Witnesses of: Black Eyed Kids, Phone Calls from the Dead, The Cursed Heart

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

The Why Files

Society & Culture, Documentary, Science Fiction, Science, Life Sciences, Fiction

4.8 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Gather round for three campfire stories investigators cannot explain. A dead man's phone calls thirty-five times in twelve hours, guiding rescuers through wreckage to his body. The phone battery should have died. The phone was never found. A heart transplant patient inherits his donor's food cravings, handwriting, and wife. Thirteen years later, he kills himself the same way his donor did. Same method. Same location. Two children knock on a car window asking for a ride home. Their eyes are solid black from edge to edge. They cannot enter without permission. The people who let them in never tell their stories. Three documented cases. Hundreds of witnesses. Zero explanations that hold up under scrutiny. The signal sometimes gets through. The heart sometimes remembers. The door should stay locked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWANHcSyL5s Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Gather around because this happened.
0:09.6	September 12, 2008, the 4.22 PM MetroLink left Union Station packed with commuters.
0:17.1	Charles Peck stood in the aisle of the front car. He was 49 years old.
0:21.2	He texted his fiancé, Andrea.
0:23.1	I'm almost there.
0:24.5	That was the last message he ever sent.
0:27.6	Minutes later, the commuter train slammed head on into a Union Pacific freight train,
0:32.5	both traveling over 40 miles per hour, combined impact speed 82 miles per hour. Charles Peck died instantly.
0:41.3	Twelve hours later, his family sat in a living room watching news footage of the wreckage. Then Andrew's phone lit up on the table. The caller ID said Charles.
1:08.9	The said Charles. We think of telephones as everyday things, plastic and glass, good for ordering pizza or
1:14.6	doom scrolling through social media. With sensor invention, people suspected they could serve
1:19.6	another purpose. Nikola Tesla built a radio to reach the spirit world. Thomas Edison believed
1:25.2	he could do the same. He called it a spirit phone,
1:28.0	a device to bridge this world and the next. In 1920, Edison told Scientific American he'd been
1:34.0	working on an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth
1:39.7	to communicate with us. He died in 1931 without completing it, or so his assistants claimed.
1:46.1	But these calls do happen.
1:49.0	In 1979, scientists published the first comprehensive study of phone calls from the dead.
1:55.4	They documented over 100 cases.
1:58.0	72% occurred within 24 hours of death.
2:04.7	89% featured heavy static or poor connection quality.
2:09.2	94% described voices as distant, mechanical, or hollow.
	...

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