For years there have been reports all of the world of people receiving phone calls from family members. While this is no reason to get too excited there is one small catch .... the family member has passed. Let's look into this very strange phenomena.

While the concept of Thomas Edison’s Spirit Phone being a myth, there is however phenomena that many have experienced all over the world. Many claim to have received phantom phone calls from people who are no longer with us. While sometimes it happens in a dream, in quite a lot of accounts, the people were very much awake! Missed calls from numbers that once belonged to a loved one that have been discconected, messages left on answering machines to phone calls with a weird static on the other end. It is a phenomena reported all over the world.

My call from the other side

I guess I will start with my own experience. It happened in a dream, but it felt so very real. A lot of people do say we can be contacted through our dreams and I am a big believer in this. My grandfather had passed away and in my dream I was standing in my kitchen with all of my family members. This was strange in itself as there were members of our family that we didn’t really speak to anymore but they were there in my dream. I never dream about them ... ever! The phone rang and I picked it up. This was about 15 years ago when we all still used landline phones that were attached to the wall so it wasn't odd that this was in my dream. My kitchen was exactly how it was then and the phone in the exact place that it really was. I answered the phone and I heard my grandfather’s voice say my name in the way that only he could. It is hard to explain but he would say my name in a breathless exaggerated way it was how he greeted me. I became very emotional and I asked him where he was. He answered I am OK and the phone call ended and I woke up straight away. It was in the moment that I felt comfort and I woke up feeling like that was him contacting me and letting me know that he was OK. While I was asleep, this of course can be easily put down to my imagination, but I still feel within myself that it was his way of communicating with me.

So what about the people who have had this experience while they were completely awake?

Your stories

I put the call out to you guys to contact me with your stories. Considering this blog has a very small following, I wasn't sure if I would even get any one to tell me a story at all. But you guys came through with some really lovely stories.

Dennis Atkinson: This happened to me 1yr after my mum passed. My phone rang I answered and there was total silence, I rang 1471 the number to find out who called, it was my mum's old number. I then rang it only to get the unobtainable tone. I took this as a sign that she just wanted me to know she was ok.

Susan Clark FitzPatrick: When my boyfriend passed a couple days later my phone would ring at 1 AM. I had caller ID. Nothing would show up. When I picked up the phone there was silence. No dial tone nothing. It went on for a week. No more phone calls after that. It happened 14 yrs ago this coming Sept. But one night I was ready to sleep and I did get really scared because I felt him in the bedroom. But at the time I didn't recognize it was him. That's the last experience I had with him. Now I only get his scent or a song will come in the radio.

Pete Renn: Two years into moving to Canada my Nan died in the uk After returning back from the uk a week later I recieved a missed call from her old disconnected number. It didn’t even ring.

If you google this topic, there are so many forums and articles with so many stories very similar to the above. I have handpicked these as they were direct responses to me asking for stories. These have not been taken from other articles, books or forums. I was also contacted by a few people that claimed it didn't happen to them but a friend or family member. In these cases I did not include their stories as they have not come from the source itself.

Psychological Reasoning

Of course I have to look at the psychological side of things because we need to consider all possibilities. As people who have lost someone near and dear to us, we often look for some kind of sign that they are OK. We also like the comfort of knowing they have gone to a good place, and the same awaits us one day. Can it just be a case of mistaken identity?

There was an occasion when I had a woman call me. When I answered the phone she said she was returning my call. I had not called her. She had actually called me earlier that week to ask about ticketing for an event so my number was in her recent call list. A missed call from someone, she accidently thought was me. She was so sure that it was me. When I told her that it wasn't, she felt that maybe it was spirits playing with her (because she was coming to a paranormal event I was hosting). It is an example of how easily something has been misinterpreted into being paranormal. Is it possible these calls are something simple like this? If we desperately want to hear from a loved one, can we unknowingly connect the pieces to fit what we want?

Skeptic Viewpoints

Skeptics have also raised a few questions of this phenomena. Whether being serious or not, they question : How does a ghost pick up a phone when they are not a physical being? Why would a ghost use a phone to communicate when they can just appear to you instead? No one has seemed to go as far as to check phone records with telephone companies to prove that calls have come from disconnected numbers etc. They have also said it could be people pranking or a case of mistaken identity.

Can a spirit really call us on the phone? Can they use the frequency or radio waves to get us some sort of message? The answer is that we really don’t know because we don't even know if they really can set off K2 meters and all the fancy gadgets. Everything about spirits is based on belief and theory and this topic is no different. What we do know is that this is something that is reported all over the world. Not just by one person. By many. A lot of researchers have actually dedicated a lot of time to this topic interviewing people for their accounts. There are a large number of books on the market by a lot of different researchers with their thoughts and findings on this topic.

Regardless of if someone really did or didn’t get a call from the other side does it really matter? I mean if it is giving someone some comfort and closure that their loved one is OK, then why do we need to prove if it did or didn’t happen? I know I can put my experience down to a dream, because it happened in a dream. I don’t care. To this day I remember it so very clearly and it gave me the peace and comfort I needed to get through what was a very difficult time for me as it was the first time I had lost someone close. For that reason, I don’t want to debunk it.

The only advice I will give you though, if a spirit does call, don’t accept those reverse charges. Those long distance charges are a bitch!

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During this quest, a few people have recommended a book to me by Dr Callum E Cooper called "Telephone Calls from the dead". I can't vouch for the content or how good it is yet, but I have ordered a copy and it has to get all the way here from the UK. It has come highly recommended from a few people in the field that I respect so it is off to a good start. If you are interested in researching this topic further, it might be worth a look.