phone calls from beyond

Last Sunday night my husband and I were home, he in the basement doing something on the computer, I upstairs vacuuming. I heard the phone ring, turned off the vacuum and heard husband saying (loudly) "hello". I continued to vacuum.

A few minutes later, husband comes upstairs telling me I have to pick up the phone and listen. We hear on the other side a girl talking, some other people talking, noise from what sounds to sort of be a party.

We listen and listen, try to talk to them, though they don't hear us and have NO idea that their phone called us. We couldn't figure out who it was. Sometimes the people sounded close by, laughing and talking, other times they were futher away. We tried whistling into the phone, shouting, pushing buttons on the phone, crinkling plastic bags into the phone, shouting some more, talking to them about how dumb they were, but nothing was heard by the other side.

Now, this happened before, someone's cell phone dialed our number and left a message on our machine - they were at a ball game or soemthing and it went for a couple minutes, then the lady says "what, who did I call? hello? hello?" and then hung up.

The other night though, this went on for a good 20 minutes. Then suddenly the line went dead. Our partiers had disappeared. It was rather amusing...