Calls from Beyond
An article claims a man’s cell phone made calls to his loved ones for hours after his death.
In California’s San Fernando Valley, the deadliest incident in Metrolink’s history occurred. At 4:22 p.m. on 12th September 2008, a commuter train carrying 225 passengers collided with a freight train. Known as the Chatsworth crash, 135 people suffered injuries and 25 met their demise.
49-year-old Charles E. Peck was one of the deceased. He had come to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport because gaining employment in L.A would have allowed him to wed his fianceé, Andrea Katz. Their wedding plans were put on hold until they resided in the same state.
As his fiancée was heading to the train station to pick up her beloved, she heard a news report of the crash on the radio. Peck’s parents and siblings who lived locally, had 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 – His son, his brother, his stepmother, his sister and his fianceé. In total, 35 calls from his cell phone throughout that night. Upon answering, all they heard was static. When they called back, their calls went diverted to voice mail. The calls gave them hope that Peck was still alive, just imprisoned somewhere in the wreckage.
The barrage of calls prompted search & rescue crews to track the whereabouts of the phone through its signal. Once again searching through what was left of the first train, the location the calls were coming from, the searchers finally found Peck’s body about an hour after the calls from his cell phone stopped.
It was found that Charles Peck died on impact. Yet long past his death, his cell phone had continued to reach out to his loved ones, which ultimately lead rescuers to locating his remains. As far as investigators revealed, Peck’s cell phone was never recovered.
Last updated on Snopes: 31st October, 2008
Calls From Beyond – [Snopes]