Communicating Across Time and Space
Is everyone a little bit psychic?
Hello and welcome to our new subscribers! Here’s a quick primer on what is going on here: I saw a woman named Muriel in a family movie in 2012 and felt deeply connected to her. I found out she died in a plane crash in 1972, and that crash became a famous aviation ghost story. That famous aviation ghost story was a major part of my childhood obsession with the paranormal in the mid-90s. I’m using this as an opportunity to flex my research skills and taking you along as I try to connect the dots.
You’re clearing out the pictures on your phone and smile when you catch a glimpse of a friend you haven’t seen for a few months. They call you 15 minutes later to catch up; you’ve been on their mind.
You spend the day with your child at the circus in New York, thinking constantly about your own mother and how it would’ve been a perfect day to spend with her if she weren’t living in New Mexico. You get home and learn that she passed away unexpectedly that afternoon.
You’re in middle school math class and the teacher decides to illustrate the concept of probability by running a Zener Card test on a handful of students. Zener Cards are used to conduct experiments related to extrasensory perception. You get 15 cards right in a row before your incredulous teacher stops the experiment.
Are these simply coincidences, or something more? We’re a species hungry for patterns and sense-making, constantly seeking the signal in the noise. It’s impossible to know all the ways that we are receiving information each second. Our brain moves at lightning speed to interpret and act, giving us little time to parse the source of our information.
Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the parts stripped from the wreckage of Flight 401 and used on other planes were primarily radios and other electronic communication equipment. The hauntings on these sister planes were attributed to these reused parts, which transmitted the voices of unseen pilots into the liminal space of a plane’s body.
Research Question Update: Passenger Ghosts
One of my original research questions was about the ghosts of Flight 401. Specifically: are there any passenger-related ghost sightings associated with Flight 401? So much of the legend focuses heavily on Second Officer Donald Repo and, to a lesser extent, Captain Robert Loft. I was curious if there was a possibility that other people had seen Muriel, my ghost.
The headline: there are some limited precedents for passenger-related ghost sightings associated with Flight 401, but not as many as you might imagine. Here are the ones I uncovered:
On that December evening in 1972, Sadie Messina was waiting for her husband, Rosario, at Gate 87 in the Miami Airport. It was around 11:30 pm and Flight 401 was due to land at any moment. She and her two sons reported hearing a distinct whistle behind them that sounded exactly like the one Rosario usually did to announce his arrival home. When the family turned around, expecting to see him, the gate was empty. Rosario didn’t survive the crash.1
In a seance witnessed by author John G. Fuller for The Ghost of Flight 401, a definitive recounting of the plane crash and a subsequent investigation into the flight’s spirits, two names came to a medium as she held a piece of the Flight 401 wreckage: “Christina” and “Mrs. E Jackson”. There were two children on the flight named Christina (both survived) and a passenger named Mrs. E. Jackson (who did not). The medium, although co-investigating the crash with Fuller and later marrying him, claimed that she never saw a passenger list.2
The documentary Shock Docs: Ghosts of Flight 401 (available on HBO) makes a claim that I hadn’t heard before: the land where Flight 401 crashed is haunted, with reports ranging from screams to full-bodied ghosts. Over the course of a nearly 90-minute documentary, a medium touches the levee that finally stopped Flight 401 from tumbling across the Everglades and describes hearing a woman screaming and crying. During an Electronic Voice Phenomenon recording session at the crash site, the paranormal investigator hears the name “Charles” along with the name “Don” (which matches up with Second Office Donald Repo). The screaming woman never gets a name (typical), although they suggest that she is mother of a child who survived the crash.
There’s no mention of Muriel in any of the media I’ve consumed so far, but she’s present to me anyway. There are some very graphic descriptions of the crash’s aftermath in The Ghost of Flight 401, which includes mentions of the fates of various unnamed women in the murky water and sharp sawgrass of the Everglades. I hope none of them were Muriel. Similarly, seeing some of the crash footage from the documentary Shock Docs: Ghosts of Flight 401 was sobering. It’s a visceral experience to see the isolation and darkness that the survivors encountered over 50 years ago and to hear from a few survivors of the crash.
Letting the Cables Sleep
There’s only one report that I’ve found of a ghost of Flight 401 interfering with the communication equipment in a sister plane that reused Flight 401’s equipment. In that incident on Eastern Airlines plane #318, an unknown male voice came over the public announcement system to make a request for passengers to fasten seatbelts and mind the no smoking signs. The crew on that flight claimed that no one had been using the PA system at that time.3 Plane #318 was an epicenter of Flight 401’s post-crash hauntings by Repo and Loft.
Supposedly, the hauntings on Flight 401’s sister planes slowed down and then stopped when the airline removed the reused communications and avionics equipment in the mid-1970s. Three separate pilots also apparently conducted “plane exorcisms” on plane #318 but that’s a topic to explore in a future newsletter.
Everyone’s a Little Bit Psychic
The first three scenarios I laid out at the start of this newsletter happened to me, my mom and grandma, and me again.
But let’s get back to you, assuming that you are a Millennial like me: it’s 2002 and you’re in bed. Your 2G flip phone is on your nightstand next to your Sony clock radio (this was mine). You’re waiting for your crush to call you and you need to answer fast or your dad will be knocking on your door because it’s a school night. All of a sudden, you hear a familiar sound fizz over your Sony speakers: blip blip blip buzz. There’s a second between this noise and the phone’s ring when you know what’s about to happen: your crush is pinging off your nearest cell tower and calling you.
The radio frequency, constantly swirling around you, becomes real in that moment. You know someone is reaching out to you over the wires and thinking of you, even if you aren’t speaking to them yet. You know what’s coming before it happens.
It’s radio interference. It’s a moment when the intangible turns tangible. Same as a ghost, right?
Strange Distractions
An occasional feature where I recommend something weird, spooky, or unusual.
Here are some of my favorite spooky things right now:
Dearest’s spooky jewelry and artifacts roundup, featuring a bejeweled bat and a very disconcerting warming plate previously owned by Barbara Walters.
Cozy Grove, which is available through Apple Arcade and Steam. You are a scout on a shipwrecked island who takes care of the resident ghosts. I have played it every day for 6 months and love it.
Bigfoot is Back. (Bigfoot Never Left). We just don’t talk about cryptids enough anymore.
The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix. Someone in their R&D department heard me ask for Succession with more Poe and they delivered.
I was considering buying a SpiritBox to augment this newsletter edition but after a serious conversation with my husband, we’re holding off. Maybe there’s a future newsletter edition that includes questions you should discuss with your future spouse related to your sensitivity to the supernatural.
Fuller, J. G. (1976). The Ghost of Flight 401. Berkley Publishing Corporation.
Fuller, E. (1978). My Search for the Ghost of Flight 401. Berkeley Publishing Corporation.
Fuller (1976).