Cell phone call from the dead

[Magical Realist]

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)."

[C C]

Despite Snopes confirming it, the Debunk Squads out there seem to robotically and lazily classify this as just another unfounded anecdote. Rather than investigating what type of phone it was and asking experts whether or not it had any designed or accidental capacity whatsoever to automatically call all the numbers on the contact list, or only special starred ones or whatever. Even should that require damage or disruption to the mobile device in order to occur. If it also dialed non-family members on the list who were accordingly more isolated from each other, they probably wouldn't have bothered to notify authorities or realized any significance to the static response of their "Hello?"s. Just the connection suffering a glitch.

- - -

[stryder]

Despite Snopes  confirming it, the Debunk Squads out there seem to robotically and lazily classify this as just another unfounded anecdote. Rather than investigating what type of phone it was and asking experts whether or not it had any designed or accidental capacity whatsoever to automatically call all the numbers on the contact list, or only special starred ones or whatever. Even should that require damage or disruption to the mobile device in order to occur. If it also dialed non-family members on the list who were accordingly more isolated from each other, they probably wouldn't have bothered to notify authorities or realized any significance to the static response of their "Hello?"s. Just the connection suffering a glitch.

Playing d'bags advocate to try and investigate something near 10 years on would be extremely difficult.  

It could be posed that if there was any such chance that a phone had allegedly rang it's contacts list after or even during a crash, such reports would of been investigated.  Not so much for the paranormal, but more down to the potential of criminal elements being involved in "cloning phones" and possibly being involved in the crash itself.

One documented method of phone cloning Stingrays (wikipedia.org) can involve criminals(or phreaks (wikipedia.org)) setting up a spot over tunnel exits, as all phones would re-ping the nearby towers to re-sycronise with the phone network, and this use to allow phones to be cloned.  If the cloning method used required them to test the validity of clone, then it would cause what would appear network disruption to those that had phones being cloned.  (including the train driver)

I couldn't say for certain however if this would allow a phones contacts to be rang, since phones for the most part store them either using the actual phone or the sim.  

This hypothesis however does have an area of flaw, if a stingray was in use then the train driver wouldn't of been sending/recieving SMS messages when connected to the stingray, it would of likely increased the timing of sending and receiving due to how the device's connection is effected and this would have caused anomalies in the SMS time-line which was investigated as part of the cause of the crash.

source: 2008 Chatsworth train collision (wikipedia.org)

[C C]

The Los Angeles Times published a database for the fatalities of the train collision five days after it happened, with accounts / obituaries for each victim. The one for Charles Peck states that the search crews found no evidence of his body and it was because his phone kept making calls to his fiancée that they tracked the signal and eventually uncovered him. But on his comments / memories page, where some members of the family apparently posted (among others), there doesn't seem to be any mention of them receiving calls.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/17/...ctimpeck17

http://projects.latimes.com/metrolink-cr...rles-peck/


What looks like the only source that Snopes used for verifying that the others received calls is the KYLA-TV station in the city, where they aired a news story the same day called “Train Victim’s Cell Kept Calling Loved Ones After He Died.”

- - -

[Magical Realist]

Here's the original KYLA-TV news story. Looks legit to me, claims of lying relatives notwithstanding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f6YAUYrkxg

[C C]

Here's the original KYLA-TV news story. Looks legit to me, claims of lying relatives notwithstanding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f6YAUYrkxg

"No trace of his phone was ever found." Given that its signal led them to him, I take it that the crew didn't really care or expend a whole lot of effort on that once they found his body.

For purely recreational purposes of exploring this from a Kantian perspective, and how his fiancée / family could view it as a message from him in that context...

The phone calls would be an example of something that's quite explainable as an electronic malfunction and coincidence / probabilistic event on the side of appearances (nature, world of experience). As well as meaningless on this side of ourselves.

But on the blank, noumenal side any abstract version of Charles Peck treated as the prior-in-rank provenance of Charles Peck the physical phenomenon would have insured this coincidence occurred while still also covertly blended into the world's network of causes / effects (i.e., why it appears to be a coincidence and meaningless). There's no generation of the life of Charles Peck in a moment by moment way from the noumenal side. All of his changes through time co-exist at once, and his "free will" on the noumenal side would have decided or determined his life as a whole ("all at once" if we have to resort to yet more flawed usage of time platitudes).

Abstract Peck would not be a "cause" of phenomenal Peck in the moment by moment way in which events occur in experience (causation), but a transcendent cause of the whole sequence of his life on the side of appearances. While still coherent or blended in with nature's network of reasons (explanations). That's why a computer simulation is a flawed analogy for the noumenal / phenomenal dichotomy, since a computer is also generating the changes of a virtual person in the moment-by-moment manner. (It's a flawed comparison in plenty of other ways, too).

- - -

[Magical Realist]

Here's the original KYLA-TV news story. Looks legit to me, claims of lying relatives notwithstanding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f6YAUYrkxg

"No trace of his phone was ever found." Given that its signal led them to him, I take it that the crew didn't really care or expend a whole lot of effort on that once they found his body.

For purely recreational purposes of exploring this from a Kantian perspective, and how his fiancée / family could view it as a message from him in that context...  

The phone calls would be an example of something that's quite explainable as an electronic malfunction and coincidence / probabilistic event on the side of appearances (nature, world of experience). As well as meaningless on this side of ourselves.

But on the blank, noumenal side any abstract version of Charles Peck treated as the prior-in-rank provenance of Charles Peck the physical phenomenon would have insured this coincidence occurred while still also covertly blended into the world's network of causes / effects (i.e., why it appears to be a coincidence and meaningless). There's no generation of the life of Charles Peck in a moment by moment way from the noumenal side. All of his changes through time co-exist at once, and his "free will" on the noumenal side would have decided or determined his life as a whole ("all at once" if we have to resort to yet more flawed usage of time platitudes).  

Abstract Peck would not be a "cause" of phenomenal Peck in the moment by moment way in which events occur in experience (causation), but a transcendent cause of the whole sequence of his life on the side of appearances. While still coherent or blended in with nature's network of reasons (explanations). That's why a computer simulation is a flawed analogy for the noumenal / phenomenal dichotomy, since a computer is also generating the changes of a virtual person in the moment-by-moment manner. (It's a flawed comparison in plenty of other ways, too).

- - -

Interesting thoughts! I have pondered the possibility myself how a being outside of spacetime might effect events on our plane. At first it seems impossible due to the principle of causal closure which dictates that every event in our world have a physical cause. But suppose that during moments of extreme randomness, there is enough indeterminacy to allow a supernatural being to manipulate events in its favor. So, as in this case, there really was a coincidental aspect to the phone's operation due to it's malfunctioning state as well as a supernatural manipulation of events to effect communication. It is essentially as true that Charles Peck caused the phone to call his relatives as it is true that it was an anomolous technological glitch. Causal closure is thus preserved while also allowing for the intervention of a supernatural agency on our plane. This also explains the role of synchronicity and/or magick in our lives being the occurrence of the all TOO coincidental sign or allignment of words, ideas, and motifs in the flux of daily random happenings.

“...the distinction between "magick" and "communication" exits only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.”
― Robert Anton Wilson