EVP's

The one piece of equipment that gets us the most results and produces the harder to debunk evidence is our audio recorders. No matter which model you use, digital or reel to reel if you are looking for ghosts or not you will likely record an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) at some point. Exactly what they are and where they come from no one can really agree on but what is agreed is that something is being recorded and has been recorded for a long time. In fact strange voices on audio have been recorded since the first audio recording devices were switched on.

EVPs or "Electronic Voice Phenomena" are disembodied voices and sounds that are only heard upon playing back an audio recording. EVPs offer ghost hunters some of the best evidence that they can gather. Not everyone can throw down a couple of hundred dollars for meters but almost any researcher can find enough for an audio recorder. They come in many shapes and sizes, both cassette style and digital offer there own pros and cons. The Pro of a cassette recorder is that they are generally less expensive and can be found at yard sales for next to nothing. It is said that cassettes offer more "hard" proof as there is a physical medium recorded to. The con is that there is a lot of noise generated from the internal mechanics of the device. Digital recorders or DVRs offer more frequency range and there is no chance of internal contamination, the con is that they tend to be far more expensive. Whichever you choose, the technique is simple. Find a quiet location that has had or is having activity, turn on your recorder and start asking questions, play it back and listen for any sounds that were not there when you made the actual recording. If you are lucky you just might catch an answer to your question.

Known as the father of the EVP Friedrich Jurgenson was actually not the first to record the phenomena. In the 1950s while recording bird songs in the field he was shocked to discover that his recording contained what sounded like voices. Though he was alone in the field he could hear what to him sounded like "voices" of many people and this lead him to conduct other recordings in an attempt to understand the phenomena. He was alleged to have eventually made a recording of his recently deceased mothers voice which added more weight to the growing theory that the voices were those from "the other side". The actual term EVP comes from the book "Breakthrough: An amazing experiment in Electronic Communications with the dead." This was one of the first English books written on the subject and is where many of the guidelines to studying the phenomena got there start.

The general consensus is that the voices and sounds we hear on these recordings are from the dead but there are many theories to explain what may be recorded. Skeptics will simply say that the voices are stray radio waves intercepted by our recorders. It's hard to use this to explain away all EVPs. The EVPs that answer questions can simply not be debunked as stray signals from terrestrial sources. Also EVPs are generally out of range of normal human speech which is above 300Htz, EVPs tend to occur in a much lower frequency range. To some it's hard to accept the possibilities that there may be a way to record and maybe even communicate with the dead. This idea has been tackled by many men of science, most notably Thomas Edison who worked on a device that would allow communication with the dead for years never perfecting it. Evidence today does seem to suggest that two way communication may be possible eventually but we are not there just yet. So as researchers we continue to gather those whispery voices and look for some repeatable pattern that may one day allow us to bridge the great divide.

EVP Categories

Class "A1"- This is a class that we have come up with, it represents a class A EVP but unlike a class A the A1 is a direct answer to or related in some way to a question, or comment. It is an example of intelligence as it is in response to an outside random event.

Class "A" A class A EVP is the best, it is loud enough to be heard without headphones or filtering and is clear enough that there is no mistaking what the voice is saying.

Class "B" A class B EVP are the most common as they require the use of headphones and there is no unanimous agreement on what is said or heard.

Class "C" A class C EVP is one that requires headphones and filtering of frequency's. This is a process that is used to pinpoint the frequency of a particular background sound and remove that sound while leaving the actual EVP alone. When it works it helps to separate the EVP from the background noise, but it is also frowned upon by skeptics who think that tampering with an alleged EVP is a way to make it say what ever you may want. When we filter an EVP we analyze the background noise, find that particular frequency and remove it. You can hear the difference in the stairs EVP and you can also see that removing the background noise did not make the EVP say anything different than it did before.