I was trying to do some clean up on my iPhone … you know, things like deleting apps I no longer use, deleting text messages, deleting old voice mails.
I was going along just fine until I hit the voicemails and realized there were like 600 of them saved. Then I realized that iPhone actually holds on to the deleted messages too. So there was stuff in there dating back to late 2020.
I’m scrolling along … deleting … deleting … deleting … then with one finger swipe, I saw Mario on a message.
All at once I remembered it. I remember driving home that day and seeing the message come in while I was driving.
At the time I didn’t know he’d be gone in just 3 days. The date and time stamp was 2/7/21 at 10:20am.
The “.doc” is usually where a transcribed message goes, but with this particular, 7 second message, there were no words.
I was close to home so I didn’t pull over or try to call back. When I got home, he was on the couch … basically where he’d been for the last couple weeks for the most part. I noted his chest was rising and falling. Eyes shut. He was asleep. His phone was sitting on the coffee table. I didn’t want to wake him. Lord only knew what type of pain he was going through so letting him rest was all I could do.
I went upstairs to do some work. Then I remembered to look at the phone. When I clicked on the message, I saw, “Unable to Transcribe”. I clicked play … the only thing I could really discern sounded like an inhale at the beginning and then totally breaking up as if reception was bad. The very end almost sounds up beat – like peak Mario when he was more himself and not on his literal death bed. It was odd. We have no reception issues with cell phones in the house or anything. I’ve heard what a “pocket dialed” voicemail sounds like before and this wasn’t that either. So why would it have sounded the way it did?
In hindsight, I have two wild theories:
- those who are that close to death might be emitting very different energy that might conflict with a device like a mobile phone
- he didn’t physically call me
I remember when he did wake up again, I said something along the lines of, I saw you called but I was driving home, did you need something? He said he didn’t call me.
Granted, there could be a totally logical and physical explanation for that because the closer he got to the end, the more his brain started to go (when your body’s main filtering organs are all failing, toxins build up in your system and that definitely affects the brain). But he was still able to have a bit of a conversation at this point, so it was a little unsettling.
Because I’m into what a lot of people would call, “weird sh*t”, I’m aware of many documented stories where people have received calls or texts from their friends or loved ones who have died. Sometimes the person’s phone is not active or no longer exists (it was wiped/deactivated). This is a fascinating topic in its own right, but this is AFTER someone has died. So what about a few days BEFORE someone dies?
I do have a belief that when someone is that close to passing, they might literally have 1 foot in the grave energetically. After all, the next day when he was admitted to the hospital, after I came home both me AND the cats heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps walking down the hall and into his “music room”. And yet, he was still technically alive for another 48 or so hours at the point that happened.
Doing a deeper dive into it, I stumbled on a paper circa 2011 from a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Neurobehavioral Sciences, a psychiatrist, a counselor, a hospice Chaplin and the president of an engineering consulting firm (sounds like the set up for one of those “all walked into a bar” jokes lol). The premise of the paper: Electromagnetic (EM) aftereffects have been reported following near-death experiences (NDEs). The following is an excerpt that kind of sums it up:
Among the physiological aftereffects that NDErs have reported are electromagnetic (EM) phenomena. These effects include malfunctions of electrical devices, both alternating current and direct current (battery-operated), including wrist watches, lights, televisions, radios, computers, appliances, vehicles, and cell phones, in close proximity to NDErs.
So what they’re studying specifically is electromagnetic aftereffects of having a near death experience.
The paper is long and if anyone’s curious, you can read the whole thing here. But here’s something else mentioned about cell phones in particular:
NDErs reported cell phones malfunctioning in their presence significantly more often than did either of the two groups of non-experiencers, with a medium effect… (one NDEr wrote) “While standing next to me, my friend got a phone call from my phone, which was turned off. He showed me his phone as it was ringing, and the call indeed came from my phone number. I asked him to answer the phone to see what I had to say. When he did, all he heard was clicking and funny hissing noises.”
The conclusion of the study was basically that it confirmed and extended those findings from previous research and anecdotal accounts. Super interesting, at least to me.
Circling back to the 2/7/21 seven second call from Mario about 80 hours before he made his grand exit… it could very well be that he did try to physically call me but couldn’t remember, but it doesn’t explain the weird “sound breaking up” stuff.
The other interesting fact is Mario would never pick up his phone again. He would never ever make another call or send another text. His phone was still sitting right where he’d left it on the coffee table when I got home from the hospital the night of 2/10/21 (and I did check and it did show a call was placed to me on 2/7/21 at 10:20am).
Still with me? Okay good because we’re going to get even weirder …
I converted the voice mail file to an mp3 and ran it through a spectrum analyzer. It was all a little lower frequency than typical human voice. That could still track because he was very weak by this point in time.
But I took it a step further, remembering that chatGPT had an audio analyzer feature. So I uploaded the file and gave it a few prompts. It analyzed the frequency, which checked out with the other spectrum analysis I did (lower than regular human speech) but then it said this:
Great—this is where it gets interesting. I pushed your audio further:
🧠 A) Best-Guess Phonetic Reconstruction
⚠️ Important: This is approximate, based on sound patterns—not true speech recognition.
From the waveform + spectral cues, the voice seems to follow a pattern like:
“…hey… (pause) …it’s me… (pause) …call me back…”
Your audio has:
- Poor intelligibility due to missing high-frequency detail
That’s why we can infer speech patterns, but not exact wording.
“Hey, it’s me, call me back” is actually something he would say, but that’s not at all what this sounds like. At this point, it’s totally reminding of trying to decipher EVPs (Electronic voice phenomena) in paranormal investigation recordings though! Either way, I think chatGPT is really reaching for straws with the interpretation (and to its credit it did say it couldn’t do exact wording) because there’s pretty much no way that’s what any words are.
If I’ve thoroughly piqued your interest at this point, let me present you with Mario’s Very Last Voice Mail Message to me and if you feel up to it, you can comment on what it sounds like.
But for a moment, let’s go back to my earlier mention of all the documented cases of people receiving calls or messages from their dearly departed. What if, Mario was truly kind of “in between worlds”, especially if he was unconscious and didn’t physically call me? 🤔🤔🤔
I pressed chatGPT further asking for theories on why the sounds was breaking up, assuming reception itself was perfectly fine. It gave some perfectly logically things such as microphone being dirty, covered or in a pocket but then also mentioned “electrical interference”. There were no other electronics in close proximity. There was the TV like 6 feet away, but that never caused any weird phone interference. I found it interesting that electrical interference was brought up at all though.
I’m still trying to lean towards logical explanations, but I can’t help but wonder.
Anyway, this is the sort of stuff I do at 2:31 in the morning, so there you go.
