What happened
At 4:22 p.m. on Friday, September 12, 2008, Metrolink train 111, a locomotive and three double-deck coaches, left Chatsworth station in the northwest San Fernando Valley and passed a red signal onto a single-track section where a Union Pacific freight was coming the other way. The two met head-on on a curve near Stoney Point. The Metrolink locomotive was driven about 52 feet into the first passenger coach. Twenty-five people died, including the Metrolink engineer; 102 were taken to hospital. It remains the deadliest crash in Metrolink’s history.
One of the passengers in that first coach was Charles E. Peck, 49, a customer service agent for Delta Air Lines at Salt Lake City airport. He had flown down for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport; moving to California would let him marry his fiancee, Andrea Katz, of Westlake Village, who was driving to meet his train when she heard about the crash on the radio. Peck’s parents and siblings lived in the Los Angeles area and joined her.
The calls
Through the evening and into the early hours of Saturday, Peck’s phone rang his family: his son, his brother, his stepmother, his sister and Katz. By the family’s count there were about 35 calls. Whoever answered heard static or faint, indistinct noise, never a voice; calling the number back went straight to voicemail. The family took the calls as a sign he was alive and trapped. Rescue crews, told about them, used the phone’s signal to narrow their search to the wreckage of the lead coach. The calls stopped about eleven hours after the crash. Roughly an hour later searchers found Peck’s body in the car. The finding was that he had died on impact. The phone itself was never reported recovered.
The investigation
The National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the collision, adopted in January 2010, has nothing to say about Peck’s phone; its subject was another one. The Metrolink engineer, Robert Sanchez, had sent and received dozens of text messages while on duty that day, including one to a teenage rail enthusiast 22 seconds before impact, and the board found that he missed the red signal at Control Point Topanga because he was texting. The crash produced a federal ban on cell-phone use by train crews and the 2008 law mandating positive train control, the automatic braking system that would have stopped train 111 short of the signal.
The explanations
The story of the calls was reported within days by the Daily Breeze and the Los Angeles Times, and it has been retold ever since as a message from the dead. The facts underneath are not in dispute, and Snopes rates the account true: the calls were logged, they were silent, and they led searchers to the body. What is in dispute is what made them.
The mundane explanation is a damaged handset. A phone crushed in wreckage can have keys held down, a stuck redial or a shorted circuit that dials repeatedly from the call log or contacts list, and a phone pinned under debris with a damaged microphone will transmit nothing but noise. Every number dialed that night was one Peck called often. The timing fits a battery running down over eleven hours. None of this has been demonstrated with his phone, because nobody has examined it, and the family’s account that the calls came in bursts and then stopped is consistent with either reading.
What the calls did not do is deliver any content. No words, no pattern, no information that his family did not already have. Had the calls reached someone who answered and heard him, the case would be different.
Where it stands
The Peck calls are a true story with an unknown cause. The most likely explanation is a broken phone in a crushed railcar; the explanation believers prefer cannot be tested. The verdict is mixture: the events happened as described, and the supernatural reading is an interpretation laid over them.