Voices from Somewhere

A story of death, love, and goosebumps

Photo by Gabriel Castles on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Aunt Maria put the cassette into the player and pushed rec and play at the same time, with her two index fingers. On her face, the seriousness of starting a ritual. Something that, once initiated, couldn’t be undone or wouldn’t be wise to undo. The same sense of irreversibility of taking a photo on film. With the cassette recorder you could always push stop, rewind, and start over, but she wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t an option. She had given us instructions, and everyone was ready and she was going to kick it off in earnest. We just had to sit there silent for half an hour. 

She was into this thing she had learned from a medium: one way to summon the dead was to let the cassette recording go in silence and concentrate and think of questions to ask and sometimes even pray. You would then listen to the recording and dial up the volume and hear muffled voices coming from afar, strange spoken words, whispers, unfamiliar, mysterious noises, and these were supposedly the dead trying to communicate with you. I attended these sessions many times and I don’t know why that happened, but it happened. Most of the time, noises were indistinguishable. Sometimes you could clearly hear words or sentences. Rarely, you could even recognize who spoke them.

As a kid, I was scared of the dead. Of corpses, in particular. When grandpa passed and was lying on his deathbed at home, people coming and going to mourn and give their respect, I remember I couldn’t get myself to look at him or even go into his room. I was nine. Dad said go give grandpa a kiss, go give him a caress and say goodbye, but I couldn’t. Grandpa loved you, you know, he said, and he’d be happy if you went in there, if you were with him. And I felt bad because I thought that, first of all, grandpa was dead and he couldn’t see me (in fact, his eyes were shut), and second, if it was true that when someone dies their soul leaves the body and starts flying around and eventually goes to heaven, why would grandpa’s soul want to stay there, with me seated next to his cold dead body, when he could go to some beautiful place like a Caribbean beach or the top of the highest mountain in just an instant? I myself wouldn’t, I thought. I’d go places I’d never been to without having to travel, I’d just think of a destination and I’d be there in no time. 

But a dead body scared me, especially of someone known. I liked the story of the soul splitting from the body and all that, but part of me still thought that something horrible could suddenly happen, like the dead opening their eyes and getting up and walking awkwardly my way and reaching out to touch me. Plus I couldn’t accept to see that what once was a warm, lively, loud, energetic person was now a cold, grayish, stiff, silent, all dressed-up, mannequin-like body waiting to be buried and forgotten about. How did this happen? How could one end up like that? It was disturbing.

This thing got better over the years, but it wasn’t until my friend Saverio died of leukemia at age fourteen that I finally got rid of my fear. We were best friends, football buddies, schoolmates. The shock of his passing completely changed my view of life, death, and the dead. Death was no longer an event that happened at the end of your life, when you had nothing left to say or do and had completed your journey. Death could happen at any age, for any reason, no matter how many things you hadn’t said or done yet. And because we could just stop existing unexpectedly, life should be lived without waiting for the right thing to happen, or keeping what you think for yourself, or doing what you don’t like, or saving money for some future occasion that may never come. Pretty obvious, right? But I was fourteen and it was nineteen seventy-nine and I had just gone through the catastrophe of seeing my best friend die. It could have happened to me, I was the lucky one. My life had just been statistically extended.  

And I was no longer scared of the dead. My friend couldn’t possibly wake from his perennial sleep and come haunting me and do mean things to me. It was just impossible. We shared secrets and were always there for each other and believed in the same things, and if I didn’t go see him on his deathbed it wasn’t because I was scared, but because I didn’t want to photograph that last image of him and keep it before my mind’s eye forever. Death turned into a normal thing that happened, and the dead were just the leftovers, shells to be disposed of and soon forgotten. And in putting together this new framework it helped that I wasn’t a nine-year-old kid anymore.

So when grandpa passed, aunt Maria started to get into this blank cassette recording thing to be in touch with the afterworld. But I was still too little to make any sense of that. And granted, these things may or may not make any sense at all. Aunt Maria would come over for dinner and they’d wait until we children went to bed to start doing this recording thing. And I obviously couldn’t fall asleep knowing what they were doing, even though nobody ever officially explained it to me or said “tonight we’re going to speak with the dead”, and I was a little scared and sometimes I’d plug my ears so I wouldn’t hear. But of course I’d hear a lot. I’d hear her and dad and mom and sometimes other people that joined them get ready and then suddenly get quiet as the recording started. Occasionally, some questions that you were only supposed to think of during the recording would be asked out loud. Like I remember very specifically someone saying once “help me understand the mystery of life”. And I thought that was very funny and it sort of gave me a break from the scare. I mean, how can you possibly ask something like that? Even I (a nine, almost ten-year-old kid) knew that questions like that were preposterous and unanswerable, and that maybe the dead would laugh at them and say something like “if I told you, then I’d have to kill you”.

But in the apparent absurdity of it all, aunt Maria was desperately trying to fill the inner void that grandpa’s (her dad’s) death left. As were dad and mom and other family members. But while they eventually got tired of this, or simply got too busy to continue to (even casually) cultivate it, aunt Maria persevered, and got some remarkably interesting results that incentivized her to remain attached to the practice. She passed almost four years ago but I remember she kept all the cassettes that she recorded over the years (grandpa passed in 1974, so we’re talking about a forty-five-year stretch), some of them with clearly audible and identifiable voices. At some point I got interested in that and I asked her to listen to some of the cassettes. And she let me, glad that someone in the family was still trying to get into that. I remember hearing grandpa’s voice on one of the tapes, telling her to “Carry on!” whenever she’d lament to him how tough and unjust her life was, followed by a “You still haven’t figured that out, have you?”. Maybe meaning that pain is a natural state of our existence, and that we should learn to live with it. Who knows. I will never forget those voices.              

Are these things real? Are there conduits to communicate with the dead? I heard these voices with my own ears. Was it all a big suggestion? Maybe. But if it were, whose voices were they? They were clearly familiar voices and nobody was speaking during these recordings and the room was always very quiet with no audible environmental noises. 

Carla, whom I met during a trip to Scotland when I was sixteen or seventeen, lost her little brother in a car accident and, right afterwards, discovered she could hold a pen on a piece of paper and someone invisible would drive her hand and write for her. She felt a hand over hers, guiding the pen. And she would get in a trance and close her eyes and her hand would start moving by itself. Sometimes nobody came, and the pen didn't move. Other times many came, with different calligraphies. She clearly needed to fill the void of her loss, so she developed this thing. Not that one day she decided herself to do that -- it just happened to her. She said it was a gift from her brother, something that allowed her to feel close to and communicate with him. I’ve seen these things with my own eyes. I’ve seen her hand move so fast and strong on the paper until the pen ripped it and wrote on the other side. And when something like that happened, she was exhausted and had to stop and take a break.

As much as we could easily dismiss these phenomena saying they’re all driven by human suggestion, there’s abundant proof that something mysterious and inexplicable happens there. But if that’s the case, there must be something beyond death. So where do the dead go when they pass? Are they among us, in a different, invisible, imperceptible dimension? Of course, I don’t have answers. Nobody does. We navigate through life with this need to believe that we’re going somewhere next, be it heaven, or hell, or another galaxy, or down a black hole, or maybe some secret place on Earth where we get assigned a new body and start over. But believing in what the ultimate outcome will be like isn’t enough: we want to know our future, what’s going to happen to us on our way there; and we want to know it today. 

So we ask the dead, based on this weird theory that, once one passes, they know everything and see everything and have infinite powers to change things or convince God to do it. There’s a presumption, among most of us living humans, that the dead become similar to God. So we pray to God or the saints or what have you, but we also pray to our dead asking them to reveal us something or do something for us. 

When aunt Maria put the cassette into the player and pushed rec and play at the same time, with her two index fingers, Saverio was still on his deathbed. I didn’t want to go see him. So I thought I’d go to aunt Maria’s and ask her to run a recording specifically addressed to him. At that point I knew well about her experiments, having already attended a few of them (with my parents’ permission). I went there with Francesco, another good friend of Saverio’s who, like me, those days was hanging between despair and denial. We sat in silence until aunt Maria decided that it was enough and pushed stop. She rewound the tape and pushed play. And after a few minutes we heard him, right there, very clearly. He said “outside home, I want silence”, maybe referring to the flood of people hanging out in front of his house, waiting to go in and say goodbye or just mourning or talking incredulously about what happened. And these people were loud, and he didn’t like that. Then he said “Silvio, for you, a rain of books”, anticipating that my life would be focused on studying, or reading a lot (that was my interpretation back then, but I wasn’t that far off). His voice was a whisper, but very clear and recognizable. We both cried. 

I’m getting goosebumps and shivering while writing this. Forty-three years after the fact. Once, Carla told me that when we shiver for no apparent reason someone’s there with us, keeping us company. Someone invisible, of course. I don’t know if that’s true, but I want to believe it is.

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