Eerie and inexplicable things have a strange effect on us and they often manage to thoroughly drive our minds crazy in urge of something, anything, that could explain it to us. One such incident back in 2008 has quite baffled the skeptics, and gave hope to those who believe in afterlife, when the family of Charles E. Peck received several phone calls for 12 hours after he died in a train accident. And here are more details about the strange, but eerie, matter.

Charles E. Peck was a 49-year-old customer service agent who went to Los Angeles to attend an interview for a new job. While returning on September 12, 2008, he died in a collision between a freight train and the commuter train he was traveling in.

Peck worked as an agent for Delta Air Lines at Salt Lake City International Airport and went to Los Angeles for an interview at Van Nuys Airport. Getting a job there would have allowed him to marry his fiancée from Westlake Village. He also has three children from his previous marriage, one of whom received phone calls after his death. The train he was on had 225 passengers along with 3 crew members collided with the freight train at a combined speed of 83 mph killing him and several others in what was known as the Chatsworth crash.

The accident occurred in California’s San Fernando Valley, when the engineer failed to stop at the red signal because he was texting on his phone. 135 people were injured and 25, among whom was Peck, died.

According to the preliminary investigation, the engineer who was running the train failed to notice the red signal and let the train move onto a single track over which a Union Pacific freight train was travelling in the opposite direction. The engineer was receiving and sending text massages to two teenagers, who said during the investigation that they befriended him to learn about his job. According to the established timeline of the events, the engineer sent his final text 22 seconds before impact with the freight train.

Peck’s family members and fiancée received 35 calls from his phone during the 11 hours after the accident, but when answered all they got was static. However, it gave them hope that he was still alive and just trapped in the wreckage.

Peck’s fiancée, Andrea Katz, was on her way driving to the train station to pick him up when she heard about the crash on the radio. His son, brother, sister, and stepmother along with his fiancée received a total of 35 calls from his phone through the first twelve hours before his body was finally found. When they tried to call him back they could only reach his voice mail.

What is strange is that Peck had actually died on impact when the two trains collided and when the rescuers finally found his body the cell phone was nowhere to be found.

The calls his family received encouraged the rescuers to find where he could be by using its signal, which meant going through the wreckage of the first train again. They were able to locate his body an hour after the calls to his family stopped. However, as far as the investigators revealed, Puck’s phone was never found. How or why the phone calls occurred for so long and so many times after his death remains a mystery that probably would never be solved.

[sources: snopes.com, gizmodo.com]