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Electronic Voice Phenomena ('EVP')

Lord Lucan said:
Unfortunately no. After having no further success it was recorded over.
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It's weird how dismissive we can get about evidence. Having had a weird anomaly with asecurity video footage at work at the same time a colleague saw a ghost in the same area, yet I didn't go and follow it up the next day. I could have but it's like a dampening field and I was like "meh".
 
Andrew Motion heard EVP he believed to be Phillip Larkin speaking from beyond the grave while he worked on the latter's biography.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/27/philip-larkin-love-hate-women

And then, more bizarrely, Motion was consoled by a cassette that was sent to him by Larkin's hearing doctor, Raymond Cass, who was also a spiritualist. When Motion played the tape, above the squeaking and rushing noises, a voice very like Larkin's could be heard. The voice said that he was spending his time in the next world "tramping". What did he think of Motion's book? "Very satisfactory," said the voice.
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4 or 5 pages back I mentioned meeting an EVP researcher here in Stockholm years ago.

I never got round to saying what happened. He was from the US and was here on vacation. He had emailed me to ask if I knew of any good places he could visit whilst here to try some EVP stuff. So I met him (and his family) at his hotel before taking him to the oldest parts of the city. We sat in a cellar café in the Old Town. This café used to be a jail and was built around 1500 - 1510. It was said to he haunted and I had carried out investigations there previously.

We carried out lots of EVP tests and then as we played back the recordings, we each wrote down what we could hear. The interesting thing was that he could hear English words yet I could hear Swedish. The messages did not correlate but were still interesting.

For example, the cellar café is two floors below ground. On the other side of one of the cellar walls is a cemetery. It has been built over and repaved at street level so you could never tell now but the bodies are still there, underground. I didn't tell him this. During one test and I heard something along the lines of "Jag är nära...mumble mumble" meaning "I am close...mumble mumble". He heard in English "I am in the Church of Jesus Christ".

I asked why Swedish dead people would be speaking to him in English. His theory was that the voices/sounds recorded were transmitted in a way so that the person experiencing them would be able to understand - a sort of universal language which is interpreted differently depending upon who hears it. I wasn't and I'm still not sure what to make of that.

Still, he played me lots of scary recordings he had made (including the Sallie House where he was allegedly physically assaluted and scratched).
 
Really fascinating that you heard Swedish and he heard English. When you listened to the other EVP recordings he had made (the scary ones), what language did you hear?
 
IbisNibs said:
Really fascinating that you heard Swedish and he heard English. When you listened to the other EVP recordings he had made (the scary ones), what language did you hear?
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English. I am a native English speaker and as I knew he recorded 99% of them in the US, I was in English mode when listening to them. He prompted a couple which I was unsure of, as in "you'll hear me say this and then an unidentified voice says that" but mostly he just played them and I heard what I heard. The scariest thing about most of them was the tone of delivery rather than the message - lots of angry, growled, snarled, screamed and hissed words.

Interestingly though, the majority were not recorded in silent rooms under test conditions. They were mostly ambient, background recordings from when teams were setting up, chatting or working. In amongst all the chatter you would suddenly hear a "word". I would suggest that some were just misidentified noises caused by the team but others did seem to be different in nature. I also think that after years and years of doing this, his brain had a tendency to hear words where there were none.
 
Can't remember if this has come up before but if so, have it again.

From the BBC Radio 4 series 'Out Of The Ordinary', en edition on EVP -

Out Of The Ordinary

Jolyon Jenkins reports on the world of electronic voice phenomena (EVP) - the community of people who believe that the dead can speak to us through radio transmissions and white noise.

The technique was introduced to the English speaking world by a mysterious Latvian, Dr Konstantin Raudive, who travelled to Britain in 1969 with recordings of Hitler, Churchill and Stalin speaking from beyond the grave. The method is now a mainstay of paranormal investigators.

Jolyon unearths tapes from 40 years ago made at a key séance held by Dr Raudive in Gerrards Cross. Raudive eventually came to believe that a budgerigar called Putzi was passing on messages from a dead 14 year old girl.

Jolyon speaks to EVP current practitioners, and to a man who believes that his recordings of animal noises also contain messages.

The claims are improbable, but they tell us interesting things about human perception: about our ability to construct meaning from meaningless sound, and about how our brains naturally fill in the gaps where information is incomplete.

Optical illusions are well known, but we are equally prone to being fooled by audio illusions.

Sound artist Joe Banks suggests that, while EVP researchers may be carrying out parapsychology experiments, they are unwittingly doing conventional psychology experiments.
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Here's a quote - 'You have a rabbit on your head.' Profound.

Edit - yes, as I suspected the programme was noted both on its first aired and its repeat. Still good!
 
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escargot said:
Here's a quote - 'You have a rabbit on your head.' Profound.
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We have just had a post in a different thread about wearing a chicken on the head. :)
 
Don't EVP's operate the same way as that thing where you see something like a face in a tree or toast? you hear what you think is a word and everyone else then agrees with what you think you heard.

what i find more believable is the old school evps on standard tape recorders, none of that voices from that device that sounds like a radio switching through stations....that's 100% bs, all it's picking up is fragmented words and phases from the radio stations it's constantly going through.

much better when it's something you've actually recorded from a silent room and not from some fancy crackling device..
 
It does amuse watching American ghost hunters attempting to speak with ghosts that would have no knowledge of English.
Also, have any of such ever bothered to test their equipment properly by attempting recordings in places where no ghost would be found? A new building, an uninhabited island, deep in a desert, a newly-discovered cave system or deep in a mine where no one has died.
 
Here's a Channel 4 documentary on EVP from 2001.
The founder of the EVP movement in the USA is seen conducting a mass recording of spirit voices.

Witness: Voices Of The Dead

 
It's now 2022, one would think that with the improvements in technology let alone it's proliferation there would be more and better examples of this, there was a book out many years ago about someone who had rigged up a radio to communicate with the dead, but no more has been heard since, one would think if it were possible it would be quite commonplace
 
There are lots of people trying to experiment with EVP uploading results to YouTube at least:
 
MrRING said:
There are lots of people trying to experiment with EVP uploading results to YouTube at least:
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But those aren't able to be authenticated. They are uncontrolled, and, therefore, worthless.
 
The best EVP result I ever had was on a hand-held tape recorder with an external microphone plugged in. It was loaded with a brand new C90 cassette and left on a table in the hallway of an old restaurant. There were two people present in the restaurant - myself and a friend called Micke.

Upon reviewing the tape afterwards, you hear Micke and myself talking in the background when suddenly there is a voice clear and up-close to the microphone which simply says "Hello... in there" (but in Swedish). It wasn't us and we had the tape recorder in full view at all times. Also, the doors were locked so no-one else could have come in. The tape recorder wasn't equipped with a radio or anything else which could have "bled" over.

It really made my blood run cold when I first heard it. I still have the tape somewhere although I no longer have a tape recorder/machine to play it.
 
Yithian said:
Having recently listened to a number of EVP recordings on old Coast to Coast A.M. shows, I'm struck be the fact that this is essentially the same phenomena.

Turn on sound or it makes no sense.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1641114803640107008
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I don't really get this.
The first noise sounds like a sibilant bwawawa and the second one like an approximation of green needle.
Listen to them without reading the words and they are two clearly different sounds. What are they trying to prove?
 
Can no-one explain what was meant to be happening in that Tweet above?
The grinning woman makes a gesture with her hand followed by two very different sounds.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Can no-one explain what was meant to be happening in that Tweet above?
The grinning woman makes a gesture with her hand followed by two very different sounds.
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It's the same sound.

Check the comments to the Twitter thread.

I've also played around with listening 'blind' and I can make myself 'hear' either word in either position by 'expecting' the one I want.
 
Thanks for the reply Yith, but I still cannot reconcile the two sounds that the irritatingly smug young woman introduces, as being even remotely similar.
I've played the annoying Tweet multiple times, without looking at the words, and I am convinced they are two very different audio captures.
It's bugging me so much that I'm going to use my audio hardware to sample the two sounds and will get back to you.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Thanks for the reply Yith, but I still cannot reconcile the two sounds that the irritatingly smug young woman introduces, as being even remotely similar.
I've played the annoying Tweet multiple times, without looking at the words, and I am convinced they are two very different audio captures.
It's bugging me so much that I'm going to use my audio hardware to sample the two sounds and will get back to you.
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Try this.

Same example, but more extreme:

 
OK, so I broke out my Presonus Audio interface and sampled the entire Tweet and have separated the two distinct samples.
I am now convinced that I am not going mad and that that the initial "wsssh-wsssh-wsssh sound" is definitely not the same as the "Green needle" the woman broadcasts, after making the horns sign:

greenneedle.png
green.png
 
BMCS the sound is only played once. The first sound is getting you ready then when the words show that is the important sound and what you hear then is whichever word you are looking at, you choose.
 
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