4
The Source of the Calls:
I. Problems and Possibilities
Raymond and I had two goals in mind when we first started collecting these phone cases. Of course we wanted to amass as many firsthand accounts as possible. The examples recounted in chapters 2 and 3 are typical of what our endeavors turned up, and we have several more still under investigation. But we have never really been content with merely collecting these reports and charting their characteristics. Our second and much more difficult goal was to answer two questions these cases prompted us to ask: (1) What is the nature of the intelligence that lies behind these calls? and (2) How are they mechanically produced over the telephone system? Neither of these questions is easy to answer, so for now we will concentrate just on the first.
At the beginning of our research, Raymond and I felt that three different explanations could account for these phantom phone calls. Our reasoning went generally along the following lines:
1. To begin with, we, of course, felt that these alleged phone manipulations might indeed be masterminded by the dead during attempts to contact us. This explanation might be called the spiritistic or survival theory.
2. However, we could not dismiss the possibility that some other type of paraphysical or extradimensional being—perhaps invisible denizens that co-inhabit the Earth with us or exist in some parallel universe—might be playing a huge cosmic joke on us. Such beings might be endowed with the ability to manipulate our phone system and mimic the voices of the dead. Several experts on the paranormal (such as writers John Keel and Brad Steiger, as well as the famous naturalist Ivan Sanderson) have seriously postulated the existence of such beings. Steiger and Keel especially believe that these intelligences might deliberately set out to trick or bewilder us in any way possible. Many American Indian legends talk about a similar race of beings. Although admittedly an extravagant theory, it should nonetheless be taken seriously. We’ll explain why later. For short, we’ve come to call this explanation the EDB (extradimensional being) theory.
3. Finally, we also thought that the witnesses themselves might be unwittingly manufacturing these calls through their own innate mind-over-matter (or psychokinetic) abilities. In other words, we wondered whether or not we might be playing some sort of psychic joke on ourselves! This might be called the PK-from-the-living theory.
Now just how does one go about trying to determine which of these explanations best fits the facts? To be blatantly honest, at first we weren’t sure. There are pros and cons to each explanation, and a good case could be made for any one of them. Of course, it would certainly have been easy for us merely to assume from the start that these calls come from the dead, but nothing is that simple in parapsychology. So, as we tried to determine just what guiding force is lurking behind these calls, we found ourselves taking a much closer look at the reports we had assembled.
We started by mapping out the characteristics of our cases. We graphed out how long they lasted, how many words were spoken by the phantom voices, what time of day they occurred, ad infinitum and ad nauseum! After we graphed, diagramed, “statisticalized,” and scrutinized our data, we were hoping that some clues might become apparent to us. Things didn’t quite work out as neatly as we had hoped, but we did uncover several clues that led us to believe that these calls actually do come from the dead.
Now you still might be asking yourselves why didn’t we merely assume this to begin with? Isn’t it self-evident? The answer to this question is clearly negative. This might surprise you a bit, so let me explain.
Parapsychologists are roughly divided into two camps. Some, whom we call “survivalists,” are researchers who believe that some forms of psychic experiences (such as apparitions, hauntings, and psychic communications received through mediums) are due to the activities of the dead. In other words, the survivalists believe that some element of the human personality survives, persists after death, and can subsequently make psychic contact with the living. Out of convenience these entities are usually called “Theta-agents.” On the other hand, many other parapsychologists classify themselves as “anti-survivalists.” Not only do they not believe that the dead can communicate with the living, but most do not believe in any type of a life after death at all. They argue that we, the living, often use our own innate psychic abilities to trick ourselves into believing that the dead are trying to contact us or are otherwise influencing our lives. (There are also, of course, many parapsychologists who are totally agnostic on the survival issue and who prefer not to think about it at all!)
Consequently, there are two ways any case of an alleged “contact with the dead” can be explained, that is, along either survivalistic or anti-survivalistic lines. For example, take a look at the following case, originally reported around the turn of the century:
I had a very dear brother (my eldest brother), Oliver, lieutenant in the 7th Royal Fusiliers. He was about nineteen years old, and had at that time been some months before in Sebastopol. I corresponded frequently with him, and once when he wrote in low spirits, not being well, I said in answer that he was to cheer up, but that if anything did happen to him, he must let me know by appearing to me in my room. This letter (I learned subsequently) he received as he was starting to receive the Sacrament from a clergyman who has since related the fact to me. Having done this, he went to the entrenchments and never returned, as in a few hours afterwards the storming of the Redan commenced. He, on the falling of the captain of his company, took his place, and led his men bravely on. He had just led them within the walls, though already wounded in several places, when a bullet struck him on the right temple and he fell amongst heaps of others, where he was found in a sort of kneeling posture (being propped up by other dead bodies) thirty-six hours afterwards. His death took place, or rather he fell, though he may not have died immediately, on the 8th September, 1855.
“That night I awoke suddenly, and saw facing the window of my room, by my bedside, surrounded by a light sort of phosphorescent mist, as it were, my brother kneeling. I tried to speak but could not. I decided that it must be fancy, and the moonlight playing on a towel, or something out of place. But, on looking up, there he was again, looking lovingly, imploringly, and sadly at me. I turned, and still saw poor Oliver. I shut my eyes, walked through it, and reached the door of the room. As I turned the handle, before leaving the room, I looked once more back. The apparition turned round his head slowly and again looked anxiously and lovingly at me, and I saw then for the first time a wound on the right temple with a red stream from it. His face was of a waxy pale tint, but transparent-looking, and so was the reddish mark. But it is almost impossible to describe his appearance. I only know I shall never forget it. I left the room and went into a friend’s room, and lay on the sofa the rest of the night. I told him why. I told others in the house, but when I told my father, he ordered me not to repeat such nonsense, and especially not to let my mother know.”
Though it is not clearly stated in the account, the witness had absolutely no idea that his brother had been killed the very day he saw the soldier’s apparition. He only learned of the death ten days later.
Now there are two very plausible explanations for this psychic experience. The survivalist might unhesitatingly argue that some element of the dead soldier’s personality survived death, “traveled” to England, and manifested before his brother in the form of the apparition. This explanation is logical, plausible, and consistent with all the facts of the case. The anti-survivalist, however, would argue that the witness had actually received only a telepathic message from or about his brother which informed him of the death. What he really saw was not his dead brother’s “Theta-agent,” but a telepathically triggered vision and nothing more. Of course, one could argue for hours over which theory is the more cogent, but there is simply no way to prove which one is, in fact, correct.
In this same light, take the following case which appears in Dr. Louisa Rhine’s book, Hidden Channels of the Mind:
“A spring evening about twenty-eight years ago in our home in Massachusetts, my dad, mother and I were reading aloud when suddenly, at twenty minutes after seven, the clock struck once—a clock which struck only the hours and had been doing so for years. This striking was so unusual we all noticed it and about five minutes later a telephone call told us my mother’s favorite sister had died suddenly of a heart attack—at seven-twenty. The clock never struck out of turn again.”
Once again, the survival-oriented parapsychologist would probably have no difficulty explaining this odd “death coincidence,” and would argue that at the moment of death some component of the deceased woman’s mind traveled to her sister’s house and caused the disturbance. The anti-survivalist, on the other hand, could argue just as convincingly that the witness probably unconsciously received a telepathic impression about her sister’s death. Her unconscious mind may then have projected some sort of psychokinetic force that made the clock chime. The witness’s mind may have used this mechanism to bring the information to conscious attention instead of, for instance, producing an apparition.*
Note that in both these instances—the soldier’s apparition and the mysterious clock chiming—it appears that the witnesses themselves created psychic phenomena which only looked as if they were produced by the dead; but they may well have been, and most likely were, constructed by their own minds. One must never underestimate how cleverly our own minds can deceive us.
Raymond and I ran smack into this same problem when we started studying “phone calls from the dead” accounts. Let me illustrate this point by talking a little bit about the nature of psychokinesis; suggesting a possible mechanism by which these calls might be produced; and then showing how they can be explained in two very different ways.
Despite the years that went into its development, the telephone is not an overly complicated device. When you speak into it, you are, in fact, talking into a diaphragm which vibrates and converts your voice into electrical impulses. These impulses are then transmitted over the telephone wires and are reconstructed by the speaker in the phone of the person you’re calling. What he or she hears is not your actual voice, but a series of electrical impulses that are mimicking you. Now, you might ask, what does all this have to do with psychokinesis?
All of us are apparently endowed with two types of psychic ability. The first, of course, is ESP. While not very many of us have any control over our ESP abilities or can use them consciously, there seems little doubt that all of us have an ESP potential locked within us. There is even some rather impressive evidence that ESP can be developed through training. (See Dr. Charles Tart’s book, Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977.) That we all probably possess some modicum of psychokinetic (or PK) ability as well was aptly proved by Dr. J. B. Rhine years ago when he began his famous research at Duke University back in the 1930’s. By 1934, Rhine was able to report in his book Extrasensory Perception that one out of every five people seem to have some ESP talent. He had reached his conclusion after testing students, colleagues, visitors to the lab, and everyone else he could lay his hands on.
In 1934, Rhine suddenly became interested in seeing how many of his subjects had PK abilities as well. His initial interest was aroused when a young gambler visited the Duke Psychology Department one day and claimed that he could psychokinetically influence the fall of the dice. Rhine tested the man by carrying out a simple series of tests; he merely rolled some dice and asked the gambler to make them land on certain sides more often than chance could account for. The experiment was apparently successful, and soon Rhine and his colleagues began testing everyone in sight, hoping to discover just how widespread PK abilities are among the general public. The upshot no doubt surprised even Rhine. The Duke team, as well as other parapsychologists working in independent laboratories, discovered that many ordinary kinds of people—like you and me—do have a rather weak ability to influence the fall of dice, spinning coins, the growth and yield rate of plants, and so on. PK seems to be an ability almost as widespread as ESP. Eventually, some parapsychologists even discovered that PK can disrupt delicate electrical systems.
Dr. Hans Bender is a noted German parapsychologist who, until his recent retirement, headed a division of parapsychology at the University of Freiburg. In 1967, he was called in to investigate some haunted law offices in Rosenheim, Germany. The poltergeist was causing quite a commotion and had singled out the office’s electrical equipment for the greatest amount of mischief. The phones’ call buttons would activate wildly, phone calls that had never been placed were billed to the office phones over and over again, and other mechanical malfunctions plagued them as well. Later, light bulbs started exploding, furniture began moving around by itself, pictures on the walls would swing back and forth, and the overhead light would sway to and fro in an eerie dance. Even a 2,000-pound storage cabinet once slid across the floor.
Of course, the managers of the building immediately called in electrical experts from the local community and the power company. They checked the building over thoroughly and could find no normal reason for the disturbances. But once Bender arrived on the scene, it didn’t take him long to isolate the cause of the disturbances. It quickly became apparent that these odd PK and electrical phenomena occurred only when a teenaged employee, Annemarie Schnabel, was present in the offices. Nothing would happen when she was gone, but as soon as she came in for work, phones started malfunctioning and objects would start moving about inexplicably.
Sometimes the PK disturbances would center right on Annemarie. According to Bender, the lights often swung about in the office corridor as soon as the girl walked by them. Light bulbs would also explode in her presence, and the broken fragments would invariably fly toward her. Finally Annemarie was terminated from her job, but similar PK phenomena broke out in her new place of employment—and even in a bowling alley she visited one day.
But just how and why was Annemarie related to these PK outbreaks? Bender was able to come up with a good explanation for these enigmas. By talking with the girl, Bender—a trained clinician—could see that she was extremely disturbed. On both a conscious and unconscious level, she was trying to cope with deep hostility toward herself and her job. Her romantic life wasn’t going too smoothly either, and Annemarie apparently had no normal outlet for expressing her anger, hostility, and frustration, which could do nothing but well up within her.
In view of his clinical findings, Bender came to the conclusion that there certainly wasn’t a spook loose in Rosenheim. The office wasn’t really haunted. Rather, Annemarie’s own troubled mind was responsible for the PK attacks; Annemarie was probably causing the disturbances psychically—but unconsciously. Disrupting her employer’s office may have been her way of expressing the hostility seething within her. Some psychic violence was erupting within her unconscious mind, and her boss was the unfortunate victim.
The Rosenheim case certainly indicates that our PK abilities might have a particular penchant for disrupting electrical systems—telephones included! It is therefore also plausible that PK force might also be able to set up and manipulate electrical impulses sent over telephone wires. Thus these “phone calls from the dead” cases might actually be a very bizarre form of PK function—either carrying out the dead agent’s wishes to contact us or being the projections of our own minds.
If, for instance, a friend of yours thinks of you right before or even after his death, it is quite possible that he might release some sort of PK force. This PK force, liberated by the agent’s death, might then be able to “travel” to your home and cause a clock to chime unexpectedly, stop a clock, or push a plate off a shelf in your kitchen. But why couldn’t this force also affect your telephone system and wires, perhaps by initiating a series of electrical impulses that would imitate a human voice? Such a process would result in a “phone call from the dead.” On the other hand, it might also be possible that you produced this force as the result of an unconsciously received telepathic message. Having learned of the death unconsciously, your own mind might then project a PK force capable of manipulating your phone system and putting the call through.
There is one problem with this latter theory, of course. Why do some witnesses receive phone calls from people who have been dead for several months, even years? What possible purpose could these belated calls serve? In answer, I can only say that all of us yearn for immortality; recent opinion polls have shown that a vast majority of the American public believe in some sort of life after death. I doubt whether anyone who has ever lost a close friend, relative, or even a pet has not fervently hoped that, somehow, they have survived death. So “phone calls from the dead” could be a psychic and symbolic way by which we attempt to prove immortality to ourselves.
Now, I am not saying this theory is really the explanation for these phantom phone calls, but it is a way of looking at them, which we cannot logically dismiss. In other words, one can accept the existence of these phone calls without actually believing that they are produced by the dead. On the other hand, it may be that there are different types of these curious phone calls. Perhaps some of them do come from the dead while others are the product of our own minds.
Only after we had come to this conclusion did our colleague Dr. Berthold Schwarz develop a similar theory. In a letter to us dated January 19, 1978, Schwarz admitted that “whether these calls come from the dead or are created by PK [from the living] is obviously impossible to prove.” However, he went on to theorize that a person who has a strong need to believe in life after death might be “so psyched up by the actual situation and combination of other complex psychic factors that an independent energy could be split off from the witness’s mind that might have some type of ghostlike existence—that hypothetically continues as long as it is fed by the needs of the various participants and other understood psycho-physiological influences.”
Schwarz is actually describing what might be called a “thoughtform”—a psychic entity created by our own minds and endowed with formidable PK powers. Once created, this being might take on a life of its own, as he suggests. This “mind-ghost” might be very sensitive to the thoughts and motivations that gave it birth in the first place. Could these hypothetical beings be the cause of these mysterious calls? Could we in fact be talking to some dissociated part of our own minds, lobotomized and existing independently in time and space? While this theory is pretty strange, it is certainly no stranger than many things you invariably run into while exploring the psychic world.
Dr. Schwarz does not dismiss the possibility that some of these calls do come from the dead, though. As he also pointed out in a letter to us, “ … some of the communications are so spectacular that the most fetching hypothesis is some type of actual spirit communication. Maybe we are the unreal world, and the other is the true reality.” He went on to suggest that perhaps we are being deliberately led by these phone contacts to accept things such as life after death, which normally we might find unacceptable.
Now you can see why these phone calls represent such a puzzle. There is simply no way to prove unequivocally that they come from the dead. Too many alternative explanations are just as feasible. Even so, long before we began serious work on this project, Raymond and I felt that our cases themselves might supply us with obvious clues about their ultimate nature. And we were not disappointed when we began studying our cases and started coming across several indications that they had a spiritistic source. However, before explaining just how we came to this conclusion, I would like to backtrack a bit and discuss our initial reactions to these phone calls and how our present attitude gradually evolved.
My own first feelings about these cases were somewhat different from Raymond’s. From the beginning he felt that these calls were probably exactly what they purported to be, i.e., attempts on the part of the dead to contact us. I was less sure, and at first it was hard for me to believe that our departed friends and relatives have nothing better to do in the next world than to cavort around, calling up the living over some astral pay phone. I was much more prone to believe that these calls were produced by some form of PK-from-the-living. I also felt that some of these calls were probably being produced by some sort of extra-dimensional beings, out having a little fun at our expense by manipulating our telephone system and mimicking the voices of the dead.
This might strike you as a preposterous idea, but some of the first cases we collected indicated that these phantom callers were engaging in an elaborate—and very cruel—charade. I was immediately puzzled, for instance, by the MacConnell case when I first read it in Susy Smith’s The Power of the Mind, in 1975. Although the MacConnells recognized the voice of their friend Enid Johlson, never once did the voice let on that it was speaking from beyond the grave. It struck me as highly unusual that the phone-entity actively pretended to be still alive. If Enid Johlson really were the one making the call, why hadn’t she told the MacConnells about her death? The voice-entity even went out of its way to carry off the pretense. When, for instance, Mrs. MacConnell suggested that they all get together for a reunion, the voice made rather weak excuses for avoiding the meeting, yet never explained the real reason why such a meeting would have been manifestly impossible.
As I began collecting more phone call cases, I noticed other examples of this same type of trickery. In the Marie D’Alessio case, recounted in Chapter 3, Mrs. D’Alessio carried out a long conversation with a woman who had actually been dead for several months. Of course, the witness merely assumed she was talking to a flesh-and blood human being, and never once did the voice-entity try to dispel the illusion. It even ridiculously claimed that it had to go to the hospital the very next day, and when Mrs. D’Alessio offered to come to visit her, the voice immediately told her not to! It seems that this phantom was out to deliberately dupe Mrs. D’Alessio.
A similar “charade” case was reported to us by one of our colleagues. Some years ago, he received a letter from a young woman whose father-in-law had received a call from his dead daughter. The voices were identical, and the call was not very mysterious at all. The first words the caller said were, “Hi Dad. It’s me. When are you going to pick me up?” This was a request his daughter had often made while alive. The witness could not believe that he was actually speaking to the dead, so he assured the caller that she must have misdialed the number. “Come on, Dad, don’t kid,” was the voice’s reply. The caller then gave her name, as well as those of her mother and father. They all matched. But never once did the caller make any allusion to her own death; she continued to ask that she be picked up just as though she were alive. (The witness, by the way, never did come to believe that he had received a psychic phone call. He chalked it all up to coincidence!)
After studying similar cases, I rejected the notion that these calls, and others like them, came from the dead. Why would a Theta-agent want to pull such a stupid and pointless charade on its surviving friends and relatives? I thought. Instead, these cases indicated to me that at least some of the calls are being produced by some sort of “trickster.” I continued to accept this theory for quite some time—until one day it dawned on me that my line of reasoning was all wrong.
In February 1978, just as the first phase of our research was coming to an end, I began mapping out the characteristics of all the accounts we had collected so far. I was particularly interested in determining the length of time the conversations usually lasted. It was then that I made the discovery that I spoke about in the preceding chapter: If the witness knows he is talking to someone who has died, the call tends to be extremely short; but if the witness thinks he is talking to a living person, the conversation can, on occasion, last much longer. This pattern has consistently cropped up in our data. At first, neither Raymond nor I could figure out an explanation for it. But a few days after our initial discovery, one theory came to mind that fits the facts beautifully.
It had gradually become clear to us that these phone contacts can occur only when many delicate conditions—psychic and otherwise—are met. Most likely, the person receiving the call must be in just the right frame of mind before contact can be made at all. (This probably goes for the intelligence making the call as well; otherwise, these phone calls would be occurring all the time.) You might have noticed by now that most of the witnesses whose accounts we’ve quoted were in a very passive, unoccupied frame of mind when their calls came in. They were usually engaged in pleasant conversation, household chores, or just sitting home alone.
At the moment psychic contact was made, all seemed to have been in a rather “receptive” frame of mind. Now, while many of our witnesses have described their initial reactions to these calls as “shock” or “disorientation” (and one even fainted), these reactions were reported only by people who knew they were talking to the dead. Certainly one might expect a person to become extremely upset once he realizes that a ghost is on the line, and one can hardly blame him. We feel, though, that this state of emotional shock probably destroys the psychic conditions that have made the phone contact possible in the first place. These calls are, therefore, bound to be short or interrupted.
This theory can also explain why someone who does not know he or she is talking to a phantom voice can engage in a lengthier conversation. These witnesses probably stay in their “receptive” frame of mind during the course of the conversation and do nothing to disrupt the contact. The phone call from the girl who wanted her still-living father to “pick me up” may have gone on so long because the witness refused to believe he was talking to the dead and never became emotional or upset during the call.
This theory, by the way, is more consistent with the spiritistic theory than with the PK-from-the-living idea. Were a person using his own PK to produce a “phone call from the dead,” it is unlikely that he would allow himself to fall into a frame of mind that would automatically abort the call. But more important, our theory can also explain why the voices of Enid Johlson and Mrs. D’Alessio’s friend engaged in their little deception. They may have intuitively known that their contact with the living would be instantly aborted should they let on about their deaths. So in order to keep the conversation going as long as possible, they merely pretended to still be alive. Perhaps this is the reason Mrs. Sherrin “forgot” that her aunt was dead during her 30-minute phone conversation with the woman. While it was possibly a shock reaction, it also seems feasible that somehow the deceased caller psychically caused the woman to lose her memory momentarily.
It didn’t take me long to give up my extradimensional being theory, once I realized the psychic importance of the MacConnell and D’Alessio cases. There was probably nothing sinister about them at all. In consequence, I gradually joined Raymond in believing that these calls were deliberately produced by the dead.
Our analyses of our cases didn’t end with that, though. Our belief in the spiritistic nature of these calls was reinforced even further when we decided to take another detailed look at our cases.
Most forms of “death coincidence” phenomena occur close to the actual time the presumed agent has died. Most cases of mysterious clock-stoppings or chimings such as the one Mrs. Rhine reported occur within 24 hours of death, and then become less frequent as time goes by. This fact has a significant bearing on “phone calls from the dead” cases, so we’ll discuss it in some detail. For close to 100 years it has been known that this same pattern holds true for apparitions.
Back in 1889 a group of psychical investigators in Great Britain under the direction of Professor Henry Sidgwick, a noted philosopher of his day, carried out a poll among the British public. The investigators were primarily interested in discovering just what percentage of the population had psychic or other “hallucinatory” experiences to report. Sidgwick and his co-workers reaped a rich harvest: no fewer than 17,000 people responded to the poll. While the vast majority denied ever having had any hallucinatory experiences, 2,272 affirmative replies were received. Three hundred, surprisingly enough, claimed to have seen apparitions.
Of course, Sidgwick and his group had no way of telling how many of their witnesses had merely suffered pathological hallucinations, had brain dysfunctions, or had actually seen objectively real apparitions. However, they soon began to focus their keen attention on 80 very special reports that had resulted from their poll. These came from people who claimed that they had seen apparitions resembling friends or relatives who had just died. Many times the witnesses didn’t even know of the deaths until after seeing the phantom. Upon re-analyzing their data, Sidgwick and his colleagues determined that most apparitions are seen within one day of the death of the agent (the person whom the apparition resembled). These were subsequently called “crisis” cases. Fewer were seen during the subsequent weeks, and only very few were reported a year or so after death. It was this discovery that led the early investigators to believe that apparitions were nothing more than “telepathic hallucinations” produced by the unconscious minds of the witnesses.
Later researchers were able to corroborate Sidgwick’s findings. Around the turn of the century, Camille Flammarion, a well-known French astronomer, began collecting reports of apparitions and hauntings. As he reported in his massive three-volume study, Death and Its Mystery, his data matched Sidgwick’s in all details.
When we began collecting “phone calls from the dead” cases, we fully expected to make a similar discovery—that most of our cases would represent calls produced within a day or so of the caller’s death, and that these calls would then become less frequently reported as weeks and months went by. Therefore, right at the onset of our research we immediately placed each case we collected into one of five categories:
