Dead Man Calling

I recently had what I believe to be a dead man leave a message on my voicemail. Most specifically, I think that this was my friend and co-author Jon Titchenal, who passed away (I'm assuming by suicide) on June 27th of last year.

I should clarify that Jon and I wrote several books together, books having to do with the subjects of spirit communication and ghosts--most specifically a self-published book called Awakenings (a really terrible little book, published at the behest of a communicating spirit), and the book Haunted Indianapolis and Other Indiana Ghost Stories (2007), which was published with Schiffer, a niche publisher specializing in militaria and collectibles, but with a line of paranormal titles focusing on regional experiences and accounts. He wrote the foreword, "In the Gathering Dark," to my novel Joseph (2004), and an introduction to my UFO book, the awfully-titled Midwest UFOs and Beyond (not my idea), which was also published by Schiffer back in 2011. He was a person steeped in fascination with the occult and unknown, like me, and would drive many miles to visit, just so we could stay up all night and discuss strange topics.

And then he vanished. He quit coming over or calling years and years ago, and I thought perhaps he was angry with me for some reason. We lost touch, and I failed to be able to track him after 2016; I assumed he had, perhaps, died.

I even wrote a strange poem, "To Johnny Who Thought He Would Never Die," based on the feeling that my friend had died. Well, last year, out of the blue, I got a message on Facebook from someone I had friended calling himself "John Theriac." After a few moments of banter, he changed his profile pic. It was Jon.

He never explained why he had been absent all these years. At the risk of making this particular article too long, he told me he had been working in a mill. We discussed some recent audio recordings he'd done for audible, for Aleister Crowley's book Moonchild.

My back began to hurt, so I told him I had to go. I ended the chat, assuming I would be getting reacquainted soon with my old friend. Alas, it was not meant to be.

After a few weeks, I realized I hadn't heard from Jon again. I emailed him and received a reply. Not from Jon, but from his girlfriend.

She explained that he had died. On June 27th, having "passed away" in the night, unexpectedly. Possibly she said, "from a reaction to a medication." Yeah, read between the lines.

I suddenly realized what song was playing in the other browser window while I was reading this. It was YouTube, a playlist made randomly. The song? "The End," by The Doors. "This is the end, my only friend, the end...I'll never look into your eyes again." Jon would have loved that irony.

Death Tokens

As weird as that was, even weirder was the picture that fell from the wall a few days earlier. A death token? Like three stout raps on a headboard, or a clock stopping, the "picture falling from the wall" is an old trope to signal somebody is going to die. ALL the events surrounding Jon's death--including the poem I wrote, and the fact that I had already assumed about him that he was dead, even if he were still alive at that point (if only for a short time), are strange and unsettling. Why did he vanish for so many years? He seems to have been estranged from his family.

He was a brilliant, prolific novelist. At least, he was while I knew him. Where were his great novels? What happened to Jon? He lived as mysteriously as he died.

Zem Books

I am still a writer, twenty years on from first meeting Jon, from hunting ghosts with him at the old Hotel Roberts in Muncie, Indiana, and I am also a small press publisher. My imprint, Zem Books, is inspired by the name of an entity we contacted in my spritiualist circle at BSU, back in the early 2000s. The logo is the vision I had of the hand with an eye in the center of the palm--MY symbol, in a sense. I publish a hundred titles, ranging from Eastern philosophy and fortune-telling, UFOs, spiritualism, ghosts, palmistry, philosophy, gothic and early science fiction, and even politically incorrect and politically subversive titles; as well as, of course, my own books. (The "subversive" stuff is because I have a particular philosophy about publishing, one that precludes the safe and bland, and focuses on the very challenging; as in challenging preconceptions about the world.)

Zem Books Web Spotlight

I have no personal life--my entire life is my creative world. I work for various phone companies also, working as a tarot reader and "intuitive". I dabble in the occult nearly every night of my and have for many years. I occasionally get "dead people" while I am giving readings. This is confirmed by the client while we are talking. I don't usually go LOOKING for dead people.

In my time, since childhood, I've had out-of-body experiences, seen phantoms around my bed upon awakening (quite hideous ones), had UFO sightings, close ones, and had my bed shake for a period, unaccountably wakening me from uneasy slumber.

I've acted as a medium, and, for five years, as psychic intuitive and tarot reader for various phone companies, nearly every night of the week. I've had books and soap dishes fly from the shelves and basins; I've had many, many psychic dreams. I've had my fair share of experience with this sort of thing.

Nothing, not any of that, as fantastic as some of it was, has quite prepared me for receiving literal telephone calls from dead people.

Electronic Voice Phenomena I've had before. I was once doing a recording of a poem by Walt Whitman when I realized there was the sound of a young girl giggling in the background. There was no such girl giggling in the room with me, I can assure you, so I put it down to being the spirit of a young woman I knew that had committed suicide. I use to get her through automatic writing. I made a video of that EVP. but getting those ghost voices on my recordings occasionally doesn't really bother me.

But, being the sort of guy I am, when the time came to up the ante, perhaps give me something I could write about, I took the shot. I purchased a "spirit box" device. I used it precisely ONE time.

Raudive Voices and Spiricom

I should give a quick thumbnail about EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). You can Wikipedia it, I suppose. But, here goes. We'll begin with a quote:

"I sat by the table, clearly awake and relaxed. I sensed that soon something was going to happen. Following an inner pleasurable calmness, long sentences in English appeared in my consciousness. I did not perceive these sentences acoustically but they formed themselves as long phonetic sentences and after a closer study I couldn't conceive the words as correct English but in a disfigured almost alphabetical way - completely deformed. I did not hear a voice, a sound nor a whisper. It was all soundless." --Friedrich Jurgenson

Friedrich Jürgenson was a painter, composer, and intellectual polymath who spoke ten languages fluently. He was also, as such people often are, highly mediumistic, and when he purchased a tape recorder in 1960, visiting the home of his parents in Estonia, he happened upon a phenomenon, that, much like his emerging psychic abilities, was to change his life forever. Attempting to record some bird voices, he clearly heard another voice, a human woman, calling to him in the background, on his recording.

"I was outside with a tape recorder, recording bird songs. When I listen through the tape, a voice was heard to say 'Friedel, can you hear me. It's mammy ....' It was my dead mother's voice. 'Friedel' was her special nickname for me."

He thought it to be his dead mother. Jürgenson quickly abandoned all other pursuits in an attempt to record the "ghost voices" of the disembodied and authored a book on the subject. His friend, Dr. Konstantīns Raudive became interested in ghost voices, too. Raudive (EVPs became known popularly for a time as "Raudive Voices") recorded thousands of such examples himself, often of weird, sing-song voices speaking a variety of languages, uttering cryptic phrases. Skeptics put it all down to stray radio chatter and "pareidolia"; i.e. the phenomena of interpreting a sound based on the expectation of the listener; like seing a "face" in the clouds.

Raudive released a book and accompanying record, Breakthrough, in 1971. In 1974, he died. Reportedly, he made an actual phone call to an associate shortly after his demise. (I have heard this audio.)

Author John Keel, in his book The Mothman Prophecies (1975), recounts the mysterious phone calls from "Men in Black" and other weirdies surrounding the 1967 "Mothman" sightings and nearby alien "visitation" by an entity referring to itself as "Indrid Cold." Describing it as "games non-people play," Keel talked about the weird, nonsensical way in which these highly deceptive-seeming beings communicated. (Fellow UFO abduction researcher, the late Budd Hopkins, ALSO mentions weird phone calls from seemingly paranormal sources in his 1987 book Intruders.)

Author William S. Burroughs was likewise fascinated with the mediumistic use of tape recorders and "Spirit voices," and used them experimentally to that end.

The late researcher D. Scott Rogo [1] wrote a 1979 book Phone Calls from the Dead, along with artist and occult researcher Raymond Bayless, which we have not personally read yet. In it, he collects the accounts of those who have claimed to have received such phone calls. This was back in the era of landlines, before caller ID. Some calls were from the dead, by the way; others were placed, through unaccountable circumstances, TO people who, it was later discovered, were dead. Some to residences that were abandoned. Believe it or not.

We should say one final word about the "Spiricom" tape, which we first heard one night on the Coast to Coast AM radio program many, many years ago, which was hosted by the late, great Art Bell. Spiricom was a supposed device built at the behest of businessman and paranormal enthusiast George Meeks, who commissioned a medium named Bill O'Neill to operate the device. He successfully did so, managing to get intelligible, if a distorted electronic voice from a "Dr. Mueller," who, it was claimed, was communicating from the Other Side. The resultant recording, taken from an old audio cassette released in the Eighties, is eerie and has gone the rounds of the internet for decades.

THIS author has, in two different books, related the old urban legend of "Martin Sheets," which was an Indiana businessman who supposedly had the terror of being buried alive. To that end, he had a special crypt designed with a telephone hook-up. When he did die, he was interred, but the telephone was never taken from the crypt. Later, his widow was found dead of a heart attack, clutching the receiver of the phone. When they finally entered the Sheets crypt, it was found that the phone in the crypt was--off the hook! The ghoulish, comic implication is that Sheets put in one final call, after death, to his beloved wife, scaring her literally to death, as well.

ITC

ITC, (Instrumental Trans-Communication), is any sort of communication via an electronic device between the living and the dead. It is an idea as old as Edison, who was said to have been working on such a device when he died. Electronic Voice Phenomena is part of it--people started using old tape recorders, reel to reel ones even, but now many use digital. However, people also capture "ghost faces"; i.e. images of the departed on video using cameras and old-fashioned television hook-ups. They use "Spirit Boxes" as well.

And you can purchase these. Quite inexpensively. I did.

This is why I am writing this to you.

EVPs are often described as weird, garbled, sing-song; at a bizarre pitch. Raudive's voices were comprised of a number of languages, including German, English, Russian, Latvian, etc. Sometimes they can be child-like, even melancholy. Less frequently, they are harsh and utter vulgarities or obscenities (seeming to preclude the skeptic's contention that these are mere stray radio snippets).

Now...

About fourteen months ago or so, I had a dream. I was sitting in a room watching an old-fashioned tube television set. On the set, I could see a news program of Israeli tanks moving into Gaza. With me were a young, blonde white woman, and a black teenage boy.

That was approximately December 1st, 2019. A few months later, I had a dream of a raven (a symbol of death) sitting on a buffet table of rotting food. I awoke, knowing that death was coming. This was before the pandemic.

Now, we have a situation in Israel we haven't had since 2014 or so. And the Israelis have a disaster of public relations on their hands. This article is NOT an attempt to comment on the morality or justification (or lack thereof), of the Israeli military response; only to point out that, such as the death of the pandemic, the racial strife of the last year, and the war in Gaza, I saw all of this, prophetically, in dreams beforehand. So something has been building. But what?

Also last year, I started getting the first very strange telephone messages.

The first ones sounded like recordings of an Asian woman, speaking quite a long, incomprehensible dialog; but it could have even been gibberish or backward speech. The intonation sounded Asian. In the background was ethereal music that sounded like New Age music without melody--I've heard such music before in dreams, among the dead. The "Invisible Choir" I suppose.

I recorded that for use in my experimental music projects, later. I didn't think much of it; after all, considering that I work for various phone companies, I thought that might have something to do with getting "weird" calls occasionally. Perhaps I was being redirected by some computer line or something.

I bought the "Spirit Box" on a whim; but, really, for the same reason behind purchasing an Ouija Board a few years ago. I was curious to more fully open up communication for the purposes of producing writing from spirits. I've done this before, but I knew, or rather know, this is something I'm supposed to do. As the conduit. That's why I was born into this world. (But, unfortunately, mediums, it has been observed, very frequently do NOT have "happy lives.")

I only experimented with the damn thing once. ONCE. That same day, I got a strange call, a message that sounded like nothing but static on my voice mail. Intrigued, but not particularly unnerved at that point, I soon forgot it. It DID, I had to admit, sound like the static from...the Spirit Box. The day before yesterday, I was checking two old messages. The first was unimportant. The second was what sounded like a heavy blast of static. A second later, though, I realized that this static whispered a single word. My name.

"Tom," is all it said.

And then nothing.

I suddenly felt the flesh crawl across my arms and legs. I listened again. I recorded the message. I do not like to listen to it.

It is described similarly, almost in textbook fashion, to others of these similar "phone calls from spirits." Yesterday, another strange call, a woman, who sounded black, called and said nothing on the phone, except, "You is so insane, you is so insane, you is so insane..." Over and over, and then, nothing. The volume seemed to cut in and out. It is said, on these calls, to do that. Writing this, right now, I am feeling unaccountably afraid, with eyes upon me. And I've experienced a lot of this sort of thing in my life. But never anything quite like this.

Some believe we can imprint these audio messages with our subconscious minds--these messages might be emerging, in other words, from some buried, hidden part of myself. I do know that, of all the people I know who have crossed over in the last few years, only Jon referred to me as Tom. Everyone else always called me by my first name.

If it IS Jon, what, pray do tell, does he want? Is it because I am soon to publish one of his lost novels, Take Me Back to the Garden of Love, which I dug up from years ago, from a defunct literary website? Perhaps. The novel is in copyright limbo (Jon left no descendants, no wife, was estranged from his family, and I know had no "literary executor" for this stuff).

The novel itself, about immortal beings that live from ancient times to modern days, was inspired by the name of an old Tin Pan Alley song, the sheet music of which I've had framed and hung on my walls for years.

I don't know. Perhaps I am most fearful that it is a warning of impending tragedy. A friend messaged me today to tell me he had a dream that I should "be careful." I just don't know.

I have tried to be as concise with this article as possible, to keep it from rambling too far afield. I hope you'll forgive me for the time or two that might have happened. But, I also try to be thorough. Below, appended to this article, is a short video with the voicemail message in question. Keeping in mind, I really, really don't like to hear it.

Note.

1. D. Scott Rogo was found murdered in his apartment in 1990. The killer was never apprehended.

The Audio.