Hi, Crime Junkies.
In case you missed my special announcement at the end of the very last Crime Junkie
Vault episode last Thursday, I have something so special I want to share with you.
I know some of you are familiar with a podcast that I used to do called Supernatural.
And I know this because so many of you have asked for me to bring the show back ever since
it concluded almost three years ago.
And I fact checked that statement three years ago, doesn't feel like it could be real,
but it really was three years ago that it ended.
Well, just like you, I have missed the show so much.
And while you do get to see me put on my tinfoil hat from time to time here and
there as I explore conspiracies or dive down a bit of a rabbit hole in cases,
there is a side of me that I don't usually get to bring to Crime Junkie.
A side of me that loves talking about aliens and ghosts and
basically anything that is just strange and unexplained.
So I'm bringing back Supernatural.
And this time I'm taking it to a whole new level,
which is why we're calling it So Supernatural.
So Supernatural is now an audio chuck original coming to you every single week.
Each Friday, we're gonna explore the world's most bizarre and
the possible explanations behind them, no matter how unbelievable.
Two brand new episodes of So Supernatural dropped today.
And I'm bringing you the first one right here.
After you listen, head to the So Supernatural feed where there are over 100
episodes already waiting for you.
And be sure to follow So Supernatural so that you don't miss what's coming.
Because there may or may not be some surprises ahead.
Enjoy.
You're not imagining this.
You're not sleepwalking or having an out of body experience.
It's really me, Ashley Flowers, and this really is Supernatural.
I am back and I'm taking this to a whole nother level which is why we're now
calling this show So Supernatural.
You guys, I have so much to get into, not least of all today's story.
But before we begin, I have to tell you why I'm here.
Because I've missed this show so, so much.
And for anyone new listening, if you don't know me, I mostly talk about crime.
Hi, it's kind of my thing, nice to meet you.
But there is a whole nother side of me that loves aliens and
time travel and paranormal stuff.
Basically anything weird or unexplained.
And that's what this show is.
Call it a passion project.
One where I explore stories of the paranormal, UFOs, bizarre legends,
and what it all says about what lies beyond our realm.
And now that So Supernatural is back, you can expect more wild stories
and some fun surprises in the coming episodes.
But for now, I just want to stop the small talk
and jump in if that's okay with all of you.
Because I heard about this story online recently.
One of those 2am internet dives where I start in one place
and end up in the deep rabbit holes of the internet.
You know, you've been there.
Anyways, I found this one story.
Basically a ghost story for the modern age.
There's no woman in Victorian garb holding a seance for her dead husband.
Modern people using modern technology to maybe communicate beyond the grave.
And it makes me question a lot of things I thought I believed
about the line between the living and the dead.
So picture this.
Someone you know and love dies tragically, unexpectedly.
Everything about their life was going normally,
and then a freak accident or health problem ends at all.
It's a horrible thought, not least of all,
because these types of deaths are so hard to come to grips with.
As many people know, if they've experienced sudden loss, it's hard to find closure.
I mean, there are a million loose ends.
Plus, that unfulfilled wish that you could just have one last conversation
with that person who's gone.
That they could let you know they're okay or give you some parting words
about how to go on living without them.
Well, for the family and friends of Jack Freese,
this was an all too familiar scenario.
Someone they loved was gone in an instant, leaving behind a lot of grieving people.
But that wasn't the end of the story.
At least not for Jack.
Welcome back to So Supernatural.
This is the kind of story you would expect to see on Reddit or 4chan or any kind of forum
where people share anonymous stories and you just have to take them at their word.
The person on the other end of the internet might be making it up for attention,
sure, or it might be the only place they feel they can go with something so unbelievable.
And for us, the ones hearing their stories,
we never really know what other details might be out there.
Details that could help make sense of it all.
There's definitely some of that in the case of Jack Freese.
As outsiders, we don't have an in-depth look at his life or the people involved.
But it's worth mentioning that unlike other ghost stories,
Jack's story has gotten a good amount of attention from news outlets.
And rightly so.
Because there's something that just feels believable about it.
So here's what we know.
And to be transparent, it's not a ton.
By all accounts, Jack Freese was a lively, fun person.
His mom Patty describes him as sensitive, kind-hearted, and unique.
In June 2011, Jack is living in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.
He's 32 years old, so still incredibly young.
But that month, he dies unexpectedly of heart arrhythmia.
We don't know a lot about Jack's death or whether arrhythmia was an ongoing issue for him.
But unfortunately, this type of death is really common.
About 15 to 20% of all fatalities are from sudden cardiac death.
And this includes deaths from arrhythmia.
What's rare here is to see it in men as young as Jack.
Still, as the name implies, it happens suddenly, out of nowhere,
whether you knew you had an underlying heart issue or not.
For Jack's family and friends, his death comes as a huge shock.
But they're left with no choice but to mourn his death and try and move on.
Fast forward to November 2011.
Jack has been gone five months.
Everyone close to him is still grieving.
And I'd imagine missing the sound of his voice, his hugs, even just his words.
And then one night, out of the blue, this happens.
Jack's friend Tim Hart is at home.
He's sitting on his couch looking at emails on his phone
when he sees a new one come through.
Sender, Jack Fries.
Tim turns white as a sheet as he reads the email subject that simply says,
I'm watching.
He opens the email and sees a short message.
Did you hear me?
I'm at your house.
Clean your fucking attic.
According to Tim, this is a reference to a conversation
he and Jack had the second to last time they saw each other.
Jack had been visiting Tim's house and the two of them went upstairs to the attic.
It was dusty and they were chatting about what work Tim would have to do
if he ever wanted to finish it.
And Tim retells this story in an interview segment with BBC.
He describes Jack's email as very quick and short,
but to a point that only Jack and I could relate on.
Because he insists it was just the two of them present
when they had that conversation about his attic.
No one else was around.
Tim even shows the BBC his email.
The bottom has what looks like a standard auto signature.
A couple of dashes above the name Jack Freese.
Now it's safe to say that Tim is shook.
And I would be too, but I hear this and my mind immediately goes
to like the true crime world.
Hacker.
Like doesn't even have to be a sophisticated one, right?
Someone who just got his password.
But Tim doesn't seem to believe that because again,
he says he never mentioned their conversation about the attic to anyone.
Don't believe Tim or think he just wants it to be true?
Well, maybe you'd believe Jack's cousin Jimmy
because that same month, he receives an email too.
It's November 21st, 2011, and this new message to Jack's cousin Jim
once again comes right from Jack's email.
The subject line says, hey, Jim.
And the message starts like this.
How you doing?
I knew you were going to break your ankle.
Tried to warn you.
Gotta be careful.
And then it goes on to say, tell Rock for me.
Great song, huh?
You're welcome.
Couldn't get through to him.
Now in the BBC footage of the email, the next sentence appears to begin
with a name or email address that's been blurred out for privacy.
And then it ends by saying his email didn't work.
And this seems like a reference to maybe this Rock guy's email, whoever that is.
But this email, this one is signed with the same auto signature,
a couple of dashes and then Jack Freese.
Now this email really throws Jim for a loop because at the time,
he does have a broken ankle.
He'd broken it about a week before as he was headed out the door on his way to work.
And according to Jimmy, not many people knew about it.
Just a couple of friends and family members.
As far as tell Rock for me, great song couldn't get through to him.
It's unclear to me who Rock is, but Jimmy must know him
if he's being asked to deliver a message.
And it seems like Jack was trying to make contact with lots of people
because Tim Hart says, quote, a few other people had also received these emails, end quote.
Now cousin Jimmy is obviously one of them,
but just how many other people or who they are, Tim doesn't say.
What is clear is how both Tim and Jimmy feel about it all.
Jimmy describes his relationship with his cousin as like a brother.
When Jack died, he had a tough time dealing with it.
And now it feels like Jack is trying to reconnect.
In Jimmy's words, quote, tell him things to help him move along and feel better.
In Tim's case, he describes Jack as, quote,
one of his best friends for the last 17 years before he died.
They were inseparable throughout high school and college.
And from what I can tell, he also wants to believe that the emails really were from Jack.
Tim says he talked to his wife and they, quote, looked into it a little bit.
I don't know what that means.
Would love to know, have some details here.
You know, was it on IP addresses, stuff like that, you know, but that hasn't been provided.
Whatever they did look at, though, they apparently didn't find anything
that was significant to them that might explain what was happening.
Now, I know that at some point he speaks to Jack's mother, Patty, though,
and her advice was this.
Think what you want about it or accept it as a gift.
And at the end of the day, that's what Tim did.
He said he's believing what he wants to, whether or not someone was messing around,
which is a definite possibility.
But let's go back for a second to Patty,
because she's the one other person who goes on record about this whole thing.
Patty describes her bond with Jack as something special.
When it comes to his email, she says, quote, I thought they were fantastic.
They were great.
It made people happy, upset some people.
But to me, that's keeping people talking about him.
End quote.
I mean, fair enough, right?
I can imagine being grateful that my child hasn't been forgotten
and that they are still being missed and talked about, acknowledged.
But I could also see being really angry if their email account was hacked
and someone was using their identity to play a prank,
which brings us back to the obvious question.
Who was really sending these emails?
For Jack's friends and family that have gone on record,
they strongly believe that no one has access to his passwords or hacked his account.
And without knowing more about Jack and how cyber savvy he was about his internet privacy,
there's not much to go off of.
They've also never gone on record to talk about whether Jack would have set up these emails
before his death.
One way this could have been done is by using schedule send.
I mean, Jack could have written the emails before his death
and then timed them to be sent months later.
It's a handy feature that is pretty normal on most email accounts.
There are even programs that you can use to send emails specifically after you die.
They work by detecting inactivity on your account,
which then triggers whatever goodbye emails you've written to send out,
which thank God I didn't know about or have on my middle school Yahoo account.
Am I right?
But that seems like a null point.
Because for one, Jack didn't know he was going to die.
His death was sudden to everyone around him and the timing was impossible to predict.
And to me, the most compelling reason not to believe that this was some kind of pre-written
email is the message that Jimmy received about his broken ankle.
It says that Jack tried to warn him, but it makes zero sense that Jack would have known
five months earlier that Jimmy would eventually break his ankle.
And even if he had predicted this weird thing,
it's hard to imagine him putting it in an email,
let alone that it would actually come true.
And that somehow, on top of all of this,
his email arrived just a week after the actual event.
Like, it's a little too perfect to believe.
Really, there are only two non-paranormal explanations I can think of that can connect
Jimmy's broken ankle with Jack's email.
Number one, that one or more of the sources in this story
planned the whole thing themselves, maybe to bring attention to Jack.
I'm not saying that this is the one I believe, just kind of pointing out that
if anyone could have written these incredibly personal emails,
it would have had to have been someone close to Jack.
The other option would be the hacker theory.
In which case, the hacker would have had to have been one of the people in Jimmy's life
who knew about his ankle and somehow also knew about the clean out your attic convo
that Jack had had with Tim and who knows what other personal information
that was in the other emails people got.
So there is a third option, right?
Another possible solution?
What if it really is Jack trying to connect with the people he left behind?
This is why I love this story and find it so interesting
because it brings up something all of us are faced with
at some point in our lives when we lose someone we love,
which is the question, do they still exist?
And can they communicate with us?
I mean, if you think yes, then why not through the internet?
I mean, be honest, you don't know how the internet works.
So just for a minute, like, open your mind and just listen.
The Jack Freez story is unique in that it has gotten so much,
for a lack of a better word, legitimate attention from the media.
But the truth is that the internet is littered with these kinds of stories.
And it's not just emails.
It's text messages, phone calls, and voicemails from loved ones
that feel completely inexplicable.
One of my favorite stories comes from the social question and answer platform Quora.
Around 2023, a person named Kathy Hurry posted that she received a phone call
about two weeks after her husband passed away.
When she picked up the phone, all she heard on the other end of the line
was his voice saying, babe, that's what he used to call her.
Now, another wild story I found on Reddit,
there was this anonymous user who claimed that the day after their mother died,
they went to visit their dad's house.
And it was Mother's Day, and everyone was sitting in the living room,
crying when the house phone rang.
This person went to the kitchen and checked the caller ID,
and it was their mom's cell phone number that they saw.
Now, when they ran back into the living room,
their dad was pointing at their mom's cell phone on the mantle.
They went to check it, and sure enough, the screen said, dialing home.
By the time they made it back to the kitchen to try and answer, the call had ended.
And then there's the story.
It happened on September 12, 2008, about three years before Jack's death.
That evening, a Metrolink commuter train collided with a Union Pacific railroad freight train.
In the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles.
When the trauma response team showed up, the damage was overwhelming.
It took them hours to comb through the wreckage.
And in the end, 135 people were wounded and 25 were found dead.
Now, in the meantime, you can imagine how excruciating it was for families
as they waited to hear whether or not their loved ones survived.
And one of the passengers who was on that train was a man named Charles Peck.
Charles was a Salt Lake City resident who had just flown into LA that afternoon to visit his
fiancée and attend a job interview.
When the Metro crashed, he was seated in the first passenger car behind the engine,
with just one more stop to go.
His family and friends were on pins and needles,
wondering if he was still alive, but they had good reason to hope.
In the hours following the crash, people who knew Charles,
like his fiancée, his son, brother, sister, stepmother,
they all reported receiving around 35 phone calls from his cell phone.
Now, there was no voice on the other end, just static and unidentifiable sounds.
Charles' brother Richard says that he kept trying to call him back,
but all he got was the voicemail.
Search and rescue teams worked to uncover the first train car hoping to find Charles alive.
And meanwhile, the calls kept coming until 3.28 in the morning.
One hour later, Charles' body was found.
Coroner's officials say that he died instantly.
His body showed no signs of having lived for even a short while after the impact.
And his phone was nowhere to be found.
Now, that story is fascinating to me,
A, because of the sheer volume of calls placed.
I mean, 35 or around 35 calls is a lot.
But B, it's like the timing of it all.
If Charles died on impact, leaving Coroner's no doubt that he could have survived,
then his spirit or ghost or consciousness, energy,
whatever you want to call it, wasted no time reaching out to his loved ones.
And it seemingly worked.
But, like they said, they didn't actually hear Charles' voice.
Is it possible for a phone to malfunction and place random calls to different numbers
before the battery goes dead?
Or was another passenger somehow near Charles' phone and trying to make calls themselves,
maybe to his most recent call history?
But if that was the case, then why was the phone never uncovered with anyone?
The so-called reasonable explanation feels like it's out there,
but there's no way to know for sure.
All that's left is an extraordinary coincidence.
And so it's no wonder Charles' family has chosen to believe what they want to about it.
His son, CJ, said that he viewed the calls as a message from his dad.
Quote, letting us know he's not suffering.
The fascinating thing about these kinds of accounts is that they blend ghost stories
with the cyber age and things like phones, emails, and the internet.
I mean, it's all technology that's been around for decades.
But usually when I think about ghosts trying to communicate,
my mind goes way back to the Victorian era and flickering electricity and
radio transmissions, Ouija boards.
But really, it is all kind of connected.
You've probably heard the term EVP, or electronic voice phenomena.
It's often brought up when it comes to ghost hunting.
It's basically when someone captures audio recording and they can hear a person talking,
a lot of times in the static or in the background noise.
EVP has been around for almost a century, but one of the first people to bring it out of the realm
of mediums and into a more everyday light wasn't a paranormal investigator,
but a Swedish film producer named Friedrich Jörgensen.
He was out and about one day in 1959 using his tape recorder to capture Finchbird calls.
And when he played it back, he said he heard the voice of his dead mother.
Jörgensen's findings were like the tip of the iceberg,
inspiring a bunch of other parapsychologists who then popularized EVP.
It's since exploded with new technology broadening into what's now known as
instrumental transcommunication, or ITC.
Basically anything from tape recorders to TVs, computers,
emails and smartphones can be conduits for the dead to communicate with the living.
Or so the theory goes.
So Jack Freese and Charles Peck's stories, both examples of possible ITC.
So is the Reddit story about the deceased mother's cell phone or Kathy's call from her husband,
and even other stories about voicemails or texts from dead relatives.
Or the ones about device batteries being drained at the same time someone senses a ghost in the
room. There was even one person on Reddit who said they communicated with a ghost using a
paranormal messaging app, which to me sounds a bit like a corny gimmick, except that apparently the
ghost was responding over text to specific things that they were saying out loud.
So TBD.
And while we're on the topic of ghost apps, I do want to point out that user reviews are split
50-50 as to whether these things really work. Some say that they're just random word generators,
while others claim that they've logged on and had it immediately spit out the names of their
closest dead relatives. But for a second, assuming that it's all true.
There are a lot of explanations for these kinds of stories within the realm of paranormal research.
Boil it down and you get two main theories about how it all works.
The first is the obvious one. It's called the survival hypothesis. It basically says that human
consciousness survives after physical death and tries to communicate with the living. So essentially
Jack Freese and Charles Peck trying to send messages to their loved ones.
And I should point out, I know that there have been various studies about how the brain can
remain active for anywhere from a few seconds to possibly even a few hours after death.
But in the case of Charles Peck, 12 hours is a long time to be able to place phone calls.
And in Jack Freese's case, the emails came five months after death.
So the other theory, which might be my favorite, has to do with psychokinesis,
the mind's ability to influence matter. If you apply psychokinesis to ITC, you're basically
looking at one of two possibilities. Either your own consciousness is performing telepathy,
influencing an electronic device to behave in a certain way. Or if it's not your consciousness,
then it's the consciousness of a spirit or ghost that's influencing matter.
Basically, either you have the psychic powers that allow you to influence technology,
or a dead person does. Or both. So take a story like the Jack Freese emails.
These could have been Jack communicating from the dead, or one or more of his loved ones
subconsciously, or maybe even consciously, causing emails to materialize, with or without
the added influence of Jack's spirit or consciousness. And I know it's all pretty far,
pretty out there. But for some people, when it comes to explaining messages from a deceased
person, they can be a lot quicker to believe that the recipient has psychic abilities than to
believe in ghosts or spirits. And this is always interesting to me, seeing what types of paranormal
activity people are or aren't willing to accept. Whether they're more comfortable with a living
person who has telepathy, or ghosts. Or just disregarding paranormal stories altogether.
I mean, it is all far-fetched sounding. But I'm going to nerd out just a little bit more,
because what I find even more fascinating about ITC is that it relates to quantum physics.
Or rather, quantum physics relates to ITC. And I promise I won't spend a lot of time on this,
because it gets pretty heavy and a little out of my depth. But in a nutshell,
theories like quantum consciousness, which are actively being studied in the science world,
could, and this is a bit could, could imply that an individual's consciousness
lingers after death, possibly even interacting with the physical world.
Or take quantum entanglement, a theory that describes how particles become interconnected
and influence each other. Based on this, there's loose speculation that our brains or consciousness
could get entangled with things like our devices, our email accounts. Which could explain how
someone like Jack, even after he was dead, was able to influence those emails into sending.
Whatever the case, paranormal or scientific, it all requires some form of belief.
And just like some people are quicker to believe the possibility of a hacker than to accept theories
like telepathy or a ghost. At the end of the day, what's heartwarming to me about a case like Jack
Freese's is that the loved ones seem to almost always want to believe. Maybe it's just the human
in us. When it comes to someone we love and who loves us, it doesn't matter so much what we believe
in our everyday lives. It just makes sense that we'd be hearing from them. One more time.
It really was so much fun being back with you guys. Like I said, I have missed this show
so much. You can find all the source material for this episode on our website,
SoSupernaturalPodcast.com. And you can now follow the show on Instagram at So Supernatural Pod. And
don't forget to stay tuned. There was actually another episode that came out today and there's
gonna be one every single week from here on out. I've even got some more surprises coming up for
you on the podcast. So Supernatural, an audio Chuck original produced by Crime House.
So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?
