones actually work and what things can take place that will produce the illusion of a seemingly remarkable telephone call from the dead. We have to refine the cases, have to go through this filtration process and sift out the wheat from the chaff. It’s a very longwinded expedition.” 35
But what do all these seemingly disincarnate voices actually want, and why all the attempts to communicate? Perhaps we should give the final word to Rogo, the man whose curiosity started it all: “It strikes me as odd that these ghostly voices always act out a charade. They never directly explain that they are speaking from beyond the grave. Yet, they do discourage their contact from trying to meet with them. Why?” 36 Two years later, Rogo still hadn’t found the answers he sought. “Eventually we may even be able to solve the mystery definitely. But that day is far, far away,” he wrote on the last page of Phone Calls from the Dead. 37
✒ THEO PAIJMANS is a Dutch writer, editor and journalist. He is the author of a history of free energy and its inventors, and his writings appear in several newspapers and magazines. He is a regular contributor to Fortean Times.