Hotline To Heaven:Phone Calls From The Dead?

In Paul Evans' morbid yet memorable 1978 hit single Hello, This Is Joannie (The Telephone Answering Machine Song), the bereaved narrator rings his dead ex-girlfriend's answerphone following her demise just so that he can hear her voice one more time. That's a phone call TO the dead. But what about phone calls FROM the dead? What if Joannie rang back?

Carl, who has neither provided an age or location, had split up with his partner and was going through a bit of a rough patch. To help him get his head back together, he'd retreated to a seaside town and checked into a B&B. The hostess of the B&B was an elderly lady who simply went by the name of "Grandma". After some brief pleasantries, some food, and a look round the local area, Carl returned to his room and the telephone started to ring.

On the other end, it's his father who tells Carl he's "in a beautiful place" and then hangs up. Over breakfast the next morning, Grandma tells him that the call could not have happened as the phone in Carl's room is merely an ornament and isn't even wired up. So Carl rings his mum. Carl's mum explains that Carl's dad had died at 11pm the previous evening. The exact same time that Carl spoke to him on the phone.

Or not. Last night's Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub talk, Phone Calls from the Dead? with the very young looking (but then almost everybody is to me these days) Dr Callum Cooper, the Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Northampton, looked into the mostly unexplored and unexplained phenomenon of people receiving phone calls from people who were, at the time - quite frankly, in no state to be making phone calls.

But, before we got to that, Dr Cooper (or Cal as host Professor Chris French preferred) wanted us to know about how he became interested in the subject and to give us a wider view of parapsychology itself. As a student, Cal loved reading books about hauntings, apparitions, and ghosts and, as well as the Usborne book of ghosts, he particularly enjoyed a book called Phone Calls from the Dead which was written by D. Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless. It came out in 1979 but if you want an original copy today it'll set you back somewhere north of £800!

Cal went on to talk, very briefly, about the founding fathers and mothers of parapsychology in the 1840s, the Fox sisters and how their reports of being haunted by a poltergeist led to the beginning of Spiritualism, and how, inspired by this, academics started showing an interest. As well as supposed mediums, many of them obviously fraudulent.

In 1882, at Trinity College in Cambridge, the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) was formed and two years later an independent US branch sprung up. Initially, the American SPR were primarily interested in debunking some of the wilder claims being made in the UK but soon, unable to entirely debunk some stories, the two societies began to work together.

Cal's journey takes us through 1886's Phantasms of the Living (Edmund Gurney. Frederic W.H. Myers, and Frank Podmore) and 1889's mammoth Report on the Census of Hallucinations. These books looked into dreams, telepathy, and, yes, hallucinations and asked if they existed (in the case of telepathy) and if they had deeper meanings (in the case of dreams and hallucinations).

Forward to the 20th century and, in Chicago, husband and wife team Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa E. Rhine had started to attend seances as part of their investigations into parapsychology. The trouble was many of the mediums hosting the seances were obviously con artists and were faking the seances. In one case, a female medium called Nina was offering other 'services' to clients. Presumably so they wouldn't complain about the poor quality of her seances while handily bumping up her coffers at the same time.

The Rhines weren't completely cynical though. They wanted to do further research so they did some telepathy tests using something called Zener cards. These cards held easily recognisable patterns, each corresponding to a number between one and five, and would be held up, backwards, to various volunteers who would try, and often fail - as proven in a test Cal did, to predict which card was being held up.

 

When the radio manufacturer Commander Eugene McDonald saw the baffling popularity of these rather boring cards he decided he'd mass produce them and sell them at Woolworths. The trouble was McDonald's replica cards were of such poor quality that in certain light they were almost transparent, at least translucent, and people didn't have to guess what was on the other side. They could see what was. This resulted in the psychologist and social philosopher B. F. Skinner dismissing the whole thing as a sham and though Zener cards, it seems, are still available today nobody seems to take them very seriously any more.

Phone calls from the dead, though? Well, some people do (take them seriously), some people don't. The truth is not much research has been done on the subject (which made for a rather niche talk, possibly a reason there were less people there than normal). It's not just the dead ringing the living, it's people making calls when it can be proven they were nowhere near a phone at the time, and, in some cases, it's even aliens ringing people up.

Most of the stories relate to old landline type telephones but there are stories about people receiving texts and e-mails from the dead (though, because of how modern technology works, they are actually easier to dismiss). To go with Carl's example from earlier we had stories of a person's deceased mother's voice being found on a recording of birdsong, a person who believed that spirits could manipulate electrons within telephones to make them ring, and a woman who reported that she was receiving approximately three calls a week from her dead husband and that this lasted for three years after his death.

As far back as 1915, a David Wilson believed the unknown calls he was receiving on his wireless telegraph was evidence of extra-terrestrials. Six years later, Francis Grierson wrote Psycho Phone-messages in which he claimed the dictaphone he'd invented for use in seances had picked up the voices of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Who had been dead for 56 and 36 years respectively.

The same year, one F. R. Melton produced a booklet called A Psychic Telephone in which he claimed he'd managed to collect some ectoplasm that could give voices to seances using Morse code. Hmmm. Melton was also arrested for faking his own death so you can come to your own conclusions regarding how trustworthy his claims were.

Other claims came from Brazil and Italy and still claims come through. Mostly people find these calls, if they happen, comforting (though there are some reports of negative phone calls from the dead - mostly involving deceased debt collectors it seems) and as it's not a serious problem and because there has been so little investigation into the subject there are no real conclusions to be had. Some cases are easily disproved and, according to Dr Cooper, others are still unexplained. Grief and bereavement are obviously a factor, grief can do very strange things to people, but is that the whole story? Who knows? More research to be done perhaps.

It'd been an interesting talk, eventually, and it even managed to touch on spoonbending, James Randi, Borley Rectory, Gef the Talking Mongoose, Thomas Edison (who it is believed tried to invent a phone sensitive to the voices of the dead), pets with ESP, Julian Clary, Linda Lovelace, UFOs, Baudelaire, Leonard Nimoy, Ozzy Osbourne, and Billy Connolly.

The Q&A expanded to take in a book called WhatsApps From The Dead, pareidolia, Madame Tussauds, Viagra, neuroscience, Herbie the Volkswagen Beetle, Brandon Lee's appearance in the 1994 film The Crow, B&Q, reincarnation, consciousness, and hope. And it's hope I great from attending these Skeptics events. Hope for humanity that by getting together and rationally discussing the weird and wonderful world we live in. Thanks to The Star & Garter and Professor Chris French for hosting, thanks to Dr Callum Cooper for giving the talk, thanks to David VB for joining me briefly for a chat, thanks to Greenwich Park for providing a nice place me for me to enjoy some sunshine beforehand, and thanks to Goddards Pie & Mash for tasty food and tea to keep me going. Thanks, also, to any of you who might be reading this - alive or dead.