Reader Submission: Last Call
“I still remember this like it was yesterday. My father passed away in 2000. I was devastated, of course, although we had not been close at all. We’d been trying to mend our relationship the year or so before his death. I cried all day when I learned he had died. He’d lived alone and overdosed on prescription medication. His neighbors found him three days later.
The news of his death ripped me apart on the inside. I kept asking myself, ‘Why didn’t I try harder to mend our relationship?’, ‘Was I not a good enough daughter?’, ‘Why did he abandon me emotionally?’. The day after I learned he’d passed, I struggled to pull myself together. My husband had to go to work that day, and my two children needed me to be there for them. When he died, my children were three and five. So still very much anguished, I crawled into the reclining chair with my five-year-old daughter Sarah while my son Ethan played nearby.
I was holding her close and telling my children how much I loved them when the phone rang. I was in no state of mind to take a call, so I asked Sarah to answer, which she happily did. Upon picking up the receiver (no cell phone in those days), she immediately looked puzzled and looked over at me. I asked her who was on the phone as I was in no mood for sales calls. She said that the man on the other end of the phone was named Joe. That was my fathers name!
I didn’t make the connection at the time that it was him calling, so I just ordered her to hang up. After a few seconds, I realized what had happened. First, let’s be clear, I knew no other Joe who would be calling me. And second, if someone named Joe had been calling for a real reason, wouldn’t he have called back after being hung up on? I have had many other experiences in my life with the paranormal, however, this one hit home.”
Have you ever received a ghostly phone call? Share your story here!
