04 - Phone Call
This incident occurred on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 17th, 2014. As with the doorknob incident, I recorded the details in emails written within hours of their occurrence.
My stepfather's final six weeks on earth were spent in a veteran's hospital on the edge of town. He'd suffered a heart attack at the end of March, followed by a collapsed right lung that needed to be slowly reflated in the hospital. Ironically, the lung was finally fully reflated within a day of his death from a fatal heart rhythm in late July. After six weeks in the hospital, he'd hoped to be released to die at home, as my mother had done years before. Alas, his wish was not to be granted...
After leaving the VA hospital on Tuesday afternoon of June 17, I heard the little tune my cell phone plays when I have a new message in my voice mailbox. At the time I thought it odd that I didn't hear the phone ring a minute or two earlier, when the person who left the message must have called to speak with me. The phone was in my pants pocket, but I should have been able to hear it as I walked out of the hospital to my car.
I was in my car, about to leave the hospital complex, when I heard the voicemail tune. I paused to listen to the message, but instead I got a "Check call restrictions - 34" error message. The hospital was way out in an undeveloped area of the Las Vegas Valley, but I was still surprised that my cell phone couldn't connect with the nearest tower. At the time, I didn't get many phone calls, so I thought there was a good chance that the voicemail message was from E, my stepfather. I figured he'd simply left me a reminder for something to do when I got home. I decided to listen to the message when I got there, instead of walking back into the hospital to find out what he wanted (if indeed he was the one who left the message). It took about an hour to get back to the house, in part because I stopped to get a few things at the local supermarket.
It was a little after 3 PM when I got home. After putting away the groceries, I listened to the voicemail message. Sure enough, it was E, but what he said thoroughly alarmed me. First he said, "Doug, I can't breathe". Then there was a short pause, after which he said "I'm having so much trouble", or something very close to that (the shock of the first sentence made it hard for me to remember the second one exactly).
Interestingly, he didn't sound out of breath, but his voice was weak, with a forlorn, desperate quality that really frightened me. Thinking this might be the last voicemail message I'd ever receive from my stepfather, I made sure not to delete it. I phoned him back immediately, but he didn't answer. He didn't have the voicemail box on his cell phone set up, so I wasn't able to leave a message. I called a couple more times, then waited for him to call me. When we finally connected, I told him I'd heard the message he left just after I departed the hospital, and asked if he was breathing better. He didn't understand what I was talking about, asserting he hadn't called me. He said he dozed off to sleep right after I left his hospital room. At that, I realized right away that I might have experienced the living equivalent of a phone call from the dead. I shared my thought with E, saying I was going to look for the message, and that I'd play it for him when I saw him the next day. After our conversation ended, I looked for E's message in my voice mailbox. It was gone!
Even though E was seriously ill, he was still very sharp mentally, so there's no doubt in my mind that he was telling the truth when he said he did not call me. Besides, if he were dangerously short of breath, why would he phone me when the nurses' station was just outside his door? If I'd been able to hear the message before leaving the hospital parking lot, it still would have taken me a few minutes to reach his bedside. Having previously driven to the hospital himself for doctor's appointments, he knew this, so there's no reason he'd call me first in such an emergency.
For those wishing to learn more about the phenomenon described above, something similar happened to the author Scott Rogo (
Phone Calls from the Dead, and many other titles). I've forgotten the details, but I believe a recording of his voice was heard on a friend's answering machine, although Rogo had no memory of having made the phone call. I think he was able to demonstrate convincingly that he could not have made the call, yet the voice definitely sounded like his.
In addition, a parapsychologist from our current era, Cal Cooper, has augmented the list of cases cited in Rogo's book with many of his own in
Telephone Calls from the Dead.