December 31, 2024 • 18 mins
George Noory and Dr. Cal Cooper explore his research into cases of people receiving telephone calls from dead loved ones, sometimes before even finding out they have died, why spirits on the other side use technology to communicate with the living, and the reaction of people when they get a call from a dead relative.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to our pre New Year's Eve program.
George Norrie with you our special guest. Doctor Cal Cooper
is a professor of parapsychology and Public Understanding of human
Science based at the University of Northampton and the United Kingdom.
He's also a co director of the Parapsychology Education at
the California Institute for Human Science, and he has authored
(00:27):
a number of books, with the most popular being Telephone
Calls from the Dead, Conversations with Ghosts, and Paracoustics Sound
in the Paranormal. Cal Cooper was last on our program
nine years ago.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Cal, it's been a long time. Welcome back.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
How you doing. It's been a long time.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
How are you doing?
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Been nine years? My gush. What have you been up to?
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Various things, all kinds of things have happen, and a
lot of PhD candidates.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
To supervise in parapsychology, so we've had.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
A number of different weird and wonderful projects to look
into since all that time. So there's a lot to
discuss in the next couple of hours.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
How did you as a parapsychologist get involved in the paranormal.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Well mind the long story, Really, I have a background
in performing arts, so I was interested in stage and performance.
I always really wanted to do that. When I was
at school, I did a lot of pantomimes and small plays,
and I was doing street dance as one of the
kind of side things to get into to help my
performing arts career. But every week we used to go
(01:31):
to the local library as a school. They would walkers
down the road to the local library and heritage shop,
and in a small corner of the library there was
about four or five books, some of them on local
hauntings written by a lady called Jane Peeter. She was
a local journalist and writer and all she'd done.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
Was go around and interview people locally.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
About their experiences. And those were the best kinds of
ghost stories that really captured my imagination because I thought
the people seemed very honest and sincere about the experiences
that they're having.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
So what's going on there?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
That there must be some sort of area of study
for this, And I wasn't seeing that in my schooling.
Aren't going to get that in chemistry, physics or biology.
And we weren't taught psychology at that level, and some
of the other books that I was looking at were
involving fourteen phenomena. So there were the classic pictures as
we know it was footage of the alleged Bigfoot.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
There were pictures of UFOs.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
There were stories of Jeff the talking mongoose in the
investigations of the Ghost under Harry Price, who also investigated
Baally Rectoring. So this all really really captured my imagination,
and I went to these places, these local haunts, quite alarmed.
In fact, only yesterday I was at one of them
that I've been going to ever since I was very young,
Newstead Abbey, and that's the former home of the poet
(02:52):
Lord Byron, who became very famous for his works and
his own character became very famous. And I going to
those places. My grandmother told me about the White Lady
and Boast and the dog and the goblin prior and
all these experiences people had had. So it was by
the time I was sixteen, was moving into college could
(03:13):
expand on the subjects. I was doing a bit more
like electronics and photography and finally got to do psychology
that I realized at university level, which is where I
was heading. There were people studying parapsychology, so looking into
the science of the unusual experiences and or abilities, which,
if they are as they seem to be, are in
principle outside of the realms of conventional scientific understanding. So
(03:36):
I had to pick very carefully which university I wanted
to go to to study psychology, but it gave a
platform for parapsychology, and yet I was having to deal
with college I was still sixteen to eighteen, had to
deal with this college level and the psychology teachers they said, oh,
just to let you know, there is no such thing
as a parapsychologist. And this was a head of psychology,
(03:58):
and I said, but I know a number of parents
psychologists and her response was, oh, I would like to
speak to them. It's just very bizarre. So I pushed through,
did my qualifications there, got into university and my starting
point with the University of Northampton, they got a third
year unit module in the psychology curriculum for parapsychology and
(04:21):
they had five or six parapsychologists there at the time,
some very well known ones as well, Professor Chris Rowe,
Dr Richard Broughton, who was one of the research directors
for the Ryan Research Center in Durham, North Carolina originally,
and so that's where I ended up, and throughout all
my degrees, that's where I've ended up going back to
and staying that that's my career.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
It's a remarkable career, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (04:46):
It is.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
I'm certainly in a very unique position because there's probably
about three hundred parapsychologists worldwide, and there's only a select
few of them that have it as a full time career.
So I'm in that privileged position where my job in
day out is effectively a full time ghostbuster, the scientific type.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
One of your favorite books is called Telephone Calls from
the Dead.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
How did you key in on that story?
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Well, that was still during my undergraduate training. So as
I was doing my.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Psychology degree, I was reading a number of books by d.
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Scott Rogo and Raymond Baylist.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
They were both from California, and scott Rogo, like me,
had had a very early fascination with paranormal and also
I think his early writing was on vampires as well,
and he started to shift away from that and he
was doing haunting investigations just like I was following up
with people's interviews of their experiences. And his very first
(05:45):
book was on paranormal music when people just randomly hear
musical sounds, and yet it doesn't appear to have any source.
So where are people hearing this musical this singing from me?
He wrote that when he was an undergraduate. So all
the books I was reading, I wrote going bayless, and
I was just throwing them on a pile of books
that I got in my room and thinking, oh, I'll
read that later. And I was reading far more parapsychology
(06:08):
than I was any other area of psychology. I bought
one second hand book that was called Phone Calls from
the Dead, a two year investigation into an incredible phenomenon.
Just looked at it briefly and then stuck it on
the pile, and I didn't think anything more of it.
It didn't capture my attention straight away. I just knew
that it was just one unique book where they'd co
(06:29):
written the whole thing, rather than doing a forward for each.
Speaker 5 (06:32):
Other's book or research papers.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
And then it was a news report on MSA News
at the time regarding a train collision in California. I
think it was a freight train and a commuter train
head on collision, and there was a passenger on there
called Charles Peck.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
His family reported.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
That around I guess ten o'clock at night, the trainer crashed.
They were receiving multiple calls from his mobile phone to
theirs and when they picked up, all they could hear
was static on the line, and when they called back,
it just went to voicemail, as though the phone was
switched off or the battery had died. Now there was
a live I think a live rescue party. It was
(07:12):
on live new channels that rescuers were going in trying
to help people from the wreckage of this train crash.
So the family realized what had happened, and so every
time they were getting a call, they were saying, don't worry, Dad,
the rescuers are on the way. They're coming to help you,
thinking that he's just in reach of his phone, but
for whatever reason, he can't talk, and he just keeps
calling his family for help. And it was around three
(07:33):
am the call stopped, and that was at the very
point that they found his body. The phone was never recovered,
but the media widely publicized it as a phone call
from the dead and the family also seemingly took comfort
from that idea as well. So that really captured my imagination.
And then I thought, but there wasn't really a conversation.
(07:53):
It was just static and repeat a call. So what's
in this book by Rogo and Baylists? So I picked
it up and I read it from cover to cover,
and in some of those instances, people are having some
five to ten fifteen minute conversations with people, only to
discover afterwards that person had died some twenty four hours beforehand,
or in some cases they know the person has died
(08:14):
and yet they still get a strange call that has
a few voices and words and phrases.
Speaker 5 (08:18):
Said in it.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
So that's how I discovered the book, and I started
writing some updated articles on the topic. I was looking
into how we've got iPhones and text messages and emails,
started looking for new accounts, and then I got help
from the Californian Institute at Intecourse Studies in San Francisco.
They went through Scott Rogo's archive for me and found
some additional cases, so I looked at those and then
(08:42):
I started collecting some modern ones as well. That's how
it all kicked off around two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I think nowadays cal the so many phones have caller ideability.
Do these calls come in with caller ID? And if
they too, what's the number?
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Well, the thing is with Rogo and Bayliss, we're talking
about a book that was completed by nineteen seventy nine,
and so a lot of their cases span the nineteen hundreds.
So everything they go from everything with a wireless telegraph
of Morse code all the way through to various types
of landline, but purely landline. I think there were only
(09:20):
two cases of voicemails because recording systems for mystic calls
was only just coming in. With the cases that I've
looked at, sometimes there were instances of no caller ID.
The unique thing when they looked into their cases was
that sometimes in following up with the phone company, there
(09:40):
was no record of a call taking place at the
time that witnesses say that one did go through, and
so that's quite unique. Other times it was apparently placed
through a long distance call exchange. With modern technology now
there was far more room for fraud and error to
take place, just because the phones that we work on
so sophisticated, even fifteen years ago. When I started looking
(10:03):
into this, there were different methods via the Internet to
go and send text messages that would not display sender information,
no name, no date, no number. You would just get
a blank message if you paid into this original kind
of website. As things are starting out, I'm sure things
have advanced far more than that now. So the ruper fraud,
(10:26):
hoax and error is far greater now. But there have
been some instances of no care or ID, but that
just nowadays leads to a lot of suspicion as to well,
where is it coming from?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Right?
Speaker 5 (10:36):
That's the problem.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Are we still getting the calls nowadays? Though?
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Apparently so.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I mean, we've got a really big show over here.
I don't know how many of you are starting to
hear a bit over there. But we've had various paranormal
shows over time, and I've been involved in various pilots
and cable TV shows for the paranormal. But one that's
really done well is a BBC radio for production called
on Cap a guy called Danny Robbins, and he did
(11:03):
a podcast over ten years ago called Haunted, and that's
when I first met him. He came to the University
of Northampton and he interviewed as about ghosts and mediumship
and lab work, and essentially in his show on Canny,
he just takes a single case from people and then
goes through their story over the course of half an hour,
and he breaks it down, this is their backstory, what happened,
(11:25):
and then the person speaks, and then there's interlude, and
then he'll bring on two experts. He'll bring in a skeptic,
usually someone with a parapsychology background, and a believer who
might be involved with theology or there a ghost hunter
something like that. And one of the shows on there
that has become most popular was one called Harry Call,
(11:45):
and it was of a guy called Will where wherever
he was going, I think he was in his late
teens early twenties. He was getting these repeated calls, usually
once that he'd missed, where someone else answered and they'd
leave a message for him saying Harry called. And I
think Harry was someone that he'd known that had passed away.
And it wasn't just this one off. Wherever he went
(12:06):
business calls were happening that he was missing and someone
else is picking up and saying, well, someone called you
called Harry, So that was really odd and it's really
captured people's imaginations. And then most recent one they did
Uncanny USA and it was the fourth series and the
second episode, Dad's Phone. I did that one as a skeptic,
and it involved it wasn't a modern phone, but the
(12:29):
father in the case, he was deceased, his job had
been a spy.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
He was a.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Secret agent, and two got this sophisticated telephone system at
his house that was now disconnected. But his daughter, who
had not particularly got on well with him, was having
repeated telephone calls on this sophisticated system, and a guy
that her father knew was at the house one time
when one of these calls took place, and he was
(12:55):
the one who's got to answer it, and he pulled
it off course to check the whole system and.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Realized there was no wiring in it.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
So it really freaked them out that there was still
getting not only a ringing, but there was this strange
static on the line that they believed was responsive. When
you spoke to it, you heard these different tones in
the statics. Yeah, these calls are still happening whenever these
things like and Kenny has mentioned on the Internet and
social media. Loads of people seem to be reaching out
and sharing their strange telephone experiences, particularly around the time
(13:24):
twenty four hours of losing someone really close. So you know,
it could be a sense of presence, it could be
seeing an apparition, it could be dreaming of someone.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
But strange telephone.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Experiences seem to be quite high up there, So yeah.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
They're there.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The fact that it's happening and they're using technology and
electronics tells you what about what the other side might
be part of.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I don't know what it particularly tells us, but certainly
around nineteen twenty it was starting to fascinate a lot
of people. There were so many amateur inventors that were
trying to create telephones to the dead. Here in Nottingham
there was a chap called Frederick Melton, and he produced
a little book look called a Psychic Telephone, in which
(14:10):
he discussed his second prototype of this telephone's contact the dead,
which strangely, of all of its components, contained a.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Balloon you heard me write, a rubber balloon that.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
He had his son blow up with his own breath.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
His son was very skeptical of the paranormal but he.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Believed that his son still had some sort of psychic
ability because whenever he was close by and they were
holding seances, the activity got heightened.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
So he said to his.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Son, I need an element of view inside this device.
So got him to blow up this balloon and attached
it to all the components.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
And so this was taken.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
Around to very spiritualist churches and apparently with some success.
But ghost under Harry Price had to go up building
this machine and got no success. American psychical researcher Herold Carrington,
he built this device and got no success. So what
was going on with the original one? If you look
into State Magazine and loads of other outlets at the time,
(15:05):
other people were coming forward claiming that they built these devices.
But most famous of all would be Thomas Edison. So
in nineteen twenty he went to Scientific American and gave
an interview, so really good out there, and he was
talking generally a bit about his research and interest in spiritualism.
His parents were spiritualists. He got lab assistants that were
(15:26):
Polish American psychics some of them, and they were holding
seances sometimes at the end of the day. And what
he said in his interview was that he was working
on a device producers just that he wanted the telephone
to contact the dead. Whether he was jumping on the
bandwagon of what people were already saying they'd done and
were publishing that, I don't know. But he describes in
(15:48):
detail saying, I want this device to contain components that
are so delicate that if the dead do indeed leave
this earth and they want to contact the living, it
will at least give them a chance to get in touch.
And so it comes up with this idea, He discusses it,
it discusses.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
The components, and yet there is nothing.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Nothing is produced, there's no blueprints, there's no final products.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Imagine if you could commercialize something like that.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
If it actually worked, you could just go down to
the local store and buy a telephone that you can
use to contact your deceased relatives. But by nineteen thirty one,
Thomas Edison had passed away. There's no such device discovered,
and the Thomas Edison Museum.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
I think it's in Texas.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
They claim that one of their highest requests is for
people to see pictures of this device, or to see
the blueprints as well, but they have no such things,
and over time people claim that they've discovered such things,
but it's certainly not reached the Thomas Edison Museum. So
people have thought that if the deads are surviving in
some way, you need electrical components, something with delicate instrumentations,
(16:52):
and it will give them a chance for getting touched.
It's an idea. I don't know how I feel about
that as a parapsychologist and a skepe, but there's certainly
a lot of really really good evidence for the idea
of something mind personality memory surviving.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
As I was involved in.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
The Robert Bigelow Essay Awards that took place in Las Vegas,
and many people, many parapsychologists all over the world, came
forward for that.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
That's one that Jeffrey Misch loved one, I think, right, yeah, yeah,
he did.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Jeff a good friend. I was texting him last night
and we've worked together on his recent parapsychology programs. But
he brought together years and years and years worth of
his new Thinking Allowed program and where people have discussed
survival of death. Yeah, Jeff won the half million dollar prize.
We got an honorable mention, so we were very happy
with that. Vegas and the people again with it people
(17:44):
within those essays they've mentioned telephone phenomena. Jeff they did
in his essay, so it's it's popular.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Can you imagine the person who receives the phone call, caw,
the look on their face when they take that.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Yeah, I think it would be a variety of different things.
I think some people would think it's a prank. I
think some people would be absolutely shocked and dumbfounded and not.
Speaker 5 (18:11):
Know what to say. I think that some other people.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
If you've just recently lost that person, they've been in
such a state of shock that they would forget that
the person has died. And if they're saying that it
was like any other call, then that's what they're treating
it like. They're treating it like you and I are
talking right now. It's not till after the call that things,
the reality starts to catch up with them. That hang
on a minute, They passed away yesterday, This can't.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Possibly have happened.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to our pre New Year's Eve program.
George Norrie with you our special guest. Doctor Cal Cooper
is a professor of parapsychology and Public Understanding of human
Science based at the University of Northampton and the United Kingdom.
He's also a co director of the Parapsychology Education at
the California Institute for Human Science, and he has authored
(00:27):
a number of books, with the most popular being Telephone
Calls from the Dead, Conversations with Ghosts, and Paracoustics Sound
in the Paranormal. Cal Cooper was last on our program
nine years ago.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Cal, it's been a long time. Welcome back.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
How you doing. It's been a long time.
Speaker 5 (00:45):
How are you doing?
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Been nine years? My gush. What have you been up to?
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Various things, all kinds of things have happen, and a
lot of PhD candidates.
Speaker 5 (00:53):
To supervise in parapsychology, so we've had.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
A number of different weird and wonderful projects to look
into since all that time. So there's a lot to
discuss in the next couple of hours.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
How did you as a parapsychologist get involved in the paranormal.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Well mind the long story, Really, I have a background
in performing arts, so I was interested in stage and performance.
I always really wanted to do that. When I was
at school, I did a lot of pantomimes and small plays,
and I was doing street dance as one of the
kind of side things to get into to help my
performing arts career. But every week we used to go
(01:31):
to the local library as a school. They would walkers
down the road to the local library and heritage shop,
and in a small corner of the library there was
about four or five books, some of them on local
hauntings written by a lady called Jane Peeter. She was
a local journalist and writer and all she'd done.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
Was go around and interview people locally.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
About their experiences. And those were the best kinds of
ghost stories that really captured my imagination because I thought
the people seemed very honest and sincere about the experiences
that they're having.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
So what's going on there?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
That there must be some sort of area of study
for this, And I wasn't seeing that in my schooling.
Aren't going to get that in chemistry, physics or biology.
And we weren't taught psychology at that level, and some
of the other books that I was looking at were
involving fourteen phenomena. So there were the classic pictures as
we know it was footage of the alleged Bigfoot.
Speaker 5 (02:27):
There were pictures of UFOs.
Speaker 4 (02:29):
There were stories of Jeff the talking mongoose in the
investigations of the Ghost under Harry Price, who also investigated
Baally Rectoring. So this all really really captured my imagination,
and I went to these places, these local haunts, quite alarmed.
In fact, only yesterday I was at one of them
that I've been going to ever since I was very young,
Newstead Abbey, and that's the former home of the poet
(02:52):
Lord Byron, who became very famous for his works and
his own character became very famous. And I going to
those places. My grandmother told me about the White Lady
and Boast and the dog and the goblin prior and
all these experiences people had had. So it was by
the time I was sixteen, was moving into college could
(03:13):
expand on the subjects. I was doing a bit more
like electronics and photography and finally got to do psychology
that I realized at university level, which is where I
was heading. There were people studying parapsychology, so looking into
the science of the unusual experiences and or abilities, which,
if they are as they seem to be, are in
principle outside of the realms of conventional scientific understanding. So
(03:36):
I had to pick very carefully which university I wanted
to go to to study psychology, but it gave a
platform for parapsychology, and yet I was having to deal
with college I was still sixteen to eighteen, had to
deal with this college level and the psychology teachers they said, oh,
just to let you know, there is no such thing
as a parapsychologist. And this was a head of psychology,
(03:58):
and I said, but I know a number of parents
psychologists and her response was, oh, I would like to
speak to them. It's just very bizarre. So I pushed through,
did my qualifications there, got into university and my starting
point with the University of Northampton, they got a third
year unit module in the psychology curriculum for parapsychology and
(04:21):
they had five or six parapsychologists there at the time,
some very well known ones as well, Professor Chris Rowe,
Dr Richard Broughton, who was one of the research directors
for the Ryan Research Center in Durham, North Carolina originally,
and so that's where I ended up, and throughout all
my degrees, that's where I've ended up going back to
and staying that that's my career.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
It's a remarkable career, isn't it.
Speaker 5 (04:46):
It is.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
I'm certainly in a very unique position because there's probably
about three hundred parapsychologists worldwide, and there's only a select
few of them that have it as a full time career.
So I'm in that privileged position where my job in
day out is effectively a full time ghostbuster, the scientific type.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
One of your favorite books is called Telephone Calls from
the Dead.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
How did you key in on that story?
Speaker 5 (05:13):
Well, that was still during my undergraduate training. So as
I was doing my.
Speaker 4 (05:17):
Psychology degree, I was reading a number of books by d.
Speaker 5 (05:21):
Scott Rogo and Raymond Baylist.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
They were both from California, and scott Rogo, like me,
had had a very early fascination with paranormal and also
I think his early writing was on vampires as well,
and he started to shift away from that and he
was doing haunting investigations just like I was following up
with people's interviews of their experiences. And his very first
(05:45):
book was on paranormal music when people just randomly hear
musical sounds, and yet it doesn't appear to have any source.
So where are people hearing this musical this singing from me?
He wrote that when he was an undergraduate. So all
the books I was reading, I wrote going bayless, and
I was just throwing them on a pile of books
that I got in my room and thinking, oh, I'll
read that later. And I was reading far more parapsychology
(06:08):
than I was any other area of psychology. I bought
one second hand book that was called Phone Calls from
the Dead, a two year investigation into an incredible phenomenon.
Just looked at it briefly and then stuck it on
the pile, and I didn't think anything more of it.
It didn't capture my attention straight away. I just knew
that it was just one unique book where they'd co
(06:29):
written the whole thing, rather than doing a forward for each.
Speaker 5 (06:32):
Other's book or research papers.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
And then it was a news report on MSA News
at the time regarding a train collision in California. I
think it was a freight train and a commuter train
head on collision, and there was a passenger on there
called Charles Peck.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
His family reported.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
That around I guess ten o'clock at night, the trainer crashed.
They were receiving multiple calls from his mobile phone to
theirs and when they picked up, all they could hear
was static on the line, and when they called back,
it just went to voicemail, as though the phone was
switched off or the battery had died. Now there was
a live I think a live rescue party. It was
(07:12):
on live new channels that rescuers were going in trying
to help people from the wreckage of this train crash.
So the family realized what had happened, and so every
time they were getting a call, they were saying, don't worry, Dad,
the rescuers are on the way. They're coming to help you,
thinking that he's just in reach of his phone, but
for whatever reason, he can't talk, and he just keeps
calling his family for help. And it was around three
(07:33):
am the call stopped, and that was at the very
point that they found his body. The phone was never recovered,
but the media widely publicized it as a phone call
from the dead and the family also seemingly took comfort
from that idea as well. So that really captured my imagination.
And then I thought, but there wasn't really a conversation.
(07:53):
It was just static and repeat a call. So what's
in this book by Rogo and Baylists? So I picked
it up and I read it from cover to cover,
and in some of those instances, people are having some
five to ten fifteen minute conversations with people, only to
discover afterwards that person had died some twenty four hours beforehand,
or in some cases they know the person has died
(08:14):
and yet they still get a strange call that has
a few voices and words and phrases.
Speaker 5 (08:18):
Said in it.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
So that's how I discovered the book, and I started
writing some updated articles on the topic. I was looking
into how we've got iPhones and text messages and emails,
started looking for new accounts, and then I got help
from the Californian Institute at Intecourse Studies in San Francisco.
They went through Scott Rogo's archive for me and found
some additional cases, so I looked at those and then
(08:42):
I started collecting some modern ones as well. That's how
it all kicked off around two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I think nowadays cal the so many phones have caller ideability.
Do these calls come in with caller ID? And if
they too, what's the number?
Speaker 4 (09:00):
Well, the thing is with Rogo and Bayliss, we're talking
about a book that was completed by nineteen seventy nine,
and so a lot of their cases span the nineteen hundreds.
So everything they go from everything with a wireless telegraph
of Morse code all the way through to various types
of landline, but purely landline. I think there were only
(09:20):
two cases of voicemails because recording systems for mystic calls
was only just coming in. With the cases that I've
looked at, sometimes there were instances of no caller ID.
The unique thing when they looked into their cases was
that sometimes in following up with the phone company, there
(09:40):
was no record of a call taking place at the
time that witnesses say that one did go through, and
so that's quite unique. Other times it was apparently placed
through a long distance call exchange. With modern technology now
there was far more room for fraud and error to
take place, just because the phones that we work on
so sophisticated, even fifteen years ago. When I started looking
(10:03):
into this, there were different methods via the Internet to
go and send text messages that would not display sender information,
no name, no date, no number. You would just get
a blank message if you paid into this original kind
of website. As things are starting out, I'm sure things
have advanced far more than that now. So the ruper fraud,
(10:26):
hoax and error is far greater now. But there have
been some instances of no care or ID, but that
just nowadays leads to a lot of suspicion as to well,
where is it coming from?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Right?
Speaker 5 (10:36):
That's the problem.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Are we still getting the calls nowadays? Though?
Speaker 5 (10:41):
Apparently so.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
I mean, we've got a really big show over here.
I don't know how many of you are starting to
hear a bit over there. But we've had various paranormal
shows over time, and I've been involved in various pilots
and cable TV shows for the paranormal. But one that's
really done well is a BBC radio for production called
on Cap a guy called Danny Robbins, and he did
(11:03):
a podcast over ten years ago called Haunted, and that's
when I first met him. He came to the University
of Northampton and he interviewed as about ghosts and mediumship
and lab work, and essentially in his show on Canny,
he just takes a single case from people and then
goes through their story over the course of half an hour,
and he breaks it down, this is their backstory, what happened,
(11:25):
and then the person speaks, and then there's interlude, and
then he'll bring on two experts. He'll bring in a skeptic,
usually someone with a parapsychology background, and a believer who
might be involved with theology or there a ghost hunter
something like that. And one of the shows on there
that has become most popular was one called Harry Call,
(11:45):
and it was of a guy called Will where wherever
he was going, I think he was in his late
teens early twenties. He was getting these repeated calls, usually
once that he'd missed, where someone else answered and they'd
leave a message for him saying Harry called. And I
think Harry was someone that he'd known that had passed away.
And it wasn't just this one off. Wherever he went
(12:06):
business calls were happening that he was missing and someone
else is picking up and saying, well, someone called you
called Harry, So that was really odd and it's really
captured people's imaginations. And then most recent one they did
Uncanny USA and it was the fourth series and the
second episode, Dad's Phone. I did that one as a skeptic,
and it involved it wasn't a modern phone, but the
(12:29):
father in the case, he was deceased, his job had
been a spy.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
He was a.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
Secret agent, and two got this sophisticated telephone system at
his house that was now disconnected. But his daughter, who
had not particularly got on well with him, was having
repeated telephone calls on this sophisticated system, and a guy
that her father knew was at the house one time
when one of these calls took place, and he was
(12:55):
the one who's got to answer it, and he pulled
it off course to check the whole system and.
Speaker 5 (12:59):
Realized there was no wiring in it.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
So it really freaked them out that there was still
getting not only a ringing, but there was this strange
static on the line that they believed was responsive. When
you spoke to it, you heard these different tones in
the statics. Yeah, these calls are still happening whenever these
things like and Kenny has mentioned on the Internet and
social media. Loads of people seem to be reaching out
and sharing their strange telephone experiences, particularly around the time
(13:24):
twenty four hours of losing someone really close. So you know,
it could be a sense of presence, it could be
seeing an apparition, it could be dreaming of someone.
Speaker 5 (13:31):
But strange telephone.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
Experiences seem to be quite high up there, So yeah.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
They're there.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
The fact that it's happening and they're using technology and
electronics tells you what about what the other side might
be part of.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
I don't know what it particularly tells us, but certainly
around nineteen twenty it was starting to fascinate a lot
of people. There were so many amateur inventors that were
trying to create telephones to the dead. Here in Nottingham
there was a chap called Frederick Melton, and he produced
a little book look called a Psychic Telephone, in which
(14:10):
he discussed his second prototype of this telephone's contact the dead,
which strangely, of all of its components, contained a.
Speaker 5 (14:17):
Balloon you heard me write, a rubber balloon that.
Speaker 4 (14:21):
He had his son blow up with his own breath.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
His son was very skeptical of the paranormal but he.
Speaker 4 (14:27):
Believed that his son still had some sort of psychic
ability because whenever he was close by and they were
holding seances, the activity got heightened.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
So he said to his.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
Son, I need an element of view inside this device.
So got him to blow up this balloon and attached
it to all the components.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
And so this was taken.
Speaker 4 (14:45):
Around to very spiritualist churches and apparently with some success.
But ghost under Harry Price had to go up building
this machine and got no success. American psychical researcher Herold Carrington,
he built this device and got no success. So what
was going on with the original one? If you look
into State Magazine and loads of other outlets at the time,
(15:05):
other people were coming forward claiming that they built these devices.
But most famous of all would be Thomas Edison. So
in nineteen twenty he went to Scientific American and gave
an interview, so really good out there, and he was
talking generally a bit about his research and interest in spiritualism.
His parents were spiritualists. He got lab assistants that were
(15:26):
Polish American psychics some of them, and they were holding
seances sometimes at the end of the day. And what
he said in his interview was that he was working
on a device producers just that he wanted the telephone
to contact the dead. Whether he was jumping on the
bandwagon of what people were already saying they'd done and
were publishing that, I don't know. But he describes in
(15:48):
detail saying, I want this device to contain components that
are so delicate that if the dead do indeed leave
this earth and they want to contact the living, it
will at least give them a chance to get in touch.
And so it comes up with this idea, He discusses it,
it discusses.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
The components, and yet there is nothing.
Speaker 4 (16:08):
Nothing is produced, there's no blueprints, there's no final products.
Speaker 5 (16:11):
Imagine if you could commercialize something like that.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
If it actually worked, you could just go down to
the local store and buy a telephone that you can
use to contact your deceased relatives. But by nineteen thirty one,
Thomas Edison had passed away. There's no such device discovered,
and the Thomas Edison Museum.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
I think it's in Texas.
Speaker 4 (16:29):
They claim that one of their highest requests is for
people to see pictures of this device, or to see
the blueprints as well, but they have no such things,
and over time people claim that they've discovered such things,
but it's certainly not reached the Thomas Edison Museum. So
people have thought that if the deads are surviving in
some way, you need electrical components, something with delicate instrumentations,
(16:52):
and it will give them a chance for getting touched.
It's an idea. I don't know how I feel about
that as a parapsychologist and a skepe, but there's certainly
a lot of really really good evidence for the idea
of something mind personality memory surviving.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
As I was involved in.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
The Robert Bigelow Essay Awards that took place in Las Vegas,
and many people, many parapsychologists all over the world, came
forward for that.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
That's one that Jeffrey Misch loved one, I think, right, yeah, yeah,
he did.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Jeff a good friend. I was texting him last night
and we've worked together on his recent parapsychology programs. But
he brought together years and years and years worth of
his new Thinking Allowed program and where people have discussed
survival of death. Yeah, Jeff won the half million dollar prize.
We got an honorable mention, so we were very happy
with that. Vegas and the people again with it people
(17:44):
within those essays they've mentioned telephone phenomena. Jeff they did
in his essay, so it's it's popular.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Can you imagine the person who receives the phone call, caw,
the look on their face when they take that.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Yeah, I think it would be a variety of different things.
I think some people would think it's a prank. I
think some people would be absolutely shocked and dumbfounded and not.
Speaker 5 (18:11):
Know what to say. I think that some other people.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
If you've just recently lost that person, they've been in
such a state of shock that they would forget that
the person has died. And if they're saying that it
was like any other call, then that's what they're treating
it like. They're treating it like you and I are
talking right now. It's not till after the call that things,
the reality starts to catch up with them. That hang
on a minute, They passed away yesterday, This can't.
Speaker 5 (18:37):
Possibly have happened.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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George Noory
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