Scheduled Readings

A Voice from Beyond the Grave

The phone’s ring shattered the silence of the April night.  It was late – a little after two a.m., as a matter of fact – when the call came through, but I was still awake.  I’ve always been a night owl.  It was in the early 1980s and I was still living at home while I worked on my undergraduate studies at the state university in Corpus Christi, Texas.  That night, I had wrapped up my latest batch of homework about a half hour before the phone started ringing.  Still wired and unable to sleep, I cracked open one of the endless string of science fiction novels I zipped through when my school reading was finished for the night.

Then the phone rang.

The sound was jarring.  To this day, I remember the ice water jetting through my veins as I bolted off the couch and raced to the extension in the kitchen.  There’s something about a phone call in the middle of the night that sets most of us instantly on edge.  It’s more than just the startling nature of the sound.  It’s the lightning-quick suspicion that such an intrusive call can only bring bad news.  Sometimes we’re lucky and it’s just a wrong number.  Other times, the news is anything but pleasant.  Such was the case that long-ago night.

I picked up the phone extension shortly after the second ring.  By then, my mother had picked up another receiver in her bedroom.  I listened to a world of whirling winds and static.  Somewhere behind the maelstrom, a voice asked for “Petra?  Petra?”

The voice – distinctly aged and female – continued to plead for my mother to respond.  And she did:  “Yes, mother?  Mother?  I’m here.”

“Petra!” the voice cried out again.

And then, perhaps because I heard the urgency in the caller’s tone and the anxiety in my mother’s response, I spoke into my receiver.  “Hello?”

The wind in the telephone shrilled, rose to a crescendo, then a sharp click killed the connection.

I met my mother in the hallway.  She was hugging herself and she looked stunned.  “That was Mother,” she said.

I nodded.  It had indeed been her mother, my grandmother.  “Yes.  That was definitely Abuela.”

To have my grandmother calling us in the middle of the night would have been disturbing under any circumstances, but this call was far more sinister.

My grandmother had been dead for over half a year.

Why had she called?  I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect it had something to do with the death of one of my mother’s brothers a few short weeks later.  Perhaps my grandmother called to prepare my mother for the shock, since she was especially close to my uncle.

This book is a true labor of love.  It focuses on my personal encounters with the supernatural.  It also delves into the stories told to me by relatives, friends and acquaintances over the years.  Most of the stories focus on South Texas, but other parts of the state are covered from time to time – as is Connecticut, my home for the past decade.

If you are intrigued by supernatural phenomena, you should find this text quite interesting and informative.  If you are a skeptic, then I hope my stories make you reconsider your position on the paranormal.  At the very least, I hope that Spirits of Texas and New England makes you ponder the possibility that the supernatural is alive and well in this realm of existence – and beyond.