DEAD CALLING: They Answered Their Phone But No One Alive Was Calling Them

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
True, unexplained stories about prank phone calls and mysterious harassers
have always been the bread and butter of horror movies.
But what happens when an unnamed creep starts making scary
prank calls in real life? What about a loved one
calling you from the site of a train crash where

(00:24):
they died moments before calling you, a dead girlfriend sending
you a private message on Facebook, or an email from
a deceased friend. I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.

(00:47):
Welcome weirdos. I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.
Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore,
the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
Coming up in this episode phantom phone calls and dms

(01:11):
from the deceased. In a very remote part of Mongolia,
one person made an incredible find. It's a discovery that
could easily turn our understanding of ancient history upside down.
What would you do if you saw a flash of
light down the hall of a nursing home when you

(01:31):
dream of loved ones who've passed away, do you consider
it just a dream, or is that deceased family member
reaching out to speak to you. A college girl leaves
campus in her car, never to be seen again. But first,
A female serial killer is described as a sadistic killer

(01:52):
who reveled in her evil actions while pretending to cure
people in her sanitarium. We begin with that story. Now,
bult your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights,
and come with me into the weird darkness. Doctor Linda

(02:22):
Burfield Hazard was known as a fasting specialist, meaning she
believed that with fasting one could cure themselves of all diseases.
Starving the body is used in many religious ceremonies as
well as meditative practices. Clear the body, Clear the mind.
Doctor Hazard was labeled as a sadistic killer because she

(02:46):
derived pleasure from her macabre methods. Doctor Hazard would convince
her patients that with her methods, they would be cured
completely of their ailment within months. The doctor created a
sanitarium which she aimed Wilderness Heights. The treatment was basic
and evil. She would feed them eight ounces of a

(03:08):
watered down to mate a soup or asparagus soup, and
some orange juice once a day during their stay and
convince them that through this new method, they would be
able to go home cured in no time. When the
patients complained of starvation, she would convince them just to
hold off a bit longer because they were almost done

(03:28):
with the treatment. Needless to say, many of them suffered
a horrible death. Neighbors from around town dubbed doctor Hazzard's
place Starvation Heights, since it was not uncommon for them
to run across patients who tried to escape looking like
living skeletons. Many of the doctor's neighbors would take it

(03:48):
upon themselves to feed these patients. One eye witness described
how her parents found a patient of doctor Hazard crawling
on the road. She described them looking like Holocaust victims.
The eyewitnesses told of how her parents took the person
home and fed them. While her patients were moribent, laying

(04:09):
in what essentially became their deathbeds, the doctor and her
husband would take their time and steal everything they could
from the patients, going through their belongings, stealing cash and valuables,
as well as forging documents for monetary gains. Around nineteen twelve,
doctor Linda Hazzard was convicted for the death of a

(04:30):
wealthy Australian woman, Claire Williamson, who at the time of
her death weighed less than fifty pounds. The only reason
why doctor Hazzard was caught was because Claire Williamson's sister, Dora,
was also in treatment and had managed to get a
hold of a family member to come to a rescue.
They both testified against the doctor, who was found guilty

(04:52):
and sent to Walla Walla prison in Washington State. After
serving only two years, she was pardoned by the governor
and the doctor and her husband fled to New Zealand.
Years later, in nineteen twenty, doctor Hazzard returned to Washington
State and opened a new sanitarium called School of Health.

(05:13):
Not having a medical license anymore, she continued starving her
patients under her new sanitarium. Fifteen years later, a fire
broke out and burned the place to the ground, never
to be built again. Doctor Linda Hazzard, now elderly, fell
ill one day, and like most delusional killers, she knew

(05:34):
that her treatment was the only thing that could save her.
Doctor Hazzard died in nineteen thirty eight after months of fasting,
dying by her own hands the same way many of
her victims had perished before. It's only a shame that
justice did not prevail in this story. Serving two years

(05:55):
of a twenty year sentence for murdering countless victims speaks
volumes of the jaded justice system of the olden days.
Doctor Hazzard's story does not end there. The story does
have its paranormal side, as you can imagine. Current residence
of the actual place, which was known as Starvation Heights,
were interviewed. The old sanitarium, now turned into a home,

(06:20):
still stands in good condition. Many of the old original fixtures,
like the kitchen sink, bathtub, and even window panes still exist.
Reporters interviewed people that currently inhabit the building. They are
well aware of its macab history and find it fascinating
to be living in a place with such gruesome history.

(06:40):
The current resident showed the original bathtub in which doctor
Hazzard would dismember her victims. The bathtub is still in
use by the husband, wife and kids. The kitchen sink,
which was once used to prepare watery to mate a
soup to starving victims, is now being used by the
family in a normal day to day lifestyle. You would

(07:03):
assume that with such a tragic history, the building would
be torn down a lah Jeffrey Dahmer style. Apparently, some
people are not bothered by such things that happened in
the past. The current residents did mention some paranormal activity
that happens around their home. Feelings of being watched all
the time is not uncommon, as if there was always

(07:26):
someone in the house with them. They talked about faint
apparitions of faces that were seen through the time stained
window panes, victims of doctor hazard. Perhaps Mongolia a land

(07:58):
full of mysteries, little known to the Western world. As
you're about to find out, some stories are so incredible
they seem almost unreal, And yet those who have witnessed
things beyond our comprehension swear their accounts are truthful. In
a very remote part of Mongolia, one person made an

(08:20):
incredible find. It's a discovery that could easily turn our
understanding of ancient history upside down. Was it all imagination?
Did the monks lie? This event is shrouded in mystery,
and no one has been able to shed light on
what really happened in Mongolia on that day when ancient

(08:40):
secrets hidden in an artificial cave were found by mistake.
Whenever we encounter a controversial, unexplained ancient mystery, there will
always be those who say the events never took place,
and those who are convinced the account is genuine. Here
we think you deserve to know what happened, and you

(09:00):
can judge for yourself what you want to believe or not.
So be prepared to go on a long journey and
uncover an astonishing secret. The following story deals with an
event that took place in a monastery in Mongolia. It
should be added right from the start there are certain

(09:20):
problems with this account, especially concerning names of people and places,
but we will deal with these historical and geographical problems later.
In nineteen twenty, an American named John Spencer made an
astonishing discovery in a remote Mongolian monastery. At the time,
Spencer was living in luxury in a large, very comfortable

(09:43):
house in China. He earned money on illegal trades like
arms and drugs. When there was a dispute between some
of his clients, he was forced to leave everything behind. Overnight,
he fled his house and escaped the country. He was
a wanted man and he had no other choice. Than
to flee on foot. Without much food or water, John

(10:06):
Spencer struggled through marshlands, mountains, and desert until he finally
reached Mongolia. He was so exhausted and tormented by thirst, hunger,
and fever that he collapsed on the ground. He most
likely would have died there if it had not been
for a group of wandering Buddhist monks who found him
and carried him to the Lamaced monastery at Turin. The

(10:29):
monks nursed him day and night, and soon Spencer regained
some of his former strength. John Spencer was not the
only foreigner who stayed at the monastery at the time.
Another American guest was also present there. He was a
businessman whose name was William Thompson. Thompson had been with
the monks for several weeks and he was absolutely fascinated

(10:52):
with the religion and tradition of the Far East. It
is very likely that Thompson told Spencer several interesting things
concerning the monastery, because instead of staying in bed until
he made a full recovery, Spencer was very interested in
exploring the monastery. He was an adventurer and a man

(11:12):
who liked money. He thought that he could discover a
hidden treasure that would make him a rich man once again.
One day, early in the morning, Spencer went outside to
explore the surroundings. He discovered a worn stone staircase not
far from the monastery. He followed it to a narrow door,
entering a brightly colored, polygonal room of twelve or more sides.

(11:38):
Spencer stared at the walls that were decorated with strange drawings,
which seemed to depict constellations. He was able to recognize
one of them. It was the constellation Taurus. He knew
that because it was the sign under which he was
born and he had an engraved representation of Torus on
a medallion hanging around his neck. With his finger, Spencer

(12:01):
touched the wall and followed the depicted constellations. When he
came to the end and touched the drawing representing the Pleiades,
the wall suddenly opened before him. Spencer could see a
narrow corridor. He took a few steps and was now
able to distinguish a dim green glow coming from a distance.

(12:22):
He looked around and noticed some boulders on the ground.
He took one of them and pushed it into the doorway.
So that it would remain open. He advanced forward and
tried to follow the green light, but he was difficult.
The green light seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. At
the same time, it became clear to him that he

(12:43):
was inside a tunnel of an artificial cavern. Spencer continued
to follow the tunnel until it reached an intersection of
several available tunnels at the end. He thought for a
while and then took the one to the right. If
he kept to the right, probably not get lost, he thought.
At the time, he was unaware that he had chosen

(13:05):
the way dictated by the sketch of the Pleiades constellation
above the tunnel entrance. He walked for several minutes until
he reached the end of the tunnel. A large hall
opened out before him, and he found himself inside a
chamber where the green light was much stronger. Standing in
a row along one of the walls were twenty five

(13:27):
to thirty rectangular enshrined coffins, and one of them contained
a surprise. The explorer was obviously shocked, but he couldn't
believe that his eyes had deceived him. He was convinced
that the horrifying sight was real The discussion with the
monks gave him much to think about, but was he

(13:48):
told the truth? At the end, we are confronted with
some problems that may or may not have a proper explanation.
Some missing links can be explained, but we are also
left with a couple of unanswered questions. Undoubtedly, this is
one of the most curious ancient mysteries. Spencer thought that
he'd found the treasures he was hoping for and started

(14:10):
to open the coffins. One by one, he pushed the
lids off the coffins. In the first three coffins, he
discovered corpses of monks who wore the same clothes as
the monks in the monastery. In the fourth coffin, he
uncovered a body of a woman dressed in man's clothing.
In the fifth coffin was a man from India dressed

(14:33):
in a red silk cloak. Another coffin contained a man
dressed in garb from the seventeen hundreds. There was also
the body of a woman whose origin he could not determine.
All the bodies were surprisingly well preserved and showed no
signs of decomposition. None of the coffins, though contained treasures,

(14:53):
he was searching for only well preserved dead bodies. When
he reached the last shrine and opened it, he could
hardly believe his eyes it contained something not human. The
small creature inside was dressed in a sort of silver suit.
According to Spencer's story, he found the body of a

(15:14):
man was inside, dressed in a sort of silver mail,
and who in place of a head, had a ball
of pure silver, with round holes where the eyes should
have been, and an oval thing full of small holes
in lieu of a nose, and there was no mouth.
Spencer was still in shock, but he leaned forward to
touch the corpse. Suddenly the big round eyes were wide open,

(15:38):
emitting a horrifying green gleam. Spencer was not a man
who was easily scared, but this sight made him absolutely terrified.
He screamed and fled as fast as he could. He
managed to remember the way out and ran until he
reached the doorway leading to the room of constellations. Then

(15:59):
came the next shot. To his astonishment, Spencer saw it
was now dark and night outside. He hurried to Thompson
and related the whole story. I must have walked for
two or three hours, all told. It's impossible that I
could have lost all sense of time to such an
extent there, Spencer said. Thompson was a little angry that

(16:20):
Spencer had taken advantage of the monk's hospitality, but he
decided to tell the monks about his friend's experience. The
next morning, Spencer was called before the Lama of a
very high degree. The monk was neither angry nor upset. Instead,
he smiled and greeted Spencer in a friendly manner. My
poor friend, your fever has played a trick on you.

(16:42):
Why didn't you expect to be cured by visiting our
holy places, the llama said, smiling. Spencer inquired about the
corpse without a mouth and was told there are neither
corpses nor vaults down there. However, this did not convince Spencer,
so the monks agen tested that they should visit the
chamber together. The Lama accompanied Spencer to the room of constellations,

(17:06):
touched a wall with his finger, and walked through a
different tunnel than the Wan Spencer had traversed. After a
few minutes, they reached a room, but this chamber was
much smaller than the Wan Spencer had visited. There was
an altar in the center of this room. On the altar,
there was a series of many coffins. These were the

(17:27):
same coffins Spencer had seen earlier, but they were much smaller.
This is what you really saw, said the monk, and
lifted the lids that revealed perfect miniature replicas of the
bodies Spencer had seen. They are images of people who
have enriched the world with their wisdom, and so we
honor them. It was your fever, my poor friend, which

(17:49):
made you think you were standing in front of a
real sarcophaguy And as you can see, there was no
green light, but only the yellow one from our humble lamps,
explained the monk. Spencer was convinced the monk was not
telling the truth, though it was all an effort to
deceive him, He did not wish to argue with the
lama and contradict him. Instead, he asked about the silver

(18:12):
being with a large round head and no mouth. The
lama pointed to the pleiades on the map and said
a high lord from the stars. Later, when Spencer talked
to Thompson, he said, it might easily be that I
still had some fever, but I absolutely reject the idea
that I dreamt it all or was the victim of delirium.

(18:32):
I lost the heel of one of my shoes down
in the labyrinth and scratched my hands at least a
dozen times. When I was feeling the stones for possible snags,
I touched the clothes on that corpse and noticed the
veins and wrinkles. The piece of wall which opened was
on the left of the entrance, whereas the opening the
lama stood in front of was almost right in front,
slightly to the right. The monk has tried to convince

(18:54):
me by showing a midiature copy of what I actually saw.
A few days later, shortly after he had left the monastery,
John Spencer disappeared without a trace. He was never heard
from again. The reason we can read about Spencer's remarkable
discovery is because William Thompson published the entire story in

(19:16):
the periodical Adventure after returning to America. Thompson always maintained
that every word of the published story was actually what
Spencer redtold him. Thompson also added, I have, on some
occasions myself seeing corpses in Mongolian monasteries preserved intact for centuries,
perhaps thousands of years, and have heard people talk several

(19:37):
times about silver men who had come from the stars.
This is undoubtedly a remarkable story. Legends and myths of
the Far East are full of accounts of shining, flying
spheres and visitors from the stars who came to the
earth in ancient times. It should be added that the
American Indians and Australian Aborigines also referred to cre without

(20:00):
mouth who come down from the heavens. The story was
described in the books Not of This World by Peter Colossimo,
as well as The Chinese Roswell by Hartwig Hausdorf. Those
who questioned the account say the Turin monastery has never
been found. It's correct, but we should also remember that
hundreds of monasteries were destroyed during the period of communist

(20:24):
rule in Mongolia. Elizabeth Kendall mentions Turin in her book
A Wayfarer in China Impressions of a trip across West
China and Mongolia, stating that this was wants a village. Turin,
not a house, but a village, she says, built in
and out among the rocks. It was an extraordinary site
to stumble upon here on the edge of the uninhabited desert.

(20:47):
A little Aparts from the rest were four large temples
crowned with gilt balls and fluttering banners, and leading off
from them were neat rows of small, white plastered cottages
with red timbers, the homes of two thousand Lamas who
live here. The whole thing had the look of a
seaside camp meeting resort. The greatest problem with the entire

(21:08):
story is that we cannot confirm the existence of either
John Spencer or William Thompson. Until we find evidence of
their existence, we can only relate the story. Due to
lack of evidence, we're unable to say whether this incredible
event took place or not. As stated at the beginning
of this story, it is a remarkable discovery, and it's

(21:31):
naturally up to you to form your own opinion of
what did or did not happen in ancient Mongolia. Coming up.
When you dream of loved ones who've passed away, do
you consider it just a dream or is that deceased

(21:51):
family member reaching out to speak to you. Plus, a
college girl leaves campus in her car, never to be
seen again. These stories and more when Weird Darkness Returns.

(22:26):
I was thirteen years old when I moved in with
my mom. I was a good kid, but my dad's
girlfriend didn't like me from the moment she laid eyes
on me three years earlier. I told my dad what
she did when he wasn't around, but his response was
always to placate her. In November nineteen ninety two, she'd

(22:47):
given him an ultimatum, and as always, she won. I
was moving out. I was upset that my dad chose
his girlfriend over his daughter, but moving out was also
a weight lifted off my adolescent shoulders. My mom loved me.
I never questioned that, but my time with her would
prove short. My bedroom was small and could only fit

(23:10):
a futon from a second hand store. The next thing
I became aware of was my mom's cat. My mom
adopted a tiny kitten to make up for a cat
we had to surrender years before. Eppie was the little
black runt of her litter, and I'm told she was
the last of her litter to be adopted. I was

(23:31):
constantly aware that I was unwonted, but life went on.
I started classes at a new school, and life slowly
took on a sense of normalcy. The days marched by,
and the air outside grew chilly. It was December, and
that normalcy was about to be turned upside down. I

(23:52):
came home this night to find my mom pale and white.
I thought she looked as though she had died, but
she hadn't died. She was alive and talking on the phone.
I must have had a habit of fighting bedtime, because
I overheard her comment on how easily I went to
bed that night. She then chalked it up to a
full moon outside. I climbed into bed, closed my eyes,

(24:15):
and fell asleep. But the night wasn't done with me yet.
My grandma had died a decade earlier. My Grandma was
never a frequent or recurring character in my dreams, but
tonight she would be back. I saw her so clearly
in my mind's eye that this dream is how I
remember her face today. My Grandma looked right at me

(24:39):
and told me that I wouldn't have my mother for
much longer. She made it clear I only had days
left that I had to get ready to let her go.
I spent the next morning trying to make sense of
the night before, while behaving as close to perfect as
I knew how. For the next three days, news would

(24:59):
soon come that my mom's dad had died. Life as
a single mother was unfair and difficult. Dad couldn't even
be relied on to pay child support. But nothing ever
stopped Mom until the day her dad died. My mom
fell into an immediate deep depression, and by morning December tenth,

(25:20):
nineteen ninety two, my mom would be joining her father
in death. She passed away in her sleep. She couldn't
live without her dad. I left her apartment for the
last time with Eppie, who was now my cat. Though
I would never again hear from my grandma, my mom

(25:41):
would soon after passing make herself known to at least
three people, myself included. After her passing, my mom has
made one phone call the day after she died. It
called to her best friend Michael, to say goodbye. Her
face has been repeatedly seen as a partiall and once
is a full form apparition in the home of another friend, Elaine.

(26:06):
For me, she never appeared in a physical form. As
a kid watching TV, I would hear her talking to me,
telling me to turn off the TV and go do
my homework. As I got older and times got tough,
I tried talking to my mother. Feeling foolish, I asked
if she could hear me, would she make herself known
by turning off a specific lamp. I talked aloud in

(26:29):
an empty room, and when I finished, that lamp flickered.
This lamp would flicker again in the future, but only
after talking to my mom. I was never able to
replicate the lamp's flicker. I'm now thirty seven years old,
one year older than my mom was when she died.

(26:50):
I don't think she's here anymore, or at least she's
gone quiet for a while. One February day in two
thousand and four, MARAA Murray climbed into her car and

(27:11):
drove away from her dorm room at the university in
Massachusetts Amherst. She headed north, her destination unknown. As night descended,
a local in New Hampshire caught one last glimpse of
Mara and her wrecked vehicle along a desolate stretch of
Route one twelve. By the time police responded to the crash,

(27:33):
Mara was gone, seemingly vanished into thin air. MARAA. Murray's
disappearance shocked her family and friends. Fourteen years later, the
cold case continues to baffle authorities. Armchair detectives and internet
slewths around the world. It has inspired everything from books

(27:53):
and podcasts to an increasingly bizarre web of conspiracy theories
and true crime message born threads. Yet the mystery remains,
what do we truly know about the disappearance of twenty
one year old Maura Murray. On the surface, Maura Murray's
life seemed ideal. She was a promising student at the

(28:14):
University of Massachusetts Amherst in pursuit of a nursing career.
She came from a loving family and shared a strong
relationship with her boyfriend of a few years. Yet all
was not as it seemed. In November two thousand and three,
around three months before her disappearance, Mara was caught fraudulently
using a credit card number that was not her own.

(28:37):
The young woman had to have been desperate. She used
the card only to order pizza, charging less than eighty dollars. Then,
on February seventh, two thousand and four, two days before
her disappearance, Mara's father, Fred, arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts for
a visit. Maura borrowed her father's car to go to

(28:57):
a party. Around three thirty eight. While driving back to
Fred's room at the Quality Inn, Mara hit a guardrail
on Brute Dyne. The police responded to the scene, but
they didn't perform a sobriety test. Mara may have believed
that these encounters with the law would tarnish her professional record,
thus threatening her dreams of becoming a nurse. Sam sleuths

(29:20):
point to this as a motive for Mara to disappear
of her own volition. The theory seems extreme, though Fred
Murray doesn't buy it. Since there was no ticket sided
at the scene of the crash, there would be no
reason for Mara to believe this was the end of
the line. Nevertheless, something changed in Mara after the crash

(29:41):
that night. In the early hours of February ninth, Mara
researched and printed out map quest directions to two different locations,
one set that led to the Berkshires, the other to Burlington, Vermont.
Throughout the day, she also phoned vacation rentals in the
Northeast in about availabilities. Nothing was booked. Then Mara's messages

(30:05):
took a dark turn. She wrote to her professors and
work supervisors stating that she would be away from campus
for a week. The reason there was an unexpected death
in the Murray family. No such death, however, had occurred.
At approximately three thirty pm, Maura Murray got in her
car and left the UMass Amherst campus. Inside her vehicle

(30:29):
were clothes, toiletries, some textbooks, and her birth control pills.
Soon after her departure, Mara was recorded withdrawing two hundred
and eighty dollars from a nearby eightm. She then entered
a liquor store, where she purchased wine, coffee, liqueur, and vodka.
Security cameras captured Mara at the atm, providing some of

(30:50):
the last confirmed sightings of her before the disappearance. In
the footage, she was alone. Whether Mora meant to temporarily
escape the pressure of her life or disappear for good
may never be clear. Upon leaving the liquor store, Mara
drove north and then left Massachusetts some time after seven pm.

(31:12):
One hundred forty five miles north of Amherst, in Haverville,
New Hampshire, a resident heard a heavy thump outside her home.
She peered out her window to see a car crashed
against a snowbank on Route one twelve. The witness phoned
the police. Meanwhile, an area bus driver who lived down
the road came upon the scene of the accident. He

(31:34):
noticed a young woman, whom he later identified as Maura Murray.
The bus driver offered to help, the young woman convinced
him not to call police, claiming she had already spoken
to triple A. The man agreed to the woman's request
and left, Yet he found her claim about a phone
call odd he knew the area lacked cell phone service.

(31:55):
Upon arriving home, he decided to phone the police. At
seven forty six pm, police arrived at the scene. The
car was locked, windshield cracked, and the air bags deployed.
The police later reported that they found an empty soda
bottle that smelled as though it had once been filled
with alcohol, but Maura Murray was nowhere to be found.

(32:20):
The bus driver who stopped and spoke with Mora didn't
think she seemed intoxicated. Nevertheless, many theorists believed that Mara
had been drinking that night. A shaken and inebriated Mara
may have left the scene of her own accord. She
may have stumbled into the dark woods and lost her way, or,
as Mara's father maintains, she may have encountered a dangerous

(32:42):
individual who wished to do her harm. The following day,
at twelve twenty one pm, police issued a BOLO be
on the lookout for the young woman. Twenty four hours
after the discovery of the abandoned car, police officially declared
Maura Murray missing. Morris family, especially Fred, view the police's

(33:03):
investigation as substandard. They point to this slow response and
failure to thoroughly investigate every lead as the reason why
morris fate remains a mystery. The police, meanwhile, have criticized
Fred's involvement in the investigation. The twenty fourteen article in
Boston Magazine cites Jeff Strelzen, chief of the homicide unit

(33:25):
at the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office and the lead
prosecutor in the Murray investigation, who said Fred Murray had
been a difficult person to deal with from the beginning.
Strelsen went on to describe Fred's anger at the police
as understandable but misplaced. As relations between Morris's family and
the police soured, rumors of infidelity and secret lives surfaced

(33:49):
among armchair detectives and internet sleuth's intent on cracking the case.
James Renner, author of true crime addict How I Lost
Myself in the mysterious disappear searance of MARAA. Murray claimed
to have evidence that Mara and her boyfriend were cheating
on one another. Others believe that Mara may have been pregnant, bellymic,

(34:10):
or both and fled to escape judgment from her loved ones.
Theories then split over whether she simply got lost and
perished somewhere in the woods, purposefully disappeared to begin a
new life, or if someone snatched her along Route one twelve.
Despite legions of obsessives searching for the truth, there have

(34:30):
been no definitive breaks in the case. I've been a

(34:53):
personal support worker for fourteen years and have witnessed several
strange occurrences, including a few that stick out. This happened
during a graveyard shift a few years after I started.
The night started like any other. There were no call
bells in that facility, as we visually checked everyone every
hour during our first round. As I walked to the

(35:15):
end of the hall, I saw a white flash out
of the corner of my eye in the doorway of
Room three twelve. I quickly turned to look, but nothing
was there. I continued on with my task, thinking my
mind was playing tricks on me. It happened again during
the second round, but this time the flash of white
was in the doorway of room three thirteen. I ignored the flash,

(35:39):
thinking I was still seeing things. On our third round,
we checked on the women in room three twelve and
one of the ladies had a very frightened look on
her face. Her eyes were fixed on the corner of
the ceiling above her bed, and she looked terrified. This
patient had advanced dementia and was nonverbal. She was a
very pleasant lady who often shuffled around the halls, confused

(36:02):
about who or where she was. The charge nurse sat
with the woman, giving her as much comfort as possible.
The patient passed away suddenly. A few minutes later. We
completed her final care and continued with our night. A
few hours later, as I folded laundry across from the
nurse station, I started to hear shuffling sounds coming down

(36:25):
the hall. Confused, I asked the nurse if she was
shuffling her feet under the desk. She said no, but
I hear it too. The shuffling continued slowly down the hall,
toward the dining room. To this day, I wonder if
it was the frightened patient taking one last walk down

(36:46):
the hall. Mysterious phone calls from the dead make for

(37:10):
excellent horror movie plots, but this eerie phenomenon also happens
in real life. Many stories of unexplained phone calls show
that they're not just the result of grief stricken imaginings,
Although people do try to explain these odd occurrences by
blaming malfunctioning cell phone technology, reports of phantom phone calls

(37:31):
go back to at least nineteen sixty seven. Charles Epek's
Metrolink death is one of the most prominent and creepy
stories about phone calls from dead people, since author Dean
Koontz's deceased mother phoned him to give him a warning,
which we'll tell you about later in the episode. Peck
was killed instantly in a horrible two thousand and eight

(37:53):
Metrolink commuter train accident where a total of twenty five
people died in one hundred and thirty five were injured.
But before anyone knew Peck was dead, his family members
received thirty five calls from his phone for several hours
following the disaster. Whether it was due to phone damage

(38:14):
or the train rider reaching out from beyond, we may
never know, but it's nice to believe that even those
who have passed are only a phone call away. Forty
nine year old Charles Peck worked for Delta Airlines. He
was considering leaving his job in Salt Lake City International
Airport for a job at Van Ey's Airport in Los
Angeles to be closer to his fiancee, Andrea Katz, and

(38:37):
he had an interview there. Although the couple was ready
to get married, the fact that they didn't live in
the same state was an issue, and then the disaster occurred.
Katz was on her way to pick him up from
the train station when she heard the news of the
accident on the radio. Peck had three children from a
previous marriage, one of whom was on his afterlife phone

(38:59):
call list. Andrea Katz heard about the crash on the
radio as she was driving to pick up Peck from
the train station, and was relieved when she received a
call from his phone. Other friends and family members of
Cats were in the same position. After the crash. Peck's
phone placed calls to his son, sister, brother, and stepmother.

(39:20):
In all, about thirty five calls were made during the
eleven hours that followed the accident. According to one source,
the final call from Peck's phone came at three twenty
eight am, about one hour before his body was found.
Charles Peck was a passenger on a Metrolink commuter train
traveling through the San Fernando Valley in California on September twelve,

(39:43):
two thousand and eight. It collided head on with a
Union Pacific freight train at eighty three miles per hour
when the conductor failed to stop at a red light.
The impact was devastating, and of the two hundred twenty
five people aboard the Metrolink, at least twenty five died
and more than a hundred were seriously injured. The engineer

(40:04):
sitting at the front of the train was killed instantly
as well. The freight train was carrying only three crew members,
but it was demolished in the accident. The disaster later
became known as the Chatsworth train crash, and it still
considered the worst commuter train accident in the history of California.
At first, pecks loved ones must have been excited when

(40:26):
they saw his name pop up on their phone screens.
As the calls continued, they had hope that he was
still alive and trapped within the rubble of the crash. Unfortunately,
they were unable to actually talk to him. All they
heard when they answered his calls was static. However, Andrea
Katz used the opportunity to communicate with their fiancee and

(40:48):
to let him know that she was with him, shouting
messages of encouragement like hanging in their baby, We're going
to get you out. You're gonna be okay. Other people
who claim to have received phone calls from Beyond also
report hearing static or a voice that seemed very faint
and far away. Before rescue workers discovered Charles Peck's body

(41:09):
in the wreckage, they had no reason not to believe
the calls placed to his family meant he was still alive.
As it became clear they probably weren't going to find
any survivors in the crash, their rescue efforts turned into
a mission to recover bodies, but when yet another call
came from Peck's phone, they decided to trace it to
find its location. Unfortunately, they discovered his body and knew

(41:33):
that he had died on impact. Police never revealed if
Peck's phone was found. Although rescue teams were excited because
the phone calls might mean Charles Peck was still alive,
that wasn't the case. They discovered Peck's body an hour
after the last phone call was placed. According to anecdotal
sources like forums and unsolved mysteries sites, the coroner was

(41:56):
unable to find signs that Peck had survived for any
amount of time after the crash, confirming the calls were
not made while he was still alive. Anyone who had
ever butt dialed a number knows it is possible to
make a phone call accidentally. Perhaps an object was sitting
on top of Peck's phone, causing it to make random calls.

(42:16):
The phone was most likely severely damaged during the disaster,
so it may have malfunctioned. Peck's broken phone may have
called his speed dial list. When his story was posted
on Reddit, several users shared their own creepy stories of
malfunctioning phones and posted eerie phone activity stories on online forums.

(42:36):
The possibility that Peck's phone suffered from technical issues shouldn't
be overlooked. Although rescue workers were able to locate Charles
Peck's body successfully. His phone was never discovered. It's possible
that it was completely destroyed in the disaster or damaged
to the point of malfunctioning. But why it made calls
to several of the people Peck was closest to we

(42:59):
may never know. Perhaps he was reaching out to tell
his loved ones not to worry or say goodbye. Maybe
he took it with him into the afterlife, like ghosts
who were seen in the clothes they were wearing when
they passed. Since the rescue team was able to trace
the calls to locate his body, maybe Peck was simply
leading them to it. No one will ever know for sure,

(43:21):
so this story may forever remain a mystery. Investigators believe
the conductor of the metrolink train was responsible for the
crash after he failed to stop at a red light.
The commuter train was running on the same track as
the freight train and was directly in his path. It's
likely that the conductor was distracted by his phone and

(43:42):
was too busy texting to notice his mistake. After the disaster,
a teenager came forward and admitted that they had received
a text from the conductor immediately before the crash. The
last text sent from the conductor's phone happened twenty two
seconds before the impact. Intrigued by the many stories of

(44:03):
people receiving phone calls from the deceased, PSI investigators d
Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayliss did research, and they published
a book about their findings in nineteen seventy nine. Their
research was recently continued by another paranormal researcher, Callum Cooper.
While some people have reported seeing the name or number
of a deceased acquaintance appear on their caller ID, others

(44:27):
claimed to have spoken to someone they later discovered passed
away before the call was made. According to lists of
true accounts by a paranormal researcher, someone named Krystal S shared,
I was at my mom's house and I was calling
a friend who lived nearby. She was at her cousin's house.
So I looked up the number in the phone book.
It was the only Owen's in the phone book, so

(44:49):
I knew it was my friend's cousin's number. I called
it and it didn't even ring, but an old lady answered.
She said hello, I asked, is Amelia there? Amelia is
my friend, Jessica's cousin. The old lady said, no, dear
Amelia isn't here. I should be expecting her any minute now.
So I thought nothing of it and hung up. I

(45:09):
told Jessica about it, and she said, Amelia's grandmother is dead.
And we were there all day long. We were sitting
right by the phone. It never rang all day. In
another anecdote from the same list, a salesperson named Mary
be remembers I made a sales call to Pennsylvania. It
started just like any other call. Yes, I need to

(45:30):
speak to mister or missus B. The woman identified herself
as missus B, and I continued on with a normal
sales call. She seemed very interested and asked a lot
of questions, but when I came to the decision making,
she quickly stopped me, insisting that I had to talk
to her husband. Her objections were the same every time
I attempted to close. She also quickly pointed out that

(45:53):
since his retirement, he spent a great deal of time
fishing and was not easy to get in touch with,
and it'd be best to try early in the morning
before he left for his favorite hobby. On the callback,
the husband did answer the phone. I introduced myself in
the normal fashion and explained that i'd been talking to
his wife the previous day and she had suggested that
I speak to him. You can imagine the shock and

(46:16):
horror when he stated to me, distraught lady, I don't
know who you were talking to, but my wife died
and I'm not in any mood to speak to anyone,
And with that he quickly hung up the phone. We've
all had our fair share of wrong numbers. More often

(46:38):
than not, they're pretty harmless. You tell the other person
they made a mistake, and then you go about your day.
But sometimes you get a phone call that sticks with
you the rest of your life. The kind of phone
call you can't explain, you know, the ones you can
only describe as phone call creepy pasta, or perhaps even
cell phone creepy pasta. Well, the good news is you're

(47:00):
not alone. There are tons of people who got creepy
phone calls, and chances are theirs have been just as bad,
if not worse, than yours. Up next on weird Darkness,

(47:30):
several Reddit users shared their tales of the creepiest phone
calls they've ever had over the years. These are the
phone calls that have kept people up at night for
weeks or even years. Were they real people, ghosts, versions
of people from a parallel dimension. We'll never know, but
it sure is creepy to think about. One redditor wrote

(47:53):
a few years ago, my brother would get a call
on his cell phone around two or three am every night.
He would answer it, and it was this hellish sounding
noise like static mixed with screams. He changed his cell
phone number after a month of this and it stopped.
Then after a week or so, it began again, the
exact same noise, exact same time. Finally, one day he

(48:16):
decided to back dial the call. It was an old
man that had no clue what he was talking about. Still,
the calls persisted. If he didn't answer, it would call
a few more times. No messages were left. He decided
to say screw it and did his contract with his
phone company, switched to a new one, and then got

(48:36):
another new number. You guessed it. The screaming static calls
continued after a short delay. By this time he was
terrified every night, unsure why this was happening. He back
dialed the number again and got a different person. Around
this time, he lost his job and his phone. The
calls stopped. Of course, his phone was disconnected now, so

(49:00):
one day my mom asks me to listen to this
weird message she got on our home phone. It was
the static screaming. We showed my brother and he was
freaking out. He back dialed the number again and it's
said the number was disconnected this time. Never heard from
it again after that. From another editor. When my sister

(49:22):
was young, my parents got her a personal phone, a landline,
so that she could feel special. Yes, she was extra spoiled.
It was a prepaid landline, though, so basically no one
could call in or out if she ran out of credit,
much like a mobile phone. Anyway, every night, at three am,
her phone would ring. She said there was a man

(49:43):
on the other line, and she'd get really scared and
come running to my room. It escalated to the point
that I asked her to please disconnect her phone before
going to sleep, because it was becoming extremely annoying to
get woken up every single night by this person that
called her. Eventual, she'd just got rid of the phone.
A few years ago. We were talking about it, and

(50:04):
she confessed that her phone continued to ring even after
she disconnected it, which is why she said that she
didn't want it anymore. She has no recollection of what
the person on the other end was saying, or maybe
she has just completely blocked it out. Another redditor had
this to tell about a couple of weeks after I

(50:27):
was born, my dad's best friend, Jim died. They were
really close and one of the last things he wanted
was to hold little me before he passed. His wish
was filled, and some short time after that he was gone.
Fast forward seven years, I'm now a happy seven year
old with a five year old brother and recently born sister.

(50:48):
One day, the phone rings, and with my mom out
and dad in the washroom, I thought it was going
to be ignored, as we kids were still too young
to answer the phone. No call display, we didn't know
if there would be a stranger, but my brother other
broke the rules and he answered Hello. At this point,
my dad is out of the washroom and is asking
my brother to hand in the phone. He ignores him
and keeps listening to whoever is speaking. Before my dad

(51:11):
could ask for the phone a second time, my brother
hangs up, looks at him and says, Jim says, Hi,
and he misses sky Wing Nova and then he goes
back to playing. The look of shock my dad had
is what I remember most about this. Another writer said,
when I was a child, we would frequently get calls

(51:31):
for a woman named Tanya. Didn't see him like a
big deal. She had the same last name as us,
although it's quite a common one around here. When we
moved across the city and phone books stopped being the
go to for finding somebody's number, the calls for Tanya
gradually stopped. Those days seemed to have ended, and we
carried on forgetting about the mysterious Tanya. It was about

(51:53):
four years ago that she popped up in our lives again.
I was driving home from work one afternoon was greeted
by a pretty grisly car wreck at the turn to
my house. Two cars had collided and one had wrapped
itself around the signage poll that had house numbers and
directions on it, one of which was my house number.

(52:14):
Several days later, we get a call from the police.
They asked if Tanya was at this residence. Her car
was found wrapped around a pole down the street from
my house, and she was nowhere to be found. At
the accident site. I haven't heard anything about her since.
In two thousand and seven, there was a Washington family

(52:35):
that was terrorized by an unknown entity and they had
no way to fight back. They were allegedly receiving death
threats from unknown numbers, but when the police investigated the calls,
the family's teenage daughter became the number one suspect. Creepy
stories about prank phone calls, especially ones involving restricted callers,

(52:56):
they're not really hard to find. However, the story of
the fur Crest War, Washington, restricted caller is absolutely terrifying
due to the lengths to which the mysterious caller went.
The anonymous person taunted and harassed multiple families on the
same block, while casting suspicion on to the very people
he or she was harassing. This creepy story about a

(53:18):
restricted caller will definitely change the way you look at
your cell phone the next time a restricted call comes in.
In two thousand and seven, the Kukindall family was living
in Fircrest, Washington, near Tacoma, when one of their daughter's
phones started sending text messages on its own. Sixteen year
old Courtney claims that the phone would message her friends

(53:40):
of its own free will. At the time of the
initial reporting, there were no claims as to what the
text messages said. After the texts, a series of phone
calls from someone with a scratchy voice started coming from
a number that read restricted. The calls would describe what
the family was doing at that moment, and even what

(54:01):
they were wearing. Kugndal's neighbor Andrey and Mackay, who said
that she was also a victim of the restricted harassment,
claims that one day, when she was cutting limes in
her kitchen, a mysterious call came through and the voice
on the other end told her that it preferred lemons.
The initial wave of phone weirdness prompted the families to

(54:21):
immediately contact the police. They showed the cops how their
phones would send text messages on their own, turned themselves on,
and how the ring tones would appear to change themselves.
But it wasn't until the phone calls started coming in
that the police were able to actually do anything. The
fir Crest police attempted to trace the calls, but they

(54:42):
just went back to the family's own phones. The weird
part about it was that this would happen even when
their phones were turned off. The calls from the scratchy
voice escalated from the level of juvenile pranks to serious
threats within a short period of time. Heather Kuchindall claimed
they say you're going to die, we hate you, We're

(55:04):
going to murder you. The family also reported that calls
would come at all hours, threatening to murder everyone that
they knew, including their pets. The most terrifying call came
during the day to the McKays, another family being harassed
by the Restricted. They claimed that while their kids were
in school, the voice called and told them that there

(55:25):
was going to be a school shooting. It's unclear whether
or not the family followed up on this threat and
contacted their children's school. A member of the McKay family
told ABC News the level of fear went from this
is a pain to an uncontrolled fear and anxiety level.
The families all claim that after making a series of
death threats against them, the Restricted calls seemed to exist

(55:50):
solely to make them paranoid. Calls would come in from
the mysterious person, telling what they were wearing and what
they were doing. The family claimed that some of the
calls didn't feature the scratchy voice at all, but rather
a playback of a private conversation between family members. One
call allegedly featured a recording of a conversation between one

(56:12):
of the families and a detective. The Kukin Dolls said
they tried to end the harassment by changing out phones
and switching their numbers, but the calls kept coming. All
over the country, law enforcement was still warming up to
the idea of cyber crime back in two thousand seven,
so the fact that the fur Crest PD approached this
case with the sincerity that it did is fascinating. At

(56:35):
the time of the case, the police told ABC News
that if the caller was actually harassing the family and
not conducting an elaborate hoax, the person was actually violating
multiple federal laws. However, the fur Crest PD admitted that
they were in the weeds in terms of actual investigation.
Fircrest Police Chief John Cheeseman, who claimed to have known

(56:57):
the Kukiin Dolls prior to the calls, said we're almost dumbfounded.
We've never seen anything like this. The local police reached
out to the Department of Homeland Security and they even
looked at sixteen year old Courtney Kukindahl as a suspect.
A fur Crest detective noted, at this point, we're not
saying it's someone inside the family, but it's someone that

(57:18):
is close enough to them to know this much about them.
It seems like it's someone who is tied into the group,
a family member, a friend, or an enemy, which is
a very roundabout way of saying that the caller is
a person who knows the people they're calling. After dealing
with a lengthy police investigation, swapping out phones, and installing
a security system in their home, surely the Kukin Dolls

(57:40):
must have figured out who was stalking them, right, No
one seems to know. The entire story seems to have
evaporated after its first reporting. The Kukin Dolls and the
other impacted families have kept their social media presence low.
In fact, it says if they all fell off the
radar completely, if there ever was a harasser, he or

(58:02):
she was not likely caught since it was never reported.
Phone hacking or phone freaking has been going on since
the nineteen fifties. Phone freaks explore the mysteries of the
phone system by hacking payphones and learning how to impersonate
phone operators in order to make free calls. If a
phone freak was talented enough, they could definitely wiretap someone.

(58:25):
And while phone freaks don't necessarily exist in the twenty
first century or exist in the same way that they
did in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the desire to
game the phone system and find technological workarounds is still there.
The calls to the kouk indolls were coming through in
two thousand and seven, the same year that the iPhone
was released. This means that the digital technology required to

(58:49):
tap into someone's phone would have been easy to find
at that time. All you needed to listen to someone's
voicemail was their four digit passcode, which is easy enough
to guess. In addition, with the right software, you could
track a person's every movement due to GPS technology. If
you weren't already paranoid about people listening to your phone calls,

(59:10):
now may be the time to get out your tinfoil hat.
Even though cell phone technology is always changing and improving,
it would seem that the ability to clone a cell
phone or tap into a phone's security is rarely a
step or two behind. Methods for tapping a phone involve
everything from getting your hands on the device and manually

(59:31):
cloning it to using software in order to keep an
eye on someone from a distance. The proliferation of articles
about how easy it is to hack into a phone
makes it all the more plausible that someone who lived
near the cook Indalls decided to have a little phone
fun before things got out of hand. Despite their beings
an evidence to the contrary, it's not out of the

(59:53):
question for the cook In Dolls to have made the
whole the restricted character up. The three families, or members
of those families who were subject to the calls could
have absolutely worked together to clone their phones and send messages,
making it appear that there was an all seeing hacker
messing with them. The fact that the police actually looked

(01:00:13):
into the texts and recorded phone conversations shows that these
anonymous messages could have actually occurred, but it's not enough
to debunk the possibility that it was all just a hoax.
The idea that the Kukin Dolls, the Mackays, and a
third family wove an elaborate plot to make themselves the
center of police attention feels like it could be too

(01:00:35):
complicated to be true. The police never found a culprit or.
If they did, no charges were pressed. In fact, the
whole case seems to have dropped off the face of
the earth. There's a small group of people online who
have their own theories about this case, but each theory,
be it an unknown neighbor, courtney, or multiple youths, all

(01:00:56):
have holes in them. The most plausible theory is that
some one was just trying to have a little fun
and got carried away. However, there is a possibility that
the restricted is still in for Crest Washington, waiting for
the right person to call. Famous horror author Dean Coontz

(01:01:23):
is more than familiar with all things scary, but not
just from his imagination. He once received an ominous warning
from his mother twenty years after she died, and she
probably saved him from being murdered by his own father.
That story is up next on Weird Darkness. We've all

(01:02:03):
heard stories about heroic dogs saving their owners. How many
of us know a real life tale about ghosts saving people? Yes,
I said ghosts. Many have had moments in their lives
when something extraordinary occurs with no rational explanation for these
unexplained paranormal encounters. I'd also venture to assert that we

(01:02:25):
have all received the occasional creepy phone call from one
prankster or another, but very few of us can honestly
claim that the phone call was also our paranormal experience.
That is, unless your name happens to be Coonts and
you are a best selling horror novelist. Dean Kotz's dead

(01:02:46):
mother called him with a warning to be careful after
twenty years of silence. Just days before being attacked by
his own father in September of nineteen eighty eight, author
Dean Coontz was working in his own when the phone
began to ring. Coontz answered the receiver and heard a weak,
far away voice on the other end of the receiver.

(01:03:08):
The voice warned, please be careful. Kontz asked the person's identity,
but they did not respond to his inquiry. Instead, they
repeated their warning three additional times before the line went silent.
Kots was in shock. The voice sounded just like his mother,
except that his mother had been dead for nearly twenty years.

(01:03:31):
Koontz's phone number was an unlisted number. Unlisted numbers or
private numbers are telephone numbers which are intentionally not listed
in phone books. If you have a private number, you
usually do not have to worry about getting calls from telemarketers,
prank calls, or being contacted by people you do not know.
The fact that Koontz did not have a listed phone

(01:03:52):
number makes the phone call all the more interesting. Of course,
it could have been a case of a person calling
the wrong number, but sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction.
The warning that the woman gave him on the phone
could very well have been about an incident that occurred
only two days later. Two days after Kutz's strange phone call,

(01:04:15):
the retirement home where his father was staying contacted him.
His father, Ray would often cause problems at the facility,
but the problems were escalating and he became violent, punching
another resident. Nurses at the facility were concerned and asked
Coontz to speak with Ray and try and calm him down.
When Coots arrived at Ray's room, his father wasted no

(01:04:36):
time and proceeded to grab a knife from a drawer,
which he attempted to use to stab his son. Coontz
had to fine off his father, and he eventually was
able to get the knife away from him. Police arrived
and they took Ray to a psychiatric facility, which everyone
felt was the best place for him. It took Coonts
a long time to talk about what he justifiably feels

(01:04:58):
was a fateful phone call. Once he felt comfortable sharing
his story, he did what he does best and wrote
about it in a book titled Beautiful Death The Art
of the Cemetery by photographer David Robinson. You see morbid
yet beautiful photos of tombstones and cemeteries. You will also
see that the introduction is written by none other than

(01:05:20):
Dean Coots. In the introduction, Coots writes an essay about
his phone call experience, sharing the book's theme of exploring death.
Florence Cootz had severe health problems throughout her life. The
stress of her horrible marriage with Ray didn't help matters.
Florence passed away in February nineteen sixty nine at the

(01:05:40):
age of fifty three. While on her deathbed, Florence explained
to her son that she had some information about his
father to share with him and that it would be
life changing. Florence ended up dying before she could ever
share the secret with her son. Coots has often wondered
if his mother was going to tell him Ray wasn't
actually his father. He contemplated getting a DNA test to

(01:06:02):
see whether Ray was his biological father, but decided he'd
be unhappy to learn Ray was actually his father. Ray
Koontz was thirty five years old when his son Dean
was born. Koontz does not recall any happy memories regarding
his father throughout his entire life. He remembers his father
drinking and abusing him and his mother. When his father

(01:06:25):
would arrive home from a night out drinking, his mother
would promptly send him to his room so he wouldn't
be able to see or hear how his drunken father
would behave Later in life, Ray Koontz would be diagnosed
as schizophrenic. Kontz's father attempting to kill him while in
a retirement community was actually his second attempt to kill

(01:06:45):
his son. One can only imagine that sharing facts of
your father trying to kill you multiple times would be
rather uncomfortable, and Coontz has not been forthcoming with many
details of the first attack. Incident occurred in nineteen eighty seven,
when the author was forty two years old. The two
were arguing when his father pulled a knife on his son.

(01:07:07):
The police were not notified regarding the first attack. Cootz
grew up very poor and refers to his mother as
a saint and his father as a sinner. By all accounts,
Koontz had a miserable childhood, but he doesn't appear to
let that bother him. In fact, Kontz took his negative
life experiences and turned them into something positive. He's quoted

(01:07:29):
as saying, I've said sometimes that I would not have
had my career if not for my father, because that's
where all the creativity comes from. Kontz said, when I
write about sociopaths, I'm writing from the trenches. Konts could
have easily been led down the same path as his father,
not just because of the shared environment, but also because

(01:07:50):
mental illness can be hereditary. Instead of living a brutal
and violent life like his father, though, Kontes thrived and
used his bad experiences as a creative outlet, going on
to write horror novels that sell by the millions each year.
Coots took care of his father until he died from
degenerative alcohol syndrome in nineteen ninety. Even though Cootz would

(01:08:13):
regularly visit his father and arrange his health care and
living situations. He never forgave ray for how he treated
his wife and son. He did not dwell on his
father's violence and actions, but he never forgot them either.
Unlike his parents, Coots and his wife have a dependable
and loving marriage, which they have been very dedicated to
for over fifty years. Kontes and his wife have no children.

(01:08:36):
Coots never received another strange phone call from the woman
who sounded like his mother, perhaps a mother's love never dies,
and which he saw danger heading in his direction. She
did whatever she could to warn him. The fact that
he hasn't received a call since could just mean that
he has nothing to worry about. No one is trying
to kill him, and he is safe. Although Kotz cannot

(01:08:59):
say with certainty that the ghost of his mother called
him that day, it seems as though someone somewhere was
looking out for him. People who've passed on aren't limited
to phone calls or hauntings. In the modern age. They
often use email and social media sites such as Facebook
to contact their loved ones. For instance, Jack Friesi's sudden

(01:09:22):
death at the age of thirty two shocked his friends
and family and done Moore, Pennsylvania, but not as much
as the emails mysteriously sent from his account since then.
Friest died of a heart arrhythmia in June twenty eleven,
but nearly six months later in November, some of his
closest pals, like childhood friend Tim Hart and cousin Jimmy McGrath,

(01:09:46):
received mysterious emails from his account, According to the BBC,
even stranger. The messages were about things Freest discussed with
his friends in their last conversations, such as the message
Heart received with the subject heading on I'm watching. The
text of the message itself read, did you hear me?
I'm at your house? Clean your effing attic? I turned

(01:10:09):
ghost white when I read it. It was very quick
and short, but to a point that only Jack and
I could relate on, Hart told the BBC, adding that
shortly before Friese's death, he privately teased Heart about the
attic's MESSI state. Hart later sent a reply to the account,
but has yet to get a response. McGraw also received
a posthumous email from Friese warning him about an ankle

(01:10:31):
injury that occurred after his cousin's death. I'd like to
say Jack sent it just because I look at it
as he's gone, but he's still trying to connect with me,
trying to tell me to move along to feel better.
McGrath said. Friese's mother, Patty told the man just to
accept the mysterious emails as a gift. I saw they
made people happy, they upset some people, she said, but

(01:10:54):
I see it as people were still talking about him.
Although the source of the email is unknown, heart doesn't
mind even if it turns out he was the victim
of a cruel prank. Somebody's joking around. I don't care,
because I take it whatever way I want, he said.
People sometimes claim their deceased friends have liked their posts

(01:11:16):
on Facebook or sent them messages, like the viral Reddit
threat about messages and deceased Emily allegedly sent to her boyfriend.
For most of us, death is the end of our
time here on this wonderful planet. But for some reason,
Emily seems to have gotten caught in Facebook limbo. In
related news, if Facebook limbo is a thing, it's officially
the worst way to spend an afterlife. Obviously, it should

(01:11:39):
go without saying that this could, and very likely is
a story that has been fabricated to freak people out.
If that's the case, Nathan has done a wonderful job
in creating a thoroughly unsettling story. Nathan's story was posted
on no Sleep, a corner of Reddit that has been
carved out for those who wish to share their true

(01:12:00):
ghost stories that aim to raise the hairs on the
back of your neck and send shivers down your spine.
Within two days of Nathan posting his story, it blew up,
gathering an impressive thirty eight hundred upvotes within just a
few days. The whole thing started on September fourth, twenty thirteen,
when Emily returned to Facebook. It's worth mentioning that, according

(01:12:23):
to Nathan, only he and Emily's mom share admin privileges
of Emily's Facebook account. They decided not to memorialize the
page because that felt too final. I can certainly understand that.
Nathan soon realized that the messages Emily was posting were
sourced from old chats the two of them had shared
back before the accident that claimed her life. Then in February,

(01:12:47):
things got really creepy. Emily had started tagging herself in photos.
That's just not right. If this is real, then, dang.
But if somebody's messing with Nathan, I'm pretty sure that
individual has no soul. This kept going on, with Emily
randomly tagging herself in photos and posting messages comprised of

(01:13:08):
words that she had typed when she was among the living.
She did this until May eighth, when Emily used her
first original word, freezing. In his post. Nathan says this
is the message that turned his growing anger and frustration
toward a person he assumed was trying to mess with
him into terror. He was no longer able to sleep,

(01:13:29):
and when he did, he was plagued by nightmares in
which Emily's trapped in an ice cold car, frozen blue
and gray, and I'm standing outside in the warmth, screaming
at her to open the door. She doesn't even realize
I'm there. Sometimes her legs are outside with me. Part
of me believes, even hopes, that this is a story
Nathan made up to get his fifteen seconds of Internet fame,

(01:13:52):
because if that's not the case, if it is real,
this is one of the most eerie stories I've ever heard.
She'd have to go through the pain that comes from
losing a partner and then endure something like this only
a few years later, when the wounds are probably only
just beginning to scab over. That is not right. The

(01:14:14):
story goes on. Nathan ended up memorializing Emily's page, and
that actually stopped her messages until July first, the day
before he took to Reddit to share his story. Thanks
for listening. If you like the show, please cheer it

(01:14:36):
with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories,
true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. All
stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless
stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links
to the authors in the show notes. Weird Darkness is
a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now

(01:14:57):
that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you
with a little light Matthew seven, verse twelve. So in
everything due to others, what you would have them do
to you for this sums up the law and the profits.
And a final thought, never forget who was with you
when you had nothing. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining

(01:15:20):
me in the Weird Darkness.

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