It happens several times a day to everyone I know, usually at dinner time. Sitting quietly, minding your own business in the comfort of your own home and the phone rings. You look at the number and it looks somewhat familiar - whoever is calling lives in your area code, so there’s that. It can’t be from some robocaller - oh, you know, it probably is, but you put your hand up to the phone and wait - that is, if you have an answering machine. My son has a great strategy that he recorded for us a long time ago - it goes - “Hi you’ve reached the Burbys. We can’t come to the phone right now but if you’ll leave your name and number, we’ll be happy to get back to you, unless you’re soliciting something, in which case, please call someone else.” It works most of the time.  There are pathways that lead into our homes - the front walk that leads to the door, your email, your Internet connection and of course, your phone. We have a strange modern relationship with our phones. We eat with them, take them to the bathroom and take them to bed. Phones have become a hardware addition to the human mind, a kind of peripheral that we just can’t seem to do without. We hold them in our hands and keep them safe because they connect us to so many people, places and things. We have ways of filtering out the unwanted emails and calls, but even then, sometimes you get that call - the weird one where you decide to answer and say, “Hello?” and then you wait and time passes - and there is no answer, but you know, or at least you tell yourself - that there is someone there on the end of the line - someone who isn’t answering. These are unnerving, to be sure. Maybe it was just a wrong number.  You hang up and forget about it. These things happen all the time. Probably a glitch. But there are the calls where someone does answer and these calls can change the way you look at the world and gauge your own experience of the strange. Phones operate using electricity and are, in the context of human history, a fairly recent invention. How can such a thing made of batteries and silicon, copper and gold be a conduit for the experience of the unexplained? When I was a kid we had something called a party line. Everyone on our long country road shared the same line, but we all had different rings. If you answered someone else’s call, you heard about it. If you picked up the phone and didn’t listen to hear if someone else down the road was using it, you might begin dialing over someone’s conversation. Sometimes, though, you’d hear your ring - it was meant for your household, and you rushed over and picked up the receiver and put it to your ear and heard...what was that? Was someone whispering? It always happened when you were home alone, when the shadows of night started falling. A phone call from someone - but who? What did they want? Why wouldn’t they talk? And then a sound - from a thousand miles away, a static-filled nearly indistinguishable utterance of something unintelligible. But you can swear it sounds like someone you know. Did they say your name? “Hello? Hello?” you say over and over, but to no avail. There were more than a few of these calls at my house growing up. I wonder about them from time to time.  There is a story from before the invention of cell phones in the summer of 1970 from a town in northern New Hampshire. Like so many ghost stories, it is simple and cannot be proven, but that doesn’t matter. Ghost stories don’t need proof - they only require belief. See if you...believe. Three friends are in a pickup truck, driving down the back road that leads deep into the back forty of a northern New Hampshire property. It’s summer and the weather is fine - the sun is bright and the hour is late in the afternoon, casting long shadows. Frank Carlye and his friend Sam Dugan, policemen on their day off, are in the cab of the pickup. Their friend, Lincoln Hassen, is in the open bed of the truck,