Phone calls from the dead

Magical Realist

Valued Senior Member
I first read this story on a paranormal website. So I decided to confirm it. Imagine my surprise to find it confirmed on Snopes.com. I cannot explain this event other than being a highly coincidental case of cellphone malfunction. Such are the coincidences we are willing to entertain to rule out the paranormal. See what you think:

http://www.snopes.com/horrors/ghosts/deadcall.asp

"On 12 September 2008 at 4:22 p.m. in California’s San Fernando Valley, a commuter train carrying 225 riders collided at a combined speed of 83 mph with a freight train run by a crew of three. In what came to be known as the Chatsworth crash, 135 people were injured (of which 87 were taken to hospitals, 46 in critical condition), and 25 died.

One of the deceased was 49-year-old Charles E. Peck, a customer service agent for Delta Air Lines at Salt Lake City International Airport. He had come to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport because gaining work in the Golden State would have allowed him to wed his fiancée, Andrea Katz of Westlake Village. (The pair had put off getting hitched until they were living in the same state.) This would have been his second marriage; Peck had three grown children from a previous union.

His fiancée heard about the crash from a news report on the radio as she was driving to the train station to pick up her intended. Peck’s parents and siblings (who live in the Los Angeles area) joined her.

Peck’s body was recovered from the wreckage 12 hours after the accident. Yet for the first eleven of those hours, his cell phone placed call after call to his loved ones, calling his son, his brother, his stepmother, his sister, and his fiancée. In all, his various family members received 35 calls from his cell phone through that long night. When they answered, all they heard was static; when they called back, their calls went straight to voice mail. But the calls gave them hope that the man they loved was still alive, just trapped somewhere in the wreckage.

The barrage of calls prompted search crews to trace the whereabouts of the phone through its signal and to once again look through what was left of the first train, the location the calls were coming from. The calls searchers finally found Peck’s body about an hour after the calls from his cell phone stopped.

Charles Peck had died on impact. Yet long past his death, his cell phone had continued to reach out to many of those he cared most about, and ultimately led rescuers to his mortal remains. (As far as investigators revealed, they never found Peck’s cell phone.)

Ironically (and tragically), another cell phone may have played a pivotal role in causing the Chatsworth crash, the deadliest in Metrolink’s history. Preliminary investigation revealed the engineer running the commuter train had failed to heed a red signal light, instead impelling his train onto a single track where a Union Pacific freight train coming the opposite direction had been given the right of way. According to teens cooperating with the investigation, they had been exchanging text messages with that engineer as the train left the station and received a final text message from him just before the collision (22 seconds before impact, according to the preliminary timeline worked out by the National Transportation Safety Board)."
 
that's interesting. it said he died on impact but i thought it was possibly that he was making calls but was so badly injured so couldn't speak or someone was trying to do so.

i think members like you are most transparent and honest that there is a lot we don't understand. i think the members here that are so adamant that the paranormal is not real is not due to just lack of evidence but that attitude is dishonesty itself.

i've realized it's because one can hardly get through years of life and not experience many things that point to not just possible paranormal but literally indicate that not all aspects of life work exactly the way current science says it does, whether you believe in the paranormal or not. yes, they are dishonest human beings to ignore these signs.

even such things as someone who is very close to someone yet miles away from them and having a sense of what they are feeling or what they are going through etc. i have had those intuitions and it was correct. many of these experiences are often mundane but undeniable that there are more invisible connections and ways of communicating than what is conventionally acknowledged only on a 'rational' level.

for instance, i heard of the case of this guy whose grandmother had died and he was extremely close to her and all of a sudden he had an extreme pain and anguish hit him in his heart. he was just taking a shower and immediately after he recieved a phone call that his grandmother had passed away.

there is definitely more to life than meets the eye (positive and negative) and not just with the inanimate that science is primarily focused on which is fine and legit but it's wrong to dismiss these aspects of life as unreal.
 
Have you ever pocket-dialed somebody by accident?

they found his body but not the phone. it probably does have a 'known' rational explanation but it doesn't answer all the unexplained phenomena that doesn't have tangible reasons.
 
One can answer the unexplained with one simple reply. .."I don't know "
And yet folk just have to make something up.

Alex
 
but it's wrong to dismiss these aspects of life as unreal.

Why wrong? Would you prefer "incorrect"?

If something goes against my understanding of reality I see no problem in counting it as unreal

Give any serious investigators SOMETHING to check out and I am sure they will. They seem to be on ball in being able to find the phone's location. Although how accurately phones can be pinpointed I don't know

Also is it not being "wronger" to make something up?

Making up a explanation for the unknown, to me, seems to be the province of religion

BINGO - UFOlogists, GHOSTologists and the rest of the mottly crowd now have a ligit place in society. Think of all the benefits which will accrue to each group as they transition to the status of a religion

:)
 
No, but trying to "explain" the unexplained with the supernatural does equate to unreal.
Thank you. My point exactly.

As a (now retired) Safety Officer we held many disaster drills. Frequently we were unable to explain aspect of the "training accident". These were not put in to trick us. In all the reports, co workers and myself put in I never put in "such and such observed but no explanation can be given. Must have been (god - UFO - ghost etc etc)

:)
 
Back
Top