Phone Call from Beyond
Mammoth Cave National Park, in Kentucky, contains perhaps the most famous collection of caves in the world. According to people who work there as guides, and according to at least some of the 2 million tourists who visit the caves each year, there are ghosts in those caverns.
The most convincing witnesses might well be members of the Cave Research Foundation, which numbers some 650 scientists who investigate caves all over the United States. Their headquarters are at Mammoth Cave Park. Most CRF members are professors at universities, not the sort of people who make up stories about ghostly experiences. But things happen. As one CRF member put it:
"We're a bunch of hard-nosed people. Most of us who have these experiences are not believers in ghosts, ordinarily. We just describe the facts and let others decide."
Two CRF members who had a chilling experience are Dr. Will White, a professor of Geochemistry at Pennsylvania State University, and Dr. George Deike, a government scientist. They were investigating Crystal Cave, which is no longer open to the public. However, it had once been open to the tourists and there was an old Army field telephone down in the cave.
"I guess they used it", White says, "to let the guides know some people were coming, tell them to wake up."
On this day, White and Deike, on their way through the cave to do some geological exploration, were walking by this ancient, broken down telephone - when suddenly, it rang!
The two scientists were too startled, perhaps too fearful, to stop. They kept walking down the passageway.
White says "When we got about 200 feet farther on, the phone rang again! We looked at each other for a moment, then we ran back. I picked up the old phone and answered. It was one of those old fashioned Army phones with the butterfly switch on it.
"What I heard sounded like a phone sounds when it is off the hook and there are people in the room. You hear the sound of voices, but you can't tell what they are saying. I said hello, or something like that. And on the other end there's a startled gasp. And that was all. No one responded. The line was now dead."
Astonished, the two scientists noticed that the phone was attached to a rusty, twisted phone line. The traced it back to the mouth of the cave and to a weathered shack that had once been the ticket office. But the phone line ended there. It was attached to nothing!
Had Dr. White heard the sounds of another world?
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