Your True Tales
August 2006 - Page 18
Cell Phone Mysteries
by Elizabeth Knight
My father-in-law passed away recently. He was extremely ill with lung cancer, brain cancer, and right before he died, his doctors suspected stomach cancer, as well. He was still quite young (only 54) and I feel his life should not have been so short. He was basically comatose, being under the influence of oral morphine given every half hour, I believe, for the last three or four days of his life, and he was in the hospital.
On the morning of his death, my mother-in-law was tending to him, trying to make sure he was "comfortable", etc. and her cell phone rang. She ignored it, given the circumstances. My father-in-law died within two hours. The next day, my mother-in-law checked her voicemail, and what she heard seriously gives me chills. She only recently let me hear this voicemail message and I, in fact, never knew it existed until she let me hear it about a week and a half ago. It states the time the message was left, which I believe was around 8:30 am. Then all you hear is this weird puh-puh-puh sound, like someone was breathing, by blowing hard into the phone receiver, and I am having a hard time describing this odd sound. Imagine breathing out by going "puh, puh" and that is the sound, but it is done at intervals that are at first rapid, then slow, then somewhat fast again, and then slower and slower, and then the message ends. It is exactly one minute long.
When I heard it, my mother-in-law asked what I thought it was and the impression I got IMMEDIATELY is that is was from my father-in-law, even though he was not yet dead at the time the message was left. I can't explain that, but that's the impression it gave me. I told my mother-in-law I didn't want to hear it again, and she didn't think it was paranormal, she just thought it was odd (?!). But she saved the message.
We probably would have just gone on and even forgotten about this incident had it not been for another incident involving yet another phone call this past week. My mother-in-law was driving across the river to Portland, Oregon (we live in Vancouver, Washington, which is right across the river and only like two miles from Portland), to visit my father-in-law's brother and his wife. My father-in-law's cell phone has now become hers and she no longer uses her old one, which is one of those pre-paid types. The cell phone rings (the one she currently uses) and when she says "hello?" all she hears is herself, and she said it sounded like she was on a speaker phone or something. She keeps saying "Hello?" and still she only can hear herself, and she sounds amplified. So, she figures there is a malfunction with the phone and just hangs up, thinking it was strange, but cell phones are unpredictable.
Then it dawns on her to check the number that had called. At first, she doesn't recognize the incoming number, but then feels it looked familiar. Suddenly, to her surprise, she realized who's number it was HER pre-paid cell phone! Furthermore, she all of a sudden realized it had been in the glove box of their truck (which she was driving at the time) since the day after my father-in-law's death, because she had been using his ever since! She opened the glove box and sure enough, her pre-paid phone had a one minute call to my father-in-law's phone! She had been hearing herself say hello, that is why she sounded amplified!
When she first told me this, I thought maybe somehow the phone had been bumped and had accidentally called the other one, and I guess that could have been the case, but as anyone with one of those stupid pre-paid phones probably knows, you have to first turn the phone on, scroll down to a certain number then push the call button, etc. It isn't just like you hit one button and it calls. Also, my mother-in-law was in the process of cleaning out her and my father-in-law's old apartment because she was moving, and my father -in-law's cremated ashes were in the box they give you at the funeral home and it was sitting on the passenger seat of the truck, right in front of the glove box where the phone t! hat call ed was! Pretty weird, huh? I do believe in afterlife, and I hope my father-in-law is alright. I miss him very much, but thinking that maybe those calls were his way of communicating with us makes me feel maybe he isn't too far away.
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