Phone Call from a Murdered DLSL Employee?

My bulky old Ericsson phone.  A missed call notification has remained a mystery to this day.

The Coast to Coast program that I listen to in the morning had a guest today who was a psychic researcher; and among the things that she talked about in her interview with the host was communication from the other side. Most of the things she talked about were things that we Filipinos will be open to. Indeed, unlike most western cultures, we will not quickly dismiss phenomena which cannot be explained in a scientific manner.

Something that she talked about was of particular interest to me: supposed phone calls from the dead. I might have had a call from the other side; and to this day, the incident is a mystery that has never been solved.

But I get ahead of the story…

In the late nineties, Rodel, the school's Cultural Officer who reported directly to me, was brutally murdered. From what I can recall of the incident, he had gone to see a friend late on the night of the crime, paid a short visit to an ATM machine to withdraw some cash and then hailed a tricycle to go home.

He would not get home until two days later if memory serves me right; and that was as a lifeless corpse. His body was found in a vacant lot south of the city proper, apparently the victim of a heinous crime.

It was while he was still missing that the mystery happened. It was late in the afternoon; and of course, I was out at the football field coaching my football team. I was not playing, so I had on my work clothes at the field.

I had my bulky Ericsson cell phone inside a pocket of my pants as I always did; and when I pulled it out to see if anyone had sent me a message, I saw a notification for two missed calls. Since I was immersed in my coaching, I had not felt the phone vibrating while the phone rang.

The number mystified me even if I was all too familiar with it. It was the President’s Office. The only reason the President’s Office would be calling my cell phone was if there was an emergency.

I quickly gave the boys a water break and rushed to the Diokno Building to see what the fuss was all about. Racquel, the President’s secretary, was surprised to see me. I asked if she had tried to reach my cell phone since she made most of the calls on behalf of the Brother President.

No, she had not. I showed her the missed call notification and asked if anyone had asked to use the office’s phone. Nobody had.

Was Br. Rafael Donato inside, I asked her. Fortunately, he was. I gently knocked on the door then let myself in. He was enrapt in a book and was surprised to see me.

“Did you want to see me, Brother?” I asked him. No, he did not. Neither did he try to call me. I showed him the missed call notification and told him why I had come rushing.

“That was probably Rodel trying to reach you,” he gently said. I laughed and excused myself, all the while thinking that the good Brother had just played a practical joke on me. Of course, the good Brother was never the sort to do something like that.

Years later, I told the story to a couple of colleagues over a few drinks. “What if,” one asked me, “you had taken the call?” I had pondered that very question inside my head many times before; and frankly, the very thought creeped me out.

During the funeral rites, another colleague had told me that one of our students, a good friend of the deceased, could not stop crying upon learning of Rodel’s death because she had supposedly met and spoken to him WHILE he was still missing and already presumably dead.

So was it a phone call from the other side that I missed?

I quote verbatim from the web site themystica.com.

“This is a phenomenon in which people literally receive phone calls from the dead. The deceased caller usually had a closed relationship with the recipient.

In such calls, the telephone usually rings normally, but may sound flat and abnormal. Usually the connection is bad and the voice of the deceased fades. The voice is recognizable, however, and usually speaks familiar or pet names and words. The phone call is terminated abruptly, either by the caller or by the line going dead. If the voice is too faint, the recipient may hang up in frustration.

If the recipient knows the caller id deceased, he or she may enter a state of shock and hang up immediately. If the recipient does not know that the caller is dead, he or she may talk as long as thirty minutes. Usually such calls occur within twenty-for hours after the caller's death, although, some calls have been reported as long as two years from the time of death.

Generally the purpose of such mysterious calls seems to be to leave a farewell message, or a warning of an impending danger, or information needed by the living.”

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