Laura Wright 
At 4:22 p.m. on September 12, 2008, two trains collided in California’s San Fernando Valley.
The disaster left dozens dead and more than a hundred injured.
Among the passengers was 49-year-old Charles Peck, who was returning from a job interview in Los Angeles. Peck hoped to move to California to be closer to his fiancée and was preparing for his second marriage.
For his family, the terrible uncertainty following the crash was soon replaced by hope.
Peck’s cell phone began calling them.
Again.
And again.
The calls continued for hours.
There was only one problem.
When rescuers finally found Charles Peck, investigators determined that he had died on impact.
Charles Peck
Peck worked as a customer service agent for Delta Air Lines in Salt Lake City.
He had three grown children and was engaged to be married. On September 12, he had traveled to Los Angeles for a job interview in Van Nuys. Getting the position would allow him to relocate to California and live closer to his fiancée.
After the interview, Peck boarded a Metrolink commuter train.
There were 224 other passengers aboard.
The train traveled through the San Fernando Valley.
Then, at 4:22 that afternoon, it collided with a freight train.
The Chatsworth Train Collision
The collision was catastrophic.
Passenger cars were crushed and twisted together as rescuers descended upon the wreckage.
Eventually, 25 people would be counted among the dead and 135 among the injured.
Families desperately tried to determine whether their relatives had survived.
Peck’s family didn’t know where he was.
Then their phones began ringing.
The calls appeared to be coming from Charles.
The First Phone Calls
Peck apparently began trying to contact relatives shortly after the collision.
At least, that was what his cell phone seemed to be doing.
When relatives answered, they couldn’t hear his voice.
There was only static.
If they attempted to call him back, the call went directly to voicemail.
The implication seemed obvious.
Charles was alive somewhere inside the wreckage.
Perhaps he was badly injured.
Perhaps he was trapped beneath debris and couldn’t speak.
Maybe he could reach his phone well enough to dial but was physically incapable of communicating.
His family contacted the people searching the wreckage.
Charles Peck was calling them.
He had to be in there somewhere.
Reach Out and Touch Someone
The calls didn’t stop.
Peck’s number reportedly attempted to contact his son.
Then his stepmother.
His brother.
His fiancée.
Others close to him received calls as well.
Every attempt produced essentially the same result.
If someone answered, they heard static.
If they called Peck’s number, they reached voicemail.
The calls continued throughout the evening.
For Peck’s increasingly desperate family, each one represented evidence that he was still alive.
Somewhere inside the destroyed train was a man trying to tell them where he was.
Searchers Keep Looking
Information about the calls was passed to rescuers.
As the hours passed, searchers continued trying to locate Peck.
The possibility that a living passenger remained trapped in the wreckage gave the search additional urgency.
Perhaps his phone could lead rescuers to him.
Perhaps one of the calls would finally contain a voice.
Perhaps he would make enough noise to reveal his location.
Hour after hour passed.
The telephone continued calling.
Charles himself remained missing.
Thirty-Five Calls
Eventually, Peck’s relatives counted 35 calls from his telephone.
They continued for approximately eleven hours after the collision.
Then they suddenly stopped.
No final message came through.
No voice explained what had happened.
The calls simply ended.
Approximately an hour later, searchers found Charles Peck.
Charles Had Been Dead the Entire Time
The discovery brought the family the worst possible news.
Peck was dead.
More disturbing was the conclusion concerning when he had died.
He had not survived for eleven hours beneath the wreckage while desperately trying to contact his family.
He had apparently died on impact.
That created an extraordinary question.
Who, or what, had been making the calls?
The Missing Cell Phone
An obvious explanation would be that Peck’s telephone had somehow survived the collision.
Perhaps damage caused the phone to malfunction.
Perhaps pressure against buttons repeatedly triggered outgoing calls.
Perhaps the device had been thrown elsewhere in the wreckage and continued operating independently of its owner.
There was another problem.
Searchers never found Charles Peck’s cell phone.
Without the device, investigators could not examine it and determine whether damage sustained during the collision might have caused the calls.
The object at the center of the mystery had disappeared.
Could a Damaged Phone Make the Calls?
A malfunctioning telephone provides one of the most obvious possibilities.
The collision was violent enough to destroy portions of the passenger train. A mobile phone subjected to that kind of impact could behave unpredictably.
The fact that relatives heard static rather than Peck’s voice also supports an electronic explanation.
But thirty-five calls to several people close to Peck make the story considerably stranger.
These were not simply repeated calls to one number.
His son, brother, stepmother, fiancée and others reportedly received them.
Without the phone itself, however, determining exactly what happened becomes much more difficult.
The Calls Had a Purpose
There is another detail that has made the story particularly compelling to those who see something paranormal in the event.
The calls influenced the search.
Peck’s relatives believed he was alive because his number continued appearing on their phones.
They relayed that information to rescuers.
Rescuers continued searching.
Then the calls stopped.
Approximately one hour later, Peck’s body was located.
Viewed skeptically, that sequence is simply coincidence combined with a malfunctioning or displaced telephone.
Viewed another way, the calls accomplished something.
They helped bring searchers to Charles.
Phone Calls From the Dead
Stories about telephone calls from deceased people existed long before Charles Peck died.
The telephone introduced an entirely new form of supernatural folklore during the twentieth century.
Older ghost stories required apparitions, mysterious footsteps, knocks at doors, or voices heard in empty rooms.
The telephone allowed the dead to reach the living from anywhere.
In these stories, someone receives a call from a friend or relative.
The voice may sound distant.
The connection may contain unusual static.
Sometimes the caller says only a few words.
Then the recipient learns that the person who supposedly called had already died.
The technology changes.
The underlying idea is ancient.
The dead have found a way to say goodbye.
When Technology Creates a Ghost Story
Modern technology has made stories like Peck’s simultaneously easier and harder to explain.
A century ago, thirty-five apparent telephone calls from a dead man would have seemed almost unquestionably supernatural.
Today, there are numerous possible technological explanations.
Phones malfunction.
Networks experience errors.
Calls can be delayed.
Devices can redial numbers.
Software can behave unpredictably after physical damage.
Caller identification is not infallible.
Yet technology can only provide a definitive explanation when enough evidence survives to reconstruct what happened.
In Peck’s case, the most important piece of evidence apparently didn’t.
The telephone was never recovered.
A Family Waiting for a Voice
Perhaps the most haunting element of the story isn’t the number of calls.
It’s what Peck’s family must have experienced every time the phone rang.
For eleven hours, they had reason to hope.
Charles’s name appeared.
They answered.
Static.
They called him back.
Voicemail.
Then the phone rang again.
Each call suggested that he was still somewhere inside the wreckage, injured but alive.
Someone they loved appeared to be reaching out to them.
And every time they answered, they couldn’t reach him.
Was Charles Peck Calling His Family?
There is no need to invoke the paranormal to explain the calls.
A damaged or displaced cell phone remains an entirely plausible explanation, particularly given the violence of the train collision.
But without the phone, the exact mechanism behind those 35 calls remains uncertain.
And the timing is difficult to forget.
Charles Peck died in the collision.
His number continued calling the people closest to him for approximately eleven hours.
Then the calls stopped.
An hour later, searchers found him.
Perhaps a damaged piece of electronics spent its final battery life randomly dialing stored numbers.
Perhaps the calls were nothing more than one bizarre consequence of an enormous mechanical disaster.
Or perhaps those who believe the dead sometimes find ways to reach the living will see something else in the story.
Either way, Charles Peck finally reached the people searching for him.
He just never managed to say a word.
About the Author
