A MESSAGE FROM A FRIEND

A MESSAGE FROM A FRIEND

I had a very close friend pass away from cancer a few yrs ago and a very strange thing took place following his death. This friend was well known for his sense of humor and routinely would call and, if encountering an answering machine, would always leave a strange round instead of a message. Invariably, that strange sound would involve peculiar items, like crackling crumpled paper, hissing sounds, anything that would make strange noise while he would verbally spout some equally weird gibberish or other nonsensical vocal sound effects. This way, we always knew it was him who had called. Never a question. It became his signature and he did it for many, many years.

The day he died I had purchased a new phone with a built in message system, and was boggled by the manual on setting it up, so I put it off. That night, at roughly the time he expired (I later learned), 3 messages were left on my machine from an "unknown number" as the display on the message window recorded. The three messages came only a few minutes apart. Each one was distinctly a call from him, making all the usual strange noises and garbled verbiage, only the calls sounded like they were coming through a very bad radio or something, loaded with static which caused the sound to pitch and diminish. There were no storms happening, but it reminded me of how some calls can sound during a bad electrical storm. I didn't hear the messages until the next day when I noticed a little light on the side of the phone blinking and realized messages had been left, despite having not set up the message part of the phone at all. I had to look up how to play them for fear of missing them, but once I figured it out, I knew he had called. But I simultaneously knew that was impossible, because late that same night, the phone rang and I answered and his significant other told me he had passed away only an hour or so earlier. The phone was clearly operational. He had been in a hospice because his condition had weakened so drastically. He was not able to make phone calls, and was for several days far too out of it from the morphine to have done much of anything.

None the less... he called, somewhere just after the time of death. Not once, but three times, as if to say, "Yeah… it's ME." I was able to play the recordings for my wife, who was equally mystified by them. She knew his signature goofy phone message sounds all too well. In setting up the message system later that day, I somehow managed to erase or destroy the messages entirely. I thought it was a little odd, too, because I was following the instructions perfectly and being very careful about making sure any existing messages would NOT be voided from the chip.

Not more than a month later, my granddaughter who was 2 and a half was spending the night with us, and stopped and looked down the hall and appeared to be looking at someone and nodding at them. I asked her, "Who are you looking at?" And she immediately waved to whomever it was down the hall (there was no one else here but my wife, who was in the same room as we were) and motioned for the person she was looking at to come, and she said, "It's ok, come in." I again asked her, "Who are you seeing?" And she then got a sudden shocked look on her face and kind of gasped a bit and jumped up on the bed with me, clung to me tightly and said, "Who is it, Grandpa? Who is it?" and kept looking back toward the hallway. I went down the hall and looked around, and of course, found no one. Saw nothing. I asked her what she saw and she seemed to struggle to make a good description. I asked her if it was a boy or a girl? She said "no." I asked if it was a man or a woman? And she seemed puzzled for a second and said "Who is it?" instead of "no" again. She just couldn't seem to make sense, or explain or describe what she saw, but it was definitely a "who" to her.

Later that night as we were putting her to sleep, something in the very back room at the end of that hallway came crashing down loudly startling all three of us. I went into the room which was basically empty and used only to store a few things and found nothing out of place. But the sound was distinctly of something large with many parts spilling or falling out, like a box full of various items. But nothing was out of place at all.

No further calls or apparitions have been experienced. But there is no question in my mind that some one or some thing was tapping through, by phone and perhaps with a personal appearance as well to the only one capable of seeing it. And I have a good feeling it was my good friend who passed.

Submitted by Alton Raines