POTS lines here in the US still support pulse dialing. If their contract wasn’t changed in the last 40 years it’s even possible some people are still paying a monthly surcharge for the ‘feature’ of “touch tone dialing”!
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That’s very On The Beach.
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With Bell Canada, they just buried that change in the bill and made it mandatory for all new lines. I regret having to give up my line in 2003 that was grandfathered pulse-only. It was worth it just for the calls begging me to “upgrade”.
“Do you have a computer? Then you need touchtone!”
“Why? My (USR) modems use adaptive dialing, and switch to pulse.”
“But…”
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ah the Hayes modem command set. (@#$! we’re old)
ATDx Dial the following number and then handshake
P - Pulse Dial
T - Touch Tone Dial
W - Wait for the second dial tone
R - Reverse to answer-mode after dialing
…
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A high school friend referred to phone calls with no one there as “phone calls from the dead.” We met in '79; doubtless she’d coined the term years before. I’ve experienced many of them, including some goosebump-inducing ones re: timing (e.g., getting one right after telling another friend about PCftD, or shortly after learning someone had died), etc. Caller ID has pretty much put paid to that. The number of calls we get which lack both name and number isn’t zero, but it’s very close - the ‘private caller’ designation is far more common, and I answer neither.
Those mystery calls are distressing AF for this poor family. They’re already mightily hurting, and that shit sure ain’t helpin.’ I hope the cause is soon discovered.
All needed healing to everyone afflicted by this catastrophe.
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I was told that telephone wire was often used as an impromptu tow rope to get a telecom van out of a ditch; and that fibre optic cables were required to meet a similar standard. I think if something has gone wrong, it will not be the cable but the plastic plugs either end, or the exchange, or the phone unit itself.
The parents are more fragile still. The chances that one of them is close enough to the phone, and in a good enough state to try and use it is pretty low. Bare wires from a ripped-out connection making an erratic contact sound like the best explanation to me.
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There’s a rational scientific explanation for this, and that explanation is ghosts
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As @nixiebunny mentioned upthread, old school telephone exchanges have their own DC battery banks that power the network. So mains power can die but the exchange can keep running for a couple of days.
These things are big - I’ve been in exchanges in London where half a floor is filled with a lead acid battery set that I can only describe as a small swimming pool. And the copper (+ive) and aluminium (-ive) busbars leading from them are impressively sized. Lots of current - a colleague had a perfect annular scar around his finger, from when his wedding band shorted across and promptly melted… 
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Isn’t an incoming call still 70V to ring the ringer?
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Remember the Twilight zone episode where a little kid kept getting calls on his toy phone from his grandma, who was dead, and his parents didn’t believe him, and it turned out there was a telephone line down and lying across her grave? It’s probably something like that.
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Ok, that scenario is plausible.
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