Long Distance Call

The phone call came one cold January evening; it was my father’s ex-fiancé. They had been engaged for a short while, some time before he eventually met and married the woman who would be my mother. Dad never really talked about the personal details of the relationship, but he made it clear he didn’t think they would have been good together. Still, over the decades, she would contact my father. I don’t remember any visits from her, but my mother knew her enough to recognize her, and knew her voice on the phone.

She tried several times to get back together with my father, which of course really piqued mom, that she would have such gall, all those years later. I’m not sure when the last time was that Joanne contacted dad, but I was at least a teenager; perhaps it was even after Flo and I were married.

Dad called my mother over to the phone, and had her listen in for a few minutes. It was definitely Joanne’s voice, mom later concurred. All told, they chatted for at least twenty minutes. Shortly after the conversation ended, dad called me.

The strangest thing about the conversation with Joanne, at least so I thought at the time, was that she had been murdered six years earlier.

According to D. Scott Rogo in his book “Phone Calls from the Dead,” recipients of these calls generally appear to be “blocked” somehow from recalling that the person on the other side of the conversation has died, until the call is ended. This apparently is what happened to both of my folks.

Dad insisted it was Joanne, and said she’d spoken of things only she could have known about. Flo and I visited, and we all talked about the conversation at length. Mom shortly blanked on any details she might have remembered, but still remembers firmly that it was Joanne. At the time, dad recounted a few trivialities from the conversation, though he left out details of most of it; and when pressed, his response was disturbing. There was some part he didn’t want to speak of, and said he would talk about later. That part, he later denied remembering, or that it was in any way significant.

I brought it up a few more times, and while we occasionally chatted about how strange it all was, he always managed to evade any more discussion of the content of the conversation.

My father died of a heart attack three months after that phone call.

***

Later that year, I was home when I heard a gentle tapping on the front door. It rather startled me, because it was identical to my father’s unique knock; I’ve not heard it since.

When I looked outside, I saw it was the postman who had knocked. He had left a package, wrapped in brown paper, at the door.

The package was from Joanne’s mother, with whom I’d never had contact. It contained a photo of a group of soldiers–one of them was my father. There was a short note, just saying she thought I should have this.

It arrived on my birthday.

Addendum: August 29, 2020

Back in 1986, before the Internet opened up to the rest of us, computer bulletin-board systems popped up all over the country. I had come across a number of them that were dedicated to the more non-ordinary aspects of life – a couple of different approaches on all things Fortean, some centered on psychic phenomena, others on UFOs, and still more focused on categories of paranormal phenomena. I made a list of the best, and conducted and recorded phone interviews with several of the SYSOPs. Up until the bulletin boards, there weren’t any organizations the average person could contact regarding any of these phenoms, and if you happened to encounter something interesting or disturbing of such nature, you would have months to wait for any of a small handful of magazines to bring any insight into reports – or clusters – of these events. With the reporting, culling, and sharing of information in any of these lines of interest, it occurred to me that we could be on the verge of a greater understanding, if possible, of at least, whatever aspects might be empirically quantifiable. It should be possible, I thought, to quickly identify clusters, “hot spots,” and overlapping phenomena. I wrote up a proposal for an article, and sent it to Fate Magazine, with the hopes they might be excited about such possibilities.

It was disappointing when, instead of responding to my query, I received back from Fate, a rate-sheet for advertising, along with a rather snide note. I wrote back that I had no financial investment in any of the paranormal bulletin boards, and, in fact, none of the boards themselves were for-profit operations. In my research for this piece, I was impressed by not only the technical implementation of the boards and the easy access to all types of information, but the professionalism, respect and dedication of the SYSOPs I had interviewed.

With my life-long interests and experiences, I’d had high hopes for a home for some of my writings with Fate. That was dashed rather quickly when Mary Margaret Fuller, Senior Editor and wife of the founder and publisher, took umbrage to my attempt to correct her circulation manager. She made it clear that Fate viewed the bulletin boards as a crushing competition rather than as a resource of unparalleled potential.

At a loss for what to do with my piece, I tried once more. I wrote to D. Scott Rogo, who at that time wrote a regular column, “Parapsychology Today,” for Fate, and offered him my voluminous research. He politely wrote back that he wasn’t “interested in computers.” I thought that was a bit parochial tact for “Parapsychology Today.” My research went into File #13, but I kept the signed letter from Rogo.

Looking back, I notice also that Rogo’s letter was postmarked August 25, my birthday.

In one final eerie twist, back to where this circle began with Joanne and “Phone Calls from the Dead,” D. Scott Rogo himself was murdered four years later.