Memorial Day, the next day, found me in the afternoon talking over my strange experiences of the previous day with friend Chuck at the near-by Wild Iris café. After a pleasant time talking, I was on my way walking back home when a call came in on my cell from a woman, Sue, I had met the Saturday morning before at Starbucks. Sue and I had both taught English in China and our ten-minute conversation was broken off before we’d finished really getting started. So I’d called her and left a message and she was now returning the call. Routine.
Sue was headed out of town and would get back in a couple of months. Maybe we’d check in with each other again. Fine. So I got home, put the cell on the table of my office right inside the door and went back to the kitchen to wrestle up some more coffee. But the phone rang again, and I scooted back to pick it up. Not routine. Sue’s cell but not Sue. A purse call.
I will confess that, being well primed for strangeness by yesterday up on Thumb Butte and by the talk with Chuck at the Wild Iris, the unexplained scratching rising out of my speaker phone one more time gave me the chills. After my “Hello” and its alternate silence and scratching, I tried something like “Hello, Oma” and then, with unaccustomed presence of mind, thought to record the call with my trusty Sony IC. When I hung up after 4.45 minutes, I immediately called Sue back, and that conversation was caught on the same recording. Here’s how it went.
No. Wait. Skeptics may want to CLICK HERE FIRST to hear a short excerpt from the whole recording in which I found words spoken. Do this first so I do not set a confirmation bias that might influence what you hear.
0.0.0-copy Sue nr myst call 5.18pm 160530 (Must be I had not set the IC recorder time to my local time – this was late morning, of course.) (Short excerpts of the call below.)
- The incoming call came at 5.17 pm. 5.18 is the time I began the recording on my Sony IC. Times to the nearest minute. 160530 is the date.
- This is just a direct copy. No editing has been applied. The entire duration, including the call to Sue, is about 6.25 (6m 25s).
- The Sony IC was placed near the phone, set to speaker phone, on the table.
- There are light traffic sounds in the background from the street I’m on. The front door was open.
- There is more silence than “purse scratching” coming from the phone.
- My talk with Sue shows me confused about how she might have made the call accidentally in a peculiar manner with earbuds that had happened to me recently. At this time I was quite ignorant as to how often this sort of thing actually does happen.
But all of that is fussy background, not even prologue, to the truly interesting story that unfolds from closer examination of Sue’s call. If you’ve already listened to the tape I linked above, you will have noticed that at one point I understand that a voice on the phone has spoken the word “light.” And as I listened there were somehow subtle suggestions of other words in between the scratching sounds. This needed closer inspection.
After some years now of experimenting with EVP I have acquired the wonderful open-source Audacity software to examine these recordings carefully, so I can show you the key parts of the audio. This is a spectrogram of the call that I have excerpted above as CLICK HERE FIRST. The number one shows the part where I say, “Can you say anymore?” Numbers 2 and 3 mark where a voice that I can make out, and most of my friends as well, says, “OK,” and then, quite loudly, “The light!”
At the time when I made that recording of the butt call, however, I was not yet really persuaded of the truth of the tales of EVP, voices from the dead, basically. So it is quite misleading to throw in that spectrogram above and blithely point out where the words from Doris show up. That’s not what happened back on that day, that Memorial day of 2016 when I came home and laid the phone down on the table.
What happened to begin with is what you can hear at the end of the whole recording above – I call back Sue trying to understand what’s happening. I am quite confused, as you can likely tell. After that I listen to the recording over and over again at key parts like the one with “the light” in it. I hear the words but can’t believe my ears. I also call the ATT tech people to ask about how it’s possible, this butt call thing. Sometime late in the night, after I’ve heard my wife right at the beginning of the Sue Lewis recording, answer my question, “Is this Oma?” by saying, “It’s me!” –
0.1.0-Is this Oma It's me 0.09.2-0.16.5
and also right after I ask, “Can you say any more?” And I hear her say, “OK – the Light!” –
0.2.1 Can u say anymore-OK-the Light 1.09.2-1.18.7
… sometime in the night, the truth of this thing settles into me. I feel that famous, weird shiver up the spine and I tear up a bit. My wife often told me the story of her near-death experience at age seven when a kitchen accident at home gave her third-degree burns, and in the hospital she went through the tunnel and into the light. She always remembered the light. And she remembered deciding that since there was so much love in her family she would return to her body. She did that, and she brought that love to me in due time.
So that was my Memorial Day.
And there was an earlier day, as it turns out.
