PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD
It seems that the dead are willing to make use of whatever means or whatever technology is available to them to make contact with the living, and there have been numerous reports of communication with spirits via the telephone.
Phone calls from the dead appear to occur randomly and the great majority are exchanges with loved ones or people who shared close bonds with the deceased when they were alive. Sometimes the communicator wishes to impart a message but at other times there is no other purpose but to make contact. Those who claim to have received phone calls from the dead say that the voices sound the same as when a person was alive but the connection is often bad. The phone rings normally, although some say it sounds odd or flat. In most cases the voice starts strongly and then begins to fade away, leaving the line open. In other cases the line simply goes dead.
The phantom phone call usually occurs when the person is in a relaxed state of mind and within 24 hours of the death of the caller, although sometimes it can be weeks or months after death. The longest interval recorded is two years. Some calls are made on special occasions such as birthdays or anniversaries. If the recipient is shocked and knows the caller is dead the phone call is very brief and lasts only a few seconds, but if the person does not know the caller is dead it can go on for up to half an hour. Later checks with the telephone company show no evidence of a call being placed.
In some cases a person may make a call to someone and have a conversation with them only to find out later that they were already dead at the time of the call. In other cases the caller is a stranger who says they are calling on behalf of a third party, and the recipients later find out that the third party is dead.
Researchers of such cases have also found that deceased callers sometimes make reference to a mysterious 'they’, who have allowed the call to take place. The implication is that communication help, between the dead and the living is not just difficult but undesirable.
Intention phone calls are similar to phantom phone calls but are far rarer and not quite the same, as they occur between two living people. In an intention phone call the caller thinks about making a call but for some reason never makes it; the recipient nevertheless receives a call.
Two main theories have been put forward to explain phone calls from the dead: they are created subconsciously by the recipient, whose intense desire to communicate with a lost loved one creates a psychokinetic hallucination; or they are indeed communications with dead spirits who have found a way to manipulate the phone system. Although interest in phone calls from the dead was strong in the early to mid-twentieth century, in general modern parapsychologists don't take phantom phone calls seriously as evidence for survival after death.
Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts & Hauntings by Theresa Cheung (HarperElement, 2013)