So You Want to Talk to GhostsNeed to summon a spirit? Set up your Ouija board, light some candles, and follow these guides to get chatting with parties who have shuffled off this mortal coil and onto the next.
Before the advent of the Internet, if someone wanted to communicate with a relative who had passed, they had to consult a medium or try their luck with an Ouija board. But in the 21st century, the departed are just as eager to make contact, and they're reaching out via modern technology. In 2011, Jack Froese of Dunmore, PA, suffered from a heart condition and unexpectedly passed, shocking everyone around him. But then his friends and family joined the ranks of people who were contacted by the departed when Froese allegedly started sending them emails.
The bizarre correspondences surfaced months after he passed, and they all had super personal information in them - like inside jokes and references to current private events. These happenings beg some questions: What happened to Jack Froese? Was his spirit able to reach out to his friends from beyond the grave, or was someone just pulling his family's leg? While this may not be the strangest Pennsylvania tale, Froese's emails did spark international curiosity. In 2012, BBC did an exclusive on the seemingly supernatural case, and Froese's closest came forward to share their firsthand accounts.
Jack Froese Suddenly Passed And Then Began Emailing People
In June 2011, 32-year-old Jack Froese passed suddenly from a heart arrhythmia, something that occurs when electrical impulses in the heart don't work properly. This illness can strike with no symptoms, and it's likely that Froese didn't even know he had a ticking clock in his chest. He left a mother, many friends, and extended family who didn't know how to handle the passing of someone who everyone described as a great guy.
In a 2012 interview with BBC, Tim Hart, Froese's best friend, described him as "[his] right-hand man." He says that the two were "inseparable" since the age of 17. Five months after Froese's passing, just as life was getting back to normal for his mourners, Froese - or someone pretending to be Froese - began sending emails to his friends and family.
All of the messages Froese sent after his passing were incredibly strange and very personal, which means the person sending them had to have knowledge of his personal conversations. One message was sent to Froese's buddy Hart, and it included an inside joke that the two had about cleaning Hart's attic.
Hart explained that one night he was just scrolling through his phone when he received a message from Froese. The subject line was "I'm Watching," and it read: "Did you hear me? I'm at your house. Clean your f***ing attic!!!"
Hart said that before, the two had joked about how dirty his attic was, with Froese saying that he was going to clean it. Hart insists that they were the only people who knew about the conversation.
Froese Was Worried About His Cousin's Ankle From Beyond the Grave
Froese was such a good guy that even after he passed, he was worried about the people who used to be in his life. After his cousin Jimmy McGraw broke his ankle, McGraw was laid up for a week when he received an email from Froese. Normally this wouldn't be weird, but Froese's funerary services had been months prior.
The November email read: "Hey Jim, How ya doing? I knew you were gonna break your ankle, tried to warn you. Gotta be careful." While it's possible that someone could have sent this from Froese's account, it doesn't make sense why someone would do so. McGraw told BBC that he likes to think it was Froese: "I look at it as he's gone, but he's still trying to connect with me [...] trying to tell me to move along, to feel better."
No One Knew His Passwords
One of the possible explanations for this email haunting is that someone logged into Froese's email and began sending messages to his friends and family. Everyone who received a message claims that no one knew his passwords because if they did, they wouldn't have sent the messages.
Friends and family couldn't determine a motivation for why a stranger might hack into Froese's email.
Froese Asked His Cousin To Pass Along A Message For Him
Not all of Froese's emails were able to get through to his friends and family. McGraw claims that in an email that Froese - or someone pretending to be Froese - sent him about his ankle, that the correspondent asked him to pass along a message to Froese's cousin, "Rock." The email from Froese said that he couldn't get through and that the "email didn't work."
In the interview with BBC, McGraw shows that the message indicated: "Tell Rock [...] Great song."
One of the strangest aspects of this story is Froese's relationship with his cousin Frank Froese, AKA "Rock." Once the BBC began running video stories about Froese's emails, Frank began leaving YouTube comments about how Froese was visiting him in his dreams.
Frank explains that the message sent to McGraw referenced the song Frank tried to create after Froese's passing. He claims that his cousin then visited him in his dreams and helped him complete the tribute song.
