Manx- Christmasland Callers

  Months later, in the fall, the phone rang in the Conlon house, a little after two-thirty in the morning, and Agatha, only half awake, answered. She heard a hiss and crackle, as of a long-distance connection being made, and then several children began to sing “The First Noel,” their high, sweet voices quivering with laughter. Agatha believed she heard her daughte
r’s voice among them and began to scream her name: “Charlie, Charlie, where are you?” But her daughter did not reply, and in another moment the children hung up on her.

  The phone company, however, said no call had been made to her house at that time, and the police wrote it off as the late-night fantasy of a distraught woman.

- Disappearances: Various Locales