Voices from the Grave?
Do
spirits speak all around us, unheard by the living? Many believers in EVP think
so. EVP is short for Electronic Voice Phenomena: unidentified voices that appear
in electronic media recordings. The phenomena was recently popularized by the
2005 Michael Keaton movie White Noise,
in which he plays a grieving husband trying to contact his dead wife. Some EVP
recordings are accidental but many are results of experiments attempting to
prove the existence of life after death. Believers hold the opinion that EVP is
a very real phenomenon while skeptics argue that it is, at worst, hoax and, at
best misinterpreted, static on low-quality recordings.
While certain groups, such as the American Association of Electronic Voice
Phenomena (AA-EVP), are true believers in EVP there are plenty of skeptics. The
AA-EVP mission states that it is “a nonprofit
educational association that is dedicated to the support of people who are
interested in or who are studying Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and
Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC).†(http://aaevp.com/).
The group’s founder claims to have recorded the voices of deceased loved ones,
strangers and also those of extraterrestrials. Skeptics regard such claims as
impossible, stating that the voices heard are misinterpretations of static and
background noise in the physical world or potentially fraudulent productions
intended to mislead the listener. EVP believers argue that the voices are
physically imprinted on tape during recording sessions by those who no longer
physically exist or by those who exist in other dimensions.
The field of EVP research began in 1959 when Friedrich Jurgenson, a Swedish
documentary producer, was out in the country recording bird songs. When he
played back his tape he heard the voice of a Norwegian discussing bird songs
although there were no people in the area at the time of the recording. After
checking local broadcasts and ruling out radio interference, he decided that
this was a mystery worth investigating. He made more recordings, successfully
collecting hundreds of phantom voices, some which he claimed he could identify
and who he said called him by name. By 1965, psychologist Konstantin Raudive
began working with Jurgenson and the pair taped hundreds more samples of EVP.
Raudive published their findings in 1971 in a book called Breakthrough
and released actual EVP recordings for the public to hear. He wanted to
“familiarize listeners with the bizarre rhythms of EVPs†(Konstantinos,
1995). Teaching people how to listen to the rhythms of EVP is said to be
necessary because EVP voices frequently do not sound like distinct human
language when first heard, a fact which goes a long way in convincing skeptics
that the entire field is fraudulent and inaccurate.
The playback of EVP clips is usually static-ridden, overwhelmingly brief (only a
couple of seconds) and monotone in sound. This makes it difficult to discern
language, leading some to believe that EVP is more interesting to study in
relation to the psychology of the living rather than as messages from the dead.
Joe Banks argues in his 2001 article that EVP is more like a Rorschach test for
the ears, leaving interpretation up to the individual listener. When an EVP clip
is presented, it is often introduced and listeners are told what they will hear.
These introductions can be misleading because, if left to their own devices,
multiple listeners might hear multiple phrases or perhaps nothing at all. There
are plenty of sound clips of reported EVP available online that illustrate this
concept. Most clips are labeled or have an introduction that states what the
phantom voice is saying and often the provenance of the recording (i.e. “this
was recorded at
midnight
in the cemetery on the grave of a known suicide victimâ€). Listening to an EVP
clip is often similar to listening to a record backwards and making what you can
out of the sounds; only occasionally are words clear and easily identified.
The majority of EVP recordings are created by what Tom Butler (2002) refers to
as experimenters (amateurs) and researches (people who apply the scientific
method to their studies) (p. 216). These two groups purposely hunt down phantom
voices on tape by going out in the field, be it a laboratory setting or a
graveyard, and take recordings using various methods (the standard method is
recording using an analog tape recorder with a microphone, however other
techniques are also used).
Butler
(2002) theorizes that EVP is a form of mediumship and that spirits are all
around us, seeking communication with the living. He divides the communicating
entities into four categories (p. 219):
-
The disincarnate (i.e. the
dead)
-
The incarnate (i.e. the
living. For example, a sleeping individual at a different location from the
experimenters who is called upon to answer questions)
-
Those who have not previously
had any incarnation, or, those who have not yet lived.
-
Extraterrestrial beings
He states that
because EVP are frequently in the native tongue of the experimenter/researcher
and that the voices are often identifiable (i.e.
relatives/friends/acquaintances) it is proof of continuity in EVP (p. 216).
These same observations are also cited by skeptics in attempts to disprove the
theory of EVP, proving how subjective individual interpretations can be.
Experimenters/researchers
who ask questions during their recording sessions tend to receive answers, which
to believers stands as proof but is also used against them by skeptics. It is a
stalemate situation where believers can say, “The voices are here and they
answer me†and the skeptics may respond, “That shows how subjective the
research is. The questioner had preconceived notions of what answer the voices
should give.†This is the biggest problem facing EVP research—even though
people attempt to approach it scientifically there is often a lack of scientific
objectivity, particularly if the researcher or experimenter believes that he is
talking to loved ones or other people that they have known.
The above
examples refer to purposely recorded samples created during experiments.
Accidental recordings do occur, like Jurgenson’s taping of the Norwegian bird
expert. Another interesting example of this type of recording appeared to tape
long lost sounds from a dead world. Taped in the 1970s on the squash courts of
Bircham Newton, a former Royal Air force base in
Norfolk
,
England
, this recording provided apparent audio evidence of leftover energy on the air
force base.
After hearing
rumors of ghostly activity, two men attempted to spend the night on the base’s
squash courts, located in a former aircraft hangar. They fled in the middle of
the night after hearing footsteps, leaving behind their running tape recorder.
When the tape was played the next day it revealed the sounds of an active
aircraft hangar during wartime. When subsequent recordings were made in the area
similar results were noted. Other reports of hauntings on the base have been
reported. One ghost is alleged to be a young pilot who shot himself in the
Officers’ Mess at the beginning of WWII. Soldiers bunking in the Officers’
Mess later in the war reported feelings of being smothered in their sleep and in
the 1970s a player reported seeing an RAF pilot’s ghost on the gallery above
the squash courts (Marsden, p. 91).
So in this case
it is understood that there have been reported hauntings on this base and one
can assume that the men spending the night there did not necessarily expect to
find any identifiable phantom noises on their tape. The experiment was
replicated by other people at the same site. Does any of this prove or disprove
the existence of EVP? Are accidental EVP recordings more legitimate than results
gained through experiments? For the moment it looks as if the debate is
stalemated, possibly until sometime in the future when more sophisticated
technology becomes available for analyzing EVP samples. Until then the mystery
remains and both the skeptics and the believers will continue their arguments.
