Spooky indeed! What I imagined happening was that as he got far from our reality, he was emptied of human pretention and intention, so when people talked to him, they were actually talking to a void, or more accurately, to themselves through Vartan. There is no intervention on his part, so people interpret his absence as what they want, they assign the meaning to his void. Sometimes we just need to talk away our struggles in order to obtain clarity, and they think this clarity comes from Vartan, but it doesn't...