In the late hours of dark and stormy nights, of course. Just kidding! Actually, there is kind of an interesting little hitch with the timing of telemarketing from beyond the grave.     When the authors of Phone Calls from the Dead were investigating the mechanics of the calls, they decided to look at the timing of them. Timing here means how long the caller had been dead, not what time the call was received. This was of interest mostly out of an idea that calls weren't actually from the great beyond. They figured, based on some previous research on apparitions of the dead, that people get wacky right after loved ones die, and due to this stress people could either be making all this stuff up, or maybe psychically producing the calls themselves in a desperate denial that somebody had died. Therefore, they expected most calls to be right after a death.     So they divided their cases up into five categories: · "Crisis" - Within 24 hours · Postmortem - Within a week · 30 days · 2 to 6 months · After 6 months It ended up about 27% of calls were in the crisis category, but 22% were six months or longer, so that wasn't a majority. The strange thing is that there were almost no calls within eight to thirty days. They use this to bolster the idea that maybe dead people really are reaching out to touch someone. It doesn't make much sense for a person to wait until they are well into the grief process to start hallucinating that their dead loved one is telephoning them.