Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVPs Have you noticed there seems to be more interest in the paranormal than ever? I’ve noticed it. Maybe it happened because so many people were home with not much to do during the pandemic and started watching some of those paranormal shows like the ones on the travel channel. What ever the reason it must be getting more popular because the number of paranormal programs on television seems to be increasing. There has been even more talk about EVPs lately. EVP stands for electronic voice phenomena as I said. It is usually heard on a recording even when it was not heard at the time it was said. I have often wondered about this. Think about it, how does a recorder pick up a voice we can’t hear? I have no answer to this and it makes me suspicious about all the EVPs I hear. The average human can hear sounds from 20 to 20,000 Hz. There are sounds known as Ultrasound which are above 20,000 Hz and low-frequency sounds which are below 20 Hz. Scientists have created a sound frequency which is above our hearing level but can be recorded. I thought it was only fair to mention that. Perhaps EVP recordings fall into that range. When it comes to EVPs, we have to discount more than 90 percent of them immediately. The reason for this is they could just be normal sounds which could be construed as a word, depending on who hears them. If we get several words or even a sentence that calls for more investigation. We have to discount some of them as a hoax. This might leave a couple of percent of EVPs which could be important. Speaking about EVPs, a paranormal group was investigating a house in Gloucester. They captured an EVP which they say says “He held me down there.” They also heard her asking for help on the EVP. The didn’t hear this directly from the recorder but used a device called an Alice Box. This device amplifies and translates sounds the human ear can’t hear. It makes me wonder if it is translating what it thinks was said which can be entirely wrong. In 1969 a doctor from Latvia came onto the scene. He had with him a collection of tape recordings. These were not just any tape recordings. First of all, there were 72,000 of them. The doctor claimed he had been communicating with the dead and had made contact with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin to name a few people. The doctor was Konstantin Raudive and he called his technique Electronic Voice Projection or EVP. He said he would ask a question and then just leave the tape running and sometimes when it was played back you could hear an answer. After Konstantin passed a test, a book was published about this titled Breakthrough and EVPs became popular. One of the problems with the tapes was with the Hitler tapes. He was speaking Latvian, but Hitler didn’t know that language when he was alive. I wonder how hard or easy it would be for someone who can impersonate voices to fool people on an EVP? There are three classes of EVPs. Class A has voices which are very clear and can be heard easily. Class B has fairly loud voices which are pretty clear and can be sometimes heard without headphones. Class C voices are very low and sometimes indecipherable. Paranormal researches in 2002 went into an abandoned mental hospital for an investigation. Abandoned mental hospitals seem very popular to investigate and we often find paranormal researchers going into them. Why is it they almost all to a person only do this at night? It turns out some of the paranormal organizations say daytime is just as good for research. Anyway, while the investigators were in the abandoned mental hospital, which was empty and closed for years, they recorded a voice coming over a speaker paging a doctor named Martin. When you want to go to a place to investigate how an EVP works, the best place to try and get one is where many people died and it seems Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, fits the bill. Thousands of men perished in the battles there during the American Civil War. An author named Mark Nesbitt decided to try and get an EVP recording there. He asked a series of questions and didn’t hear any replies, that is until he turned on his recorder. He had asked if a Thomas Lewis Ware was there and suddenly a gruff “yes” was heard on the recording. He had asked a second question and there was a voice but what it was saying could not be understood. When EVPs are made, they don’t always record voices. Some investigators have reported recording growls and other threating sounds. Some believe animals make it to the afterlife and what they are hearing on the EVP is a threat from a deceased animal. There is also a term Hell Hound which is sometimes cited. This is more in the realm of demons and such. Researchers believe there are not only the spirits of the living at some locations but also these demons trying to control everything and they are capable of making an EVP. An investigation took place at the Hopkins House in Kalamazoo Michigan in 2019. It is claimed six EVPs were obtained. Two on a recorder in the master bedroom where the owner George Hopkins died, and the other four on a handheld recorder during the investigation. When asked if there was a demon in the house the reply was yes four times. The human mind is a strange thing. If you suggest what a sound might say it is then implanted into the thought process of the listener and many times that is what they hear. If something is difficult to hear, they should be allowed to figure out what is being said without help. Ghost Hunters investigated a house and during the reveal one of them was explaining how they try and eliminate what seem like ghostly sounds, but really aren’t. The first EVP produced the voice of a woman but what she said was unintelligible. When the home owner mentioned his mother there was a spike in the EVP and when the question was asked who they were it sounded on the EVP like mom. The question is do EVPs really record the voices of spirits or are people just interpreting house sounds as words? It certainly is a possibility, but on the other hand there may be exceptions to the general rule and maybe the spirits of the deceased feel they would like to make contact with the living and putting a word or phrase on a recorder is for some reason all they can muster.
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