Voices of the dead, or voices in your head?

[Hardbopjazz]

I read this the other day and I decided to try it. I recorded 3 hours of white noise from a TV not attached to cable or any other device that might pick up something. I sat today and listened to it with headphones so that I could drown out any other sound. On about 4 different points in the tape, I can hear what appears to be a human voice. Once it sounded like a man saying, "I'm here, I didn't leave". Another point the same voice said, "Please help me find the door". The other 2 times I couldn't understand but it was a voice of a woman. The article is below. Try this. It spooked me out real bad. It might just be something being picked up by the TV, even though not attached to anything. It may be my mind or both.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Can voices of the dead be heard on ordinary audio tapes recorded in a quiet room?

Swedish archeologist, documentary maker and artist Friedrich Juergenson pioneered research into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). Eighteen years after his death, interest in EVP is surging thanks to the horror movie "White Noise" in which Michael Keaton receives messages from his dead wife.

"We picked up maybe 60 new members after the movie," said Lisa Butler, who runs the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (www.aaevp.com) together with her husband Tom from their home in Reno, Nevada.

Their Web site recorded 88,000 hits the day after the movie opened and the Butlers appear on the "White Noise" DVD's extra material, demonstrating how to record EVP.

The Butlers see the voices as evidence of life after death and say they have recorded the voices of Tom's father, Lisa's mother and her paternal grandmother. "We have been recording the voices for 15 years and have proved to ourselves that it's possible to reach loved ones," said Lisa Butler. "We have done that."

Believers say getting in touch with a dead relative through EVP can help the grieving process and the association's roughly 400 members include parents whose dead children have contacted them through EVP, said Lisa.

The voices cannot be heard live, only when a recording is played back. Messages are often short, such as "I miss you" or "I love you," and are usually just louder than a whisper. Anyone can record and hear them but not everyone manages to establish contact with lost family members, say the Butlers.

"There are always entities on the other side who are willing to talk to you. But getting a loved one, a specific person, is a little more of a challenge," said Tom.

FACT OR FICTION?

"White Noise" dwells on the dangers of communing with the dead and the moviemakers say one in 12 EVP messages are "overtly threatening."

"That's pure science fiction," said Tom Butler.

Skeptics dismiss EVP as the by-product of stray radio waves or over-active human imagination. Even in the esoteric world of parapsychologists, the concept is frowned upon.

"I find the idea of EVP simply ludicrous. The human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns, even where there's only randomness. So it's not surprising some people believe they have heard something in the noise," said Joakim Westerlund, who does research into parapsychology at Stockholm University.

Undaunted by such comments and the occasional accusation from religious groups that they are dallying with demons, the Butlers recommend non-believers try out EVP for themselves.

"This is something that each and every person can do, and when you get a voice it's life-changing," said Lisa Butler.

Juergenson first heard strange voices while recording bird song in 1959. Recording silence and white noise from the radio, he identified one of the voices as his dead mother and concluded that all such voices must come from beyond the grave.

In a colorful career, the Swede who died in 1987 at the age of 84 conducted archeological excavations at Pompeii and under St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican, spoke 10 languages and as an artist was commissioned to paint portraits of two popes.

In 1999, Swedish composer and sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff stumbled across Juergenson's archive of 1,000 tapes. He now chairs the Friedrich Juergenson Foundation which put out a CD "Best of" the EVP recordings and an English translation of Juergenson's 1967 book "Voice Transmissions With the Deceased."

"He is a lot more famous now than he was five years ago," said von Hausswolff, who called Juergenson's research "a kind of pioneering work into the absurd."

From time to time, Juergenson's recordings are featured along with sound art in galleries, and von Hausswolff has organized exhibitions about his life and work.

"A guy who devotes himself to something this odd is something very much out of the ordinary. People like that deserve a medal," said von Hausswolff.

[gdogus]

Try this. It spooked me out real bad.

No WAY am I going to try that.

I don't doubt your experience at all - it sounds very intense. I just don't need to be spooked outside of a movie theater or the pages of a book.

Edited May 15, 2005 by gdogus

[dave9199]

Turn me on dead man...

[Dan Gould]

Anyone watch 'Ghost Hunters" on SciFi this past fall? I found the website of the group that is featured in the show and they have some downloads of EVPs. They don't have to be deciphered from white noise of a TV (how could you stand listening to it long enough to hear anything?); they will test the "haunted" locations they investigate by running a tape recorder in an otherwise quiet room.

And I have to say, some of the clips on the website are pretty unmistakeable. In one, against a strong background hum (the levels were low) an investigator is heard saying, "That's the way it always is," followed immediately by the unmistakeable voice of a woman saying "don't let them hurt me". Its not random noise being "interpreted" or "ordered" by the mind, its as clear and distinct from the background noise as the voice of the investigator is.

Another investigation captured a child's voice saying "hey Daddy" and "can I come in?" and they're both clear as day.

[Indestructible!]

When I first read this article, the first thing I thought of is that we can chalk this up to the notion that humans tend to place "order" or "structure" on seemingly random phenomena (events, their own perceptions and emotions, etc.)... and to a bit of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

But then I remembered something that happened to me as a teenager (around 20 years ago now) that I hadn't thought of for a long, long time.

One night I was listening to a cassette tape on my Walkman (old, crappy version back then) - of an album I must've played 100 times or more, so I knew it inside and out - and near the end of the tape I distinctly heard a woman's voice ask me a question. It scared the shit out of me, and I literally ripped the headphones off my head and threw them as far as I could! No one in my house was awake at that time, and there certainly wasn't a woman in my room with me (I wish! -_- )...

Over the next few minutes, I eventually convinced myself that somehow the voice had been "recorded" on the tape due to some random event... maybe even one of my girlfriends had accidentally hit the "Record" button briefly on the Walkman at some point in the recent past, and it was her voice I heard. So, I worked up the courage to go listen to the tape again, but I never heard that voice ANYWHERE on the tape, ever again.

It freaked the hell out of me! Normally there is nothing that I get shocked by, but this event stayed with me for a good long while... it's almost as if I realized how "profound" this event was, and it just wasn't something that happened by chance.

Who knows? All I know is that I wanted to call bullshit on this EVP idea when I first read this thread, but I think I've actually experienced this first hand! So, I'm not going to summarily dismiss this out of hand... though my training would say I should (received my Ph.D. in a fairly rigorous, scientific, and quantitative discipline a number of years back).

But, as gdogus said, NO WAY am I trying this!!!

Cheers,

Shane

[Brad]

IMHO, it's an overactive imagination. The brain can play many tricks on us. To spend 3 hours listening to white noise seems like (a) a waste of time and (b) an indication that you have too much time to waste doing nothing.

[gdogus]

One night I was listening to a cassette tape on my Walkman (old, crappy version back then) - of an album I must've played 100 times or more, so I knew it inside and out - and near the end of the tape I distinctly heard a woman's voice ask me a question. It scared the shit out of me

Beside the point, perhaps, but...what was the question?

[Free For All]

Beside the point, perhaps, but...what was the question?

"Is this an Addey or a McMaster?"

[marcello]

IMHO, it's an overactive imagination.  The brain can play many tricks on us.  To spend 3 hours listening to white noise seems like (a) a waste of time and (b) an indication that you have too much time to waste doing nothing.

You have to give some credit though, it takes some balls to admit doing this; even here!

I once rented a office that was built on the site of the famous Fox Sisters home, who made quite a good living and launched a whole nation wide cult of spiritualism in the late 1800's.

"In 1888, Margaret Fox confessed to newspaper reporters that the entire spirit-rapping phenomena that she started with her sisters was an outright fraud. She gave a demonstration at an auditorium of just how she was able to make the loud popping and knocking noises that were supposedly made by spirits. She did this by cracking her toe and knee joints."

Edited May 16, 2005 by marcello

[Brad]

Beside the point, perhaps, but...what was the question?

"Is this an Addey or a McMaster?"

I think the question was why have you listened to this 100 freakin' times?

[Jazzmoose]

I have no doubt that people hear voices in these recordings. Hell, I hear voices from a fan in the room when I'm trying to go to sleep, and I don't need to record it first. The brain processes things in funny ways...

[Jazzmoose]

Anyone watch 'Ghost Hunters" on SciFi this past fall? I found the website of the group that is featured in the show and they have some downloads of EVPs. They don't have to be deciphered from white noise of a TV (how could you stand listening to it long enough to hear anything?); they will test the "haunted" locations they investigate by running a tape recorder in an otherwise quiet room.

And I have to say, some of the clips on the website are pretty unmistakeable. In one, against a strong background hum (the levels were low) an investigator is heard saying, "That's the way it always is," followed immediately by the unmistakeable voice of a woman saying "don't let them hurt me". Its not random noise being "interpreted" or "ordered" by the mind, its as clear and distinct from the background noise as the voice of the investigator is.

Another investigation captured a child's voice saying "hey Daddy" and "can I come in?" and they're both clear as day.

Well, I have to disagree with you Dan. (Like this is news, eh? ) I went to the website, and I agree that the voices were unmistakable, until I started clicking on them blindly. Then, when not preconditioned as to exactly what to hear, I heard completely different phrases than the site reported. As an example, the one labeled "I was seeing the war" (which the website also says has been heard as "I was seeing the water" or "I will see you no more" sounded to me like "You've never been, we are". Other samples that I clicked blindly gave similarly different results.

On a related note, I find it somewhat interesting that this group who runs this website began at the same time that the movie Poltergiest was released, along with it's scene of the little girl communicating with spirits through the televisions white noise...

[catesta]

Beside the point, perhaps, but...what was the question?

"Is this an Addey or a McMaster?"

hehehe

[DTMX]

I have no doubt that people hear voices in these recordings.  Hell, I hear voices from a fan in the room when I'm trying to go to sleep, and I don't need to record it first.  The brain processes things in funny ways...

I know my brain, such that it is, tries to make order out of chaos. On my first trip to Japan, I was working in a small town where almost no one spoke conversational English. Drawings, grunts, and pantomime were how we communicated (we were engineers - conversational skills weren't our strong suit anyway). I could not pick up any English language programs on the television or radio so I went for about five weeks without hearing a complete sentence in conversational English. Eventually, I just tuned out the background chatter - with 50 people working in the same room there always seemed to be at least 20 conversations going on at the same time, none of them involving me. Then one day I thought I heard someone say a sentence in English, but it was a string of nonsense, something like "blue potato with the oil filter" or "they called him bird because his reed squeaked." I think that I really wanted to hear someone speaking the English language - or the American one - so my brain was trying to turn the static in the office background chatter into something I could recognize, even if it made no sense. Sounds stupid but it really freaked me out.

The funny thing was, around that same time I was eating lunch at my desk and some guy walked up to me and said "blah, blah, blah". I didn't even look up. He did it a couple of more times, and then I realized he was speaking English - and speaking to me (nobody really spoke to me - alone in a crowd, I was). So I looked up and he spoke slowly like he was talking to someone of very limited intelligence, "I said, 'Do you speak English?'". And I completely drew a blank as to what to answer so I just nodded enthusiastically. I think I eventually managed to get out an "uh". Limited intelligence, indeed.

Anyhoo, back to your regularly scheduled programming...

[7/4]

I have no doubt that people hear voices in these recordings.  Hell, I hear voices from a fan in the room when I'm trying to go to sleep, and I don't need to record it first.  The brain processes things in funny ways...

←

Same here. I've heard hair metal, choirs, people talking (I do live in an apt. building) and so on. When I hear it, I know it's time to play some music.

[Soul Stream]

I'm not a believer in anything but, when my wife and I first got married we lived in a small, old woodframe house in Dallas. These are a few of the odd things that occurred in that house.

--I woke up in the middle of the night to find what appeared to be a home movie film being shown on the wall of my bedroom of a small white and brown dog running around in the backyard.

--orbital, glowing lights appeared quite often in the hallway (my mother even saw these when she spent the night visiting)

--a large "X" appeared on the carpet in the hallway and could not be removed with any sort of cleaning.

--our kitchen floor completely bubbled up overnight as if there were water damage of some sort, but was completely dry. Contractor could not explain it in any way.

--I used to hear music in the middle of the night quite often, but my wife could never here it.

--My wife had a seizure there one night (a first), but in the morning we had to go the pharmacy and used the yellow pages phonebook to look up the listing. When we returned home, every page of the 1000+ page Dallas phone book we left on the coffee table had been very neatly folded in half.

I'm not a believer in ghosts or phenomenon even now. However, I will say I experienced some strange things in that house that I can't explain.

[Johnny E]

Soul Stream,

I meant to tell ya' before.....It was me. Sorry for any inconvenience.

[Soul Stream]

I thought it was you Johnny because even though we hadn't met yet, I'd jumped on a time machine and met you before. But that was on Saturn in a past life.

....has I mentioned I'd be on a Sun Ra kick lately sprinkled with late night viewings of the "Twilight Zone."

Edited August 5, 2005 by Soul Stream

[Johnny E]

I thought it was you Johnny because even though we hadn't met yet, I'd jumped on a time machine and met you before.  But that was on Saturn in a past life.

....has I mentioned I'd be on a Sun Ra kick lately sprinkled with late night viewings of the "Twilight Zone."

←

Throw in a little LSD and it all makes sense.

[Alexander]

When I go to sleep at night, I "hear" the sound of people talking. It's hard to explain. I can't understand what they're saying. It's almost as though they are whispering or murmuring. These voices can be men's voices or women's, and sometimes they sound almost familiar. At times, when I'm close to drifting off, I'll hear one of the voices very loudly in one of my ears which is enough to shock me awake. I know that these voices are not supernatural in any way. My theory is that my brain is replaying things I've overheard subconciously...