Who kept calling?

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Google "apophenia."

All people detect patterns that aren't there. Mental illness or simple vulnerability and desperation can exacerbate this. I think that's what happened with Aggie.

The fact that the light on the phone never lit up when it supposedly "rang" was the key to the whole thing and an indicator of the larger goings on in the film.

The light never lit up because it was never ringing in the first place. It was in her head the entire time. She had been driven to the brink of insanity by the fact that her son went missing and she never found out what happened to him and that "phone call" was a representative metaphor for him and his mysterious disappearance: it rings but nobody is ever there.

(On a quick side note, I think the disappearance of a child would drive any parent crazy. It's much worse than the child simply dying -- at least with death you get some closure, rather than spending the rest of your life wondering what happened or where your child is and if they are okay)

Combine that enormous baggage with her crappy, claustrophobic residence and the fact that she only has one actual friend in her life, that makes for a bad recipe of someone in desperate mental straights and the ringing phone that's not really ringing is the primary indicator or how unstable she is from the opening frame.

This film is also about how two people who are unstable can easily influence one another and plunge into a "groupthink" mentality and the interesting thing is that not only does Peter influence her with his paranoia, but she influences him, too. Notice that the phone never rings while someone else is there in the motel room? The one exception to this is after she and Peter have sex (which is another metaphor for their characters "joining" each other on not just a physical level, but an emotional, spiritual and pyschological one as well) the phone rings and Peter answers it and he gets the same silence.

This is the story indicating that the two of them have just connected on the same crazy level. We know that the phone was a working phone, because R.C. uses it to make a REAL phone call early on in the story, so if it weren't ringing and the picked it up to answer it anyway, they would at least get a dial tone in their ear. But they don't hear a dial tone -- they only hear silence, which is another indicator that these characters are conjoined on the same crazy wavelength and are only hearing and seeing things that they want to hear. This obviously paves the way for the rest of their decent into madness for the remainder of the story.

The fact that the phone ringing in the credits over the toys and clothes of Lloyd, the missing son, is a dead giveaway that the ringing phone with nobody there is directly related to her son having gone missing and the insanity that it caused for her.

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I think an important thing to remember through out all of this- and most people here have basically picked up on it- is that yes the Phone was not really ringing. Agnes was clearly showing fledgling signs of her own dimentia from the start of the movie.

Remember when she found the Advertisment for the body shop on ONLY her car, and how careful the camera shows us HER vision of focusing on each cars windshield, clearly showing that she is the ONLY person to have received (or still had) a flyer?

I believe that scene is to show us the beginning of her paranoia, but it also goes to show that she is a Crack / Meth addict, because she clearly holes up inside her house for long periods of time- which is common of addicts. ie: everyone else had picked up their flyers by the time she finlly emerged from her drug daze.

You have to really put yourself into a different state of mind when seeing everything unfold in this movie, and realize that what you're being shown is carefully calculated and also not necessarily reality, but reality as its happening with the characters mind...