
The person who receives the message will often not recognize it for the very bad thing it is, because these types of things usually do not end well, and are a staple of the Horror genre.
May involve a Supernatural Phone. Contrast Disconnected by Death. Not to be confused with Phoning the Phantom, which is when you avoid looking like a lunatic while talking to somebody only you can hear by pretending you're on the phone.
Examples:
- In Digimon Ghost Game, when Kiyoshiro ends up in Purgatory and Limbo at the hands of Monster of the Week Sepikmon, it's shown to be a Dark World mirror of Japan. He tries to call for help but his phone is (also) dead, so he runs into an electronics shop and grabs a power bank. With it, his ghost phone is able to call Hiro in the world of the living, confusing the others as it was right next to them unmoving in the real world.
- Dr. STONE: Subverted. The phone hidden at Senku's empty grave allows Taiju and Yuzuriha to talk with him, but they know he's not dead. Lampshaded by the narration jokingly calling it a "communications device to the spirit world".
- Serial Experiments Lain does this with e-mail in the very first episode, kicking off the whole plot of the series.
- Shigofumi is all about letters sent by the dead to the living.
- Wonder Egg Priority: In the final episode, Neiru goes to the Dream Land and falls for the temptation of death. Ai receives a phone call from her that night, but she decides not to answer and even throws her phone from the balcony.
- Big Finish Doctor Who:
- Subverted in the Eleventh Doctor Chronicles story "The Last Stand of Miss Valarie Lockwood". When Valarie starts receiving calls from her deceased mom, she isn't fooled for a second, as she's been using her mom's dormant voicemail as a sounding board. Her suspicions are correct, as the messages have been sent by Tim, a Sapient Ship created by the Daleks, to lure her inside him and tell her of his plans to stop the Daleks for good. She's super pissed that her mom's memory was abused this way.
- Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures: In "Absent Friends", the first story in Doom Coalition 3, a company eager to construct a cell tower in an English village attempts to placate the residents by giving them free phones. As a consequence of the Doomsday Chronometer, a powerful clock being assembled for the benefit of the Doom Coalition, the residents are called by people they've lost, before their deaths. Liv is contacted by her dad, killed by an illness undetected by his MedTech, and must choose whether to warn him to get a second opinion.
- Chicago Typewriter: The late Remì Geroux communicates with Emilio Enzo through an enchanted typewriter ribbon, warning Enzo not to interfere with his "work".
- The Walking Dead: Rick Grimes gets a phone call from a woman who is eventually revealed to be his deceased wife, a sign of his Sanity Slippage. Although he stops taking the calls, he still brings the (disconnected) phone with him, knowing that all he has to do to hear his wife's voice is pick up the receiver.
- Funky Winkerbean: Les Moore's deceased wife Lisa calls him in the airport to warn him not to take a flight that's destined to crash. He takes the flight anyway, but she saves him by arranging for the plane's mechanical problem to be discovered.
- In This Bites!, after Soundbite Awakens the Noise-Noise Fruit, he gains (unknowingly, at first) the power to take calls from the deceased. Gol D. Roger is the only person who's ever posthumously called in to the Strawhat Broadcast Station — and while initially it seemed Jaguar D. Saul had also called in to comfort Robin, it was revealed several years later that he actually survived Aokiji seemingly killing him due to the future Admiral apparently making his stint as a Human Popsicle a Deliberately Non-Lethal Attack.
- Your Name: The Reveal is that Taki and Mitsuha have been communicating across a 3-year gap, including leaving each other messages... and Mitsuha died three years ago when a meteorite struck her hometown.
- The Black Phone follows a boy kidnapped and imprisoned by a serial killer who receives aid from the ghosts of his prior victims, who communicate with him through a mysterious black telephone.
- The Devil Commands: One night following his wife's death, Blair absentmindedly switches on the power to his brainwave-recording equipment, only to turn it off again during one of his more lucid moments. Then Blair finds his attention drawn to the graph, which ought to bear nothing but a flat trace for the minute or two that the machine was turned on, given that the receiver wasn't hooked up to anyone or anything. That's not what he sees, though. Not only is there a wave pattern on the graph, but it's Helen's wave pattern! Blair's research has already shown that only Helen's brain could produce that pattern, so it's difficult to find any explanation for the graph save that the idle recorder was somehow picking up Helen's thoughts from beyond the grave.
- Don't Look Down (1998): Ben receives a phone call from his dead army buddy Ivan who died in a botched parachute jump, telling him to quit the support group and describing the ghost who is killing the other members. Later, Carla hears the voice of her dead sister Rachel talking to her over the walkie-talkie while she is watching Jocelyn's bungee jump. The first was actually Mark pretending to be Ivan to spook him into quitting the group, ad the second was a hallucination caused by Mark's Gaslighting of Carla.
- The plot of Frequency involves the main character being able to communicate through time with his long-dead father, albeit through a ham radio rather than a telephone.
- John Dies at the End features a drug, only known as "Soy Sauce", that causes a number of unusual "side effects" to the user. Contrary to the movie's title, John dies about halfway through, but through the power of Soy Sauce, he is able to contact his friend David, first by calling him on his (broken) cell phone, then through a Bratwurst that David is instructed to hold to his ear like a cell phone.
- In The Mothman Prophecies, the main character gets a phone call from what appears to be his deceased wife. Even after he unplugs the (old-school with no cordless abilities) phone, it continues to ring.
- In The Ring (2002), the announcement of Samara's curse comes through a phone call received by the tape's watcher, in which Samara's ghost whispers "SEVEN DAYS!"
- Scary Movie 3 parodies the example from The Ring (2002) above, except the announcement has a bad connection at first, resulting in an I Can't Hear You gag.
- White Noise (2005) is about a man who receives messages from his dead wife through the static on television sets and radios. It's implied that it isn't his wife but a rather more sinister ghostly entity.
- Subverted in the following joke: A boss asks his employee: "Do you believe in an afterlife?" The employee: "Yes, why do you want to know that?" Boss: "Well, yesterday, while you were at your father's funeral, he called and asked for you on the phone!"
- 20th Century Ghosts features the story "The Black Phone", in which the ghosts of a serial killer's victims communicate with an imprisoned boy through the titular phone in order to help him avoid their fate at the killer's hands.
- In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, a guy makes a car phone call and starts talking into the answering machine, then gets killed. Just later his ghost tries to communicate by talking through the phone, which is recorded on the answering machine as well. Dirk deletes the message, before it screws up the timeline of when he actually died.
- Fight Club: When Marla receives phone calls with no one on the line, she believes they're from the departed. It's left out of the film, except for the "Prepare to evacuate soul" phone call scene, which has a different context.
- A Clock Punk version is faked in Going Postal, with the ghosts of dead clacksmen supposedly sending a message through the clacks accusing the Grand Trunk Company of their deaths.
- Just After Sunset: This is the premise of "The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates". A husband who died in a plane crash was trying to call his wife just before impact; she gets the call two days later and gets to talk to him in the afterlife (which, apparently, is a bus station). She gets to say goodbye, and he warns her about a future disaster, which she manages to avoid.
- A non-supernatural version appears in Ken MacLeod's short story "Like Old Times"
, in which the narrator is sorting through his late father's collection of sf novels, when he hears his father's AI "Agent" answer the phone to one of his dad's friends and, in an exact imitation of the dead man's voice and mannerisms, arrange to meet up at an upcoming convention, because it can see it's in his diary and knows he'd want to do so. When he calls back to explain, it turns out the friend is also dead, and his Agent is doing the same thing.
- Nightmares & Dreamscapes: This is sort of the premise of "Sorry, Right Number", but there's a twist. The voice heard is not dead; it's the protagonist, talking to herself five years in the future. However, her first husband does die, and her future self could have saved him had she stopped crying long enough to get the message through.
- If It Bleeds: "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" explores an Intergenerational Friendship between former cutthroat businessman Mr. Harrigan and his young neighbor Craig. At Mr. Harrigan's funeral, Craig places the dead man's treasured iPhone (which Craig himself bought for him some years back) into his pocket so that he'll be buried with it. He soon realizes that if he leaves a voicemail at Mr. Harrigan's old number, he'll get a text back. And if he calls to complain about an injustice in his life, the perpetrator just might turn up dead.
- October Daye: In Rosemary and Rue, Toby gets her Call to Adventure by receiving a phone call from the murder victim, who happens to be a fae, and who geases Toby into solving the case.
- Played with in Jerry Ahern's The Takers. Mary Mulrooney makes a living writing books on supernatural phenomena, and is introduced with the usual spooky nutcase in a Creepy Cemetery trying to record voices from the dead. Their efforts are a failure, so her spooky colleague sends her a message that he'll be trying again with someone who died recently and violently, hoping to get a better result. This turns out to be the CIA agent (Josh Culhane's brother) murdered by Jeremiah Steiglitz's daughter at the start of events. Josh Culhane and Mary Mulrooney play the grave recording (calling on Josh to avenge him) to provide a distraction to Steiglitz and her daughter at the climax of the novel.
- One Death in Paradise murder mystery begins when Dwayne gets a text message from an old friend whose body is in the process of being cremated. Subverted when it proves to have come from a concerned third party who'd stolen his phone, but it spooks Dwayne enough to investigate his death, which exposes his murderer.
- Doctor Who: In "Deep Breath", the Eleventh Doctor phones his companion Clara Oswald from the past, asking her to accept the new Twelfth Doctor.
- Downton Abbey: It is implied in the Christmas Special that Lavinia's spirit "talks" to Anna and Daisy through an Ouija Board and writes the words "May they be happy. With my love" in reference to Matthew and Mary.
- Friends subverts this when Joey gets a phone call from what he thinks is his dead agent but is actually Phoebe impersonating her (it's complicated).
- Fringe: In "The Arrival", complete with lots of static, and the dispatcher confirming there have been no calls.
- In the Supernatural episode "Long-Distance Call", several people, including Dean, seem to get this kind of call from deceased loved ones. It turns out to be a nasty ruse.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- In "Long Distance Call", soon after her death, Grandma Bayles begins calling her beloved five-year-old grandson Billy on his toy telephone and implores him to commit suicide so that they be Together in Death.
- In "Night Call", Miss Elva Keene begins receiving strange phone calls on a stormy night. She initially can't hear anything on the other end of the line but she later hears moaning and eventually a man saying "hello" over and over again. When the phone company investigates, they discover that the phoneline was damaged during the storm and it is resting on a grave in Valley View Cemetery. The grave is that of Elva's fiancé Brian Douglas.
- The X-Files: In "Christmas Carol", Scully gets a phone call from her dead sister. This ends up leading her to a girl who is her biological daughter, created using the ovum extracted from her body.
- Weird things reportage magazine Fortean Times has featured accounts where this has allegedly happened in real life, and has devoted analytical articles to discussing the accounts, whether or not they have objective reality, speculated on what psychological factors may be involved (an altered state of realty following on from recent bereavement and associated grief), or on technical glitches in the communications media involved. Most recently, instances have been noted where the dead have apparently made contact via mobile phones and online media such as Skype and email.
- In season 8 of The BBC Radio 4 Mockumentary series Incredible Women, the interviewer, Jeremy, starts getting phone calls from his great-grandmother when he's trying to interview a paranormal debunker. After the debunker turns out, to her own surprise, to be Dead All Along, they both take over the radio studio.
- Geist: The Sin-Eaters: The Sin-Eaters' ghostly Powers via Possession can invoke this. They ritually break or disable a means of communication — anything from a cell phone to a pen works — and leave it alone with a ghost, who can create one message that unerringly finds its way to its recipient.
- The plot of Another Code is set in motion when Ashley receives a birthday present from her father, who she thought was dead.
- Five Nights at Freddy's 1: The Phone Guy ends up getting killed by the animatronics. The night after his death, you'll get another phone call; however, you'll hear a demonic voice from the other end saying something in a backwards message of sorts, rather than the optimistic voice that you're used to.
- In Metro: Last Light, while passing through the anomalous River of Fate with Khan, a decades-old utility phone with no visible power source rings. If Artyom picks it up, he can hear the voice of his dead mother calling for him and will drop the phone in surprise. It even gives the player a moral point.
- Throughout Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh, Curtis will receive various post-mortem messages (phone calls, letters, e-mails) from both his dead mother and his various murdered coworkers, who call him a monster for causing their deaths. The ending reveals them all to be hallucinations send by the Hecatomb in an attempt to drive Curtis insane.
- Shadowrun Returns begins with one of these, which is actually justified with an implanted Dead Man's Switch. The sender is one of the PC's old friends, an alcoholic runner named Sam Watts who offers them one hundred thousand nuyen from his life insurance policy is they can figure out who killed him and bring them to justice. In the end, it turns out that he was lying and there was no money, he just hoped his friend would care enough to investigate it.
- Silent Hill 2 begins with one of these from the protagonist's dead wife, although it turns out to be an example of Dead Man Writing instead; he just thought it was this because he had repressed the memory of her death.
- About halfway through Spec Ops: The Line, protagonist Capt. Walker starts getting harshly critical radio messages from Colonel Konrad, and engages him in arguments about choice and morality. At the end of the game, Walker follows these messages to their source, and discovers Konrad's long-dead body — the transmissions were nothing but a product of Walker's Sanity Slippage, as he needed to invent someone to blame for the things he'd done in Dubai. Sharp-eyed players will notice that the walkie-talkie Walker picked up was broken to begin with.
- Trauma Center (Atlus): When Naomi Kimishima, the forensic investigator in Trauma Team, gets in contact with a deceased's body (or its remains), she can perceive their final words through a call to her cellphone. It isn't made clear whether this is a power of hers or of the cellphone.
- In Achewood, Roast Beef sees a pay phone while in Hell and attempts to call home. Unfortunately, because this is hell, the person on the other end can only hear an extremely pushy telemarketer.
- A Creepypasta lampoons the trope thusly:
So ur with ur honey and yur making out wen the phone rigns. U anser it n the vioce is "wut r u doing wit my daughter?" U tell ur girl n she say "my dad is ded". THEN WHO WAS PHONE?
- SCP Foundation:
- The Foundation discovered the afterlife known as Corbenic
when a woman who had received a treatment that gave her the ability to make phone calls with her mind died and didn't lose the ability.
- SCP-2190
is the ghost of a Filipino woman who continually makes phone calls in an attempt to break up her daughter's marriage (she doesn't approve of the husband because he's a Filipino — the mother wanted her daughter to marry a rich American — and a Protestant — the mother was the sort of Catholic who only considers Catholics "Christian"). The Foundation is using its resources to "trap" the ghost's phone calls so she can neither reach her daughter's family nor get into the Foundation's phone tree.
- The Foundation discovered the afterlife known as Corbenic
- Played for Laughs in one episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog which involves the medium Shirley holding a seance to contact Eustace's dead brother; the process is that Shirley herself acts as a telephone that the brothers speak through.
