Ghostly Phone Calls: Redux

This has been such a popular article, I wanted to repost it so that people could catch up and read all the stories others have left in the comments portion. THANKS to all of you who have left your stories!!


I was in the middle of a super spooky book about exorcism and demons when the phone rang. My cell phone, which I only use for emergencies or when I travel was ringing, and since all my friends knew I was at home in Kentucky, there really was no reason for it to be ringing. Yet here it was. Playing “Sweet Child O Mine” by Guns and Roses, shaking me out of my fiction induced state of horror. I picked up the phone and said “Hello.” In return I got a barrage of language in a foreign tongue. Not just foreign, but, like Super Foreign. It was some form of Arabic I would say from the sounds of it, and after a minute or two trying to interrupt the conversation, I suddenly got a thought about the connection to what I was reading. Was my reading about demons conjuring up some kind of freaky phone call that I didn't understand? I freaked myself out. Although this call was probably harmless, it did get me thinking about ghostly phone calls.

Ghostly phone calls can be anything from a phone ringing without any sound on the other end, to the voice of a dearly departed loved one on your answering machine. After my mother died I frequently had my phone ringing with no one.. actually, more than that.. an absence of anything... on the other end. After this would happen a few times in a row, I would talk to my mother in the space of my empty living room and the calls would stop. I know I am not the only one who has had ghost calls like this, and here are a few stories I found online to share with you.

Sleepless Nights and Ghostly Phone Calls

Here's the story of my haunting. In the summer of 2000, when I was 11 years old, me, my mother, and her boyfriend all moved to a small house in the town of Deal, New Jersey. Despite it's small size, The house was quite luxurious with it's tastefully decorated rooms, dual sink bathrooms with Jacuzzi bathtubs, and it's unique features, such as the old record player in the family room. My mother and her boyfriend stayed in the main part of the house, while I got the whole second floor to myself. You would think a nice luxurious house with the whole second floor to myself would make a kid happy, but I wasn't. For some odd reason, I could never really warm up to the place. I wasn't in the best situation either, me and mom or me and her boyfriend would get into fights every day about one thing or another, and I was always getting picked on in school.

My life was really going downhill. I would wake up, get teased for six straight hours at school, come home either pissed or sad, get in a fight with my mom and her boyfriend, and lay awake in bed either enraged or crying, and that was a good day for me. However, anger and sadness weren't the only things that kept me up at night. For some reason, I always felt oddly uneasy in my room, or floor rather, at night. It was like the way you feel when you go to bed after watching a really scary movie; you know nothing's going to happen, but you lie awake scared that there's a monster under the bed anyway. So, I did what anyone else would do, blamed it all on my own imagination and ignored it.

Then, just when my life couldn't get any worse, the frightening oddness of the house dramatically escalated. I began to notice that the upstairs floor of the house was always freezing cold, no matter how high the thermostat was set, my insomnia was to the point where I had to take benadryl just to get a few hours of sleep at night, and I would always feel the room getting darker. It wasn't the lights actually dimming; it was like the darkness was coming into the room rather than the light coming out of it.
This is the part of the story where I stop believing that it's just my imagination and start to question whether it could be something more. If I told my mother that the undead inhabited my room, she would probably have sent me to the crazy house, so I was forced to live with the demonic presence in my floor of the house, until things went too far.

One night while I was lying awake in bed, I saw this glowing green light in the shape of a clawed hand appear in the middle of my room, stay there for about second, then disappear. It took me a few minutes to even register what I just saw. I was completely terrified, all I could do was sit up in my bed, stare wide eyed at the walls of my room, and wish that the sun would come up. After that incident, I considered going to live at my father's house. However, it would take one final incident to push me over the edge.

It was about two weeks later when I saw something again, something far worse. I was lying awake in my bed again when I heard what sounded like feet shuffling across my floor. My mother and her boyfriend were both asleep so it couldn't have been them. The pair of shuffling feet became two pairs of shuffling feet, then two became three and three became four until shuffling filled the whole room. I was frozen with fear once more.

Then came the voices. The voices weren't the usual inaudible whispers you would expect to hear from ghosts, but rather the jumble of voices you hear when you're in a crowded place where everyone's talking and you can't make out what any individual person saying. Just when I thought things couldn't get more terrifying, they did. I heard a bunch of phones ringing all at once. It couldn't have been a real phone because there were no phones on the second floor. In the midst of all this shuffling, talking, and ringing, one voice rang clear. It was the voice of a woman.

She picked up one of the phones, said hello, and then I heard her say "yes sir, the file is ready." Then, just as suddenly as it began, everything stopped. No more talking, no more ringing, no more shuffling, just silence. After that, I moved into my fathers house quicker that you can blink an eye. Ever since I moved, I feel no more uneasiness; I sleep sounder than a baby, and the only demons I stay awake watching are the ones on Inuyasha. It's been four years since I've seen that house, and when I look back on it all I sometimes wonder why the hell would a ghost be talking about some damn paperwork?
 -Mandy. (story from http://www.guardiantales.freewebspace.com/Sleepless.html)

Another freaky story...

On a very warm summer afternoon, I was alone in our house and was taking a nap on the sofa in our front room. I was having a strange and melancholy dream about my brother who had died a little over a year ago. I don't remember the details of the dream but I remember that he kept telling me a certain number over and over and over again! When I finally woke up, the number was still sticking in my head... it was a seven digit number. After several minutes I realized that the string of numbers was a a very familiar phone number. I just couldn't place the number at first. Then, suddenly, I realized that it was the phone number of my grandparents who lived in San Diego. They had died over ten years prior. My deceased brother and I were very close to them and often called them to talk when we were in our elementary school years ( which is why it was such a familiar number! ). I don't know if it was because of the heat or because of the lingering emotions brought on by my dream, but I got a crazy notion to call the number.

The phone on the other end rang four or five times, and then someone answered. My heart started racing, because I was expecting a message that the number had been disconnected! I really didn't know what to say... so I asked, "Is Dottie there?" ( Dottie was my grandmother's name. ) There was a pause, and then the voice said, "Who IS this?". I said, "This is David." Then there was what I would describe as surprised laughing on the other end of the line. Then the female voice chuckled "Oh my God! It's been so long!" I asked, "Who is THIS?". The voice sounded slightly perplexed and she said, "Why, it's Nana!" ( That is what my brother and I used to call my grandmother. ) Only our family and my uncle and his family knew that we referred to her as Nana! I felt my stomach getting queasy from fright and disbelief, and I squeaked out "Nana?" The voice said, "Yes! It's so good to hear from you David! Let me go get your Grandpa. He's out in the 'Rumpus Room' out back." My grandparents had a part of their garage in the backyard that had been converted to a full bar with a pool table and couched in it, which they referred to as their "Rumpus Room".

The line got very noisy, then there was a squealing sound, and then the line went dead. I felt a mixture of relief from the creeps I was getting from talking to my long-since dead grandmother and disappointment that I didn't get to talk longer to her, or at all to my grandpa. I have called the same number again in the recent past and got the message that "This number is no longer in service.." I really don't know what to make of that phone call. It seemed that the person really was my Nana. It sounded kind of like her voice -- but younger than what I remembered -- and because she knew about the "Rumpus Room"... Is it really possible to make a phone call to the Other Side? Story from http://www.castleofspirits.com/stories02/otherside.html Got your own ghost phone call story? Share it here.


photo by mscaprikell flickr.com