Voices from the Other Side - not who but when - EVP/ITC Pt 5

Who are the ghostly voices we record on both audio-only digital recorders and spirit boxes?

The previous article questioned some basic assumptions we tend to make about communications we receive from the Other -- or at least from Some Other -- Side.  

It's now time (we mean that literally) to consider not just who but also when these voices come from.

This is the next topic in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here; the second, click here; the third, click here, and the fourth, click here.

(This article continues to use case studies from our own investigations to illustrate the perplexity of identifying the sources of EVP.)

Einstein has shown pretty conclusively that time is, well, relative, according to his General and Special theories. Space-time is an interlinked dynamic, and well-defined forces can warp not only space but also time.

If non-material entities are not bound by laws governing the physics of our own reality, then why would they be bound to the laws of how we perceive time? When we add in the variable of the paranormal to space-time, the notion of "real time" events becomes problematic.

Our own investigations have uncovered instances of what may well be residual hauntings at a number of locations. In several EVP conversations, we've found ourselves little more than eavesdroppers on scenes or situations that seem to replay past events. Our investigations at the Bross Hotel, the Creede Hotel, Cripple Creek's Hotel St. Nicholas, and the Twin Lakes Inn all include recordings that suggest, in part, residual hauntings that are not a part of current real-time events.

For example, listen to the exchange at the Creed Hotel which we slow down and replay at the end of the following video:

Are we even part of the end of this conversation?

When an EVP (delivered in a woman's voice -- if we trust the gender; see our previous article) announces, "I think I'm gonna shoot you," we doubt the remark is "aimed" at us. It seems more likely a pronouncement of one invisible presence directed toward another. In fact, the conversation has a context that's likely 120 or more years old! (See our Creede Hotel article for possible context.)

Other of our investigations have made us rethink other ways time may not mean the same thing for entities we have interacted with.

If an entity walks in step with us, so  to speak, in the direction we perceive time, we seem to hold real-time conversations. But time doesn't seem to mean the same thing on the Other Side -- if it means anything at all, that is. The most pronounced example we've so far uncovered from our own evidence occurred in post-investigation analysis of a very productive EVP session we conducted at the Hotel St. Nicholas in Cripple Creek, Colo.

That session took place in what was once an operating room when the hotel was a former hospital, and our use of a spirit box in that room included instances of residual haunting remarks by unseen voices talking to other unseen voices -- all relating to surgical procedures -- as well as real-time responses directed at us.

But that same session also included an instance where a voice instructed us to reverse one portion of the recording. Listen to the following, where we play the "reverse" instruction we heard in our own arrow of time, first at the original speed and then slowed down to hear all the allophones clearly. Then we reverse the recording and get what follows:

EVP in reverse to our arrow of time

These are clearly Class A EVP, no mistake as to what we heard. In this instance, one of the entities using the spirit box no longer walks in synch alongside us but instead seems to turn around and walk against our arrow of time, heading in the opposite direction! The voice telling us to "reverse" somehow understands we might not understand and alerts us to listen to that portion against our perceived arrow of time.

And note how we heard the "reverse" instruction more distinctly by slowing down the recording. A common characteristic of EVP is delivery that sounds a little rushed or sped up. We suppose that effect could be a by-product of the rapidly generated allophones of our spirit box and the manipulations by an entity to capture and rearrange these clipped sounds into intelligible words, phrases, and sentences. But it might also signal an attempt to manipulate and produce EVP in a space-time world that has no exact equivalent on that Other Side.

As a result of such recordings, we've altered our interview routine to ask if we're talking to something/someone who is contacting us in what we perceive as "real time," or a sequence in synch with our own arrow of time. In a very recent, new investigation, the response to this query produced an EVP of "Same time," which suggests the respondent recognized the question was relevant.

Our final observation about the dubious relationship of time and EVP: Kenneth Webster's book The Vertical Plane recounts ITC communication using an early computer that only had  32k of memory. Webster, who was a school teacher, and two friends renovated a house in Chester, England, set over an ancient foundation.

They began receiving typed messages on the computer screen and soon discovered they seemed to be communicating with a former resident of the original dwelling. (Recall this was almost a decade before the Internet or anything resembling the World Wide Web). This correspondent, calling himself Tomas Harden, claimed to be from the 16th-Century -- but even more incredibly, he claimed to be writing within his own 1500s time-frame and very much alive. Even more incredibly, Harden said he received a "leems-boyste," a light box or display unit, from someone living in the 2109! You can read a version of the account here if interested.

We're not quite sure to make of this -- except that such transchronological dimensions are also well within Einstein's relativistic description, which describes all space and all time as existing simultaneously in the fabric of space-time. Such musings have become more intriguing in light of 21st-Century physics' open discussions of parallel universes and multi-dimensional realities.

The nature of time and its relevance to both EVP and ITC may be more complicated than we ever imagined.

What made the above aside seem relevant to our own investigations involved peculiar photos we found on our cameras for one investigation we conducted -- photos we didn't take -- and subsequent appearances of other photos involving the same photographic compositions but including messages to us.

We seemed to have gotten the attention of someone, or something, and the subject of our next article, in two weeks.

* * *

We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Voices from the Other Side - ITC & EVP, Pt 4

Who are the ghostly voices we record on both audio-only digital recorders and spirit boxes?

As we've developed in the previous articles in this series, these devices seem to produce authentic communication. But what is the intelligence behind such electronic phenomena?  

It's time to address who -- or what -- is talking to paranormal investigators when we use ITC to record EVP.

This is the next topic in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here; the second, click here; and the third, click here.

For this article, we use case studies from our own investigations to illustrate the perplexity of identifying the sources of EVP.

Recall from Part 2 that these voices are not produced by human vocal cords. Whether the voices occur on digital recordings or through ghost boxes, EVP are not disembodied voices since they occur as the result of electronics and therefore produce human-like speech but not human speech.

This observation leads us to challenge the fundamental assumption that  "female voices" originate with  female spirits and "male voices" originate with male spirits. For one thing, we don't even know if gender is relevant for some unknown Other Side! (A good analog may be the paranormal concept of reincarnation, where  disembodied souls may well re-embody in the opposite gender. In effect, that belief system describes the soul as genderless.)

It's particularly tempting to assign gender to audio-only recordings we've captured on digital recorders. After all, these voice phenomena seem to be produced by a more direct source. But audio-only EVP are still manipulations of instrumental equipment, and we've yet to hear voices on site with our own ears: The sounds we capture only become discernible through later amplification and sometimes by slowing down the recordings to make the EVP more resemble the delivery speed we expect from normal human speech. (Faster-than-"normal" delivery is a typically reported characteristic of EVP.)

One example suffices to make our point.

When we investigated the Forest Queen Hotel in Crested Butte, Colo., we discovered on later analysis that we'd captured what we assumed was the EVP of a former prostitute named "Liz-Liz," who had reportedly jumped to her death from the window of the hotel's upper-floor Room 4.

Listen to the following to see if you think that EVP sounds like a female spirit:

A "female" EVP?

At the time of the investigation, a housekeeping staffer told us the prostitute's name was Thelma, but our subsequent research revealed her name was actually Elizabeth, or Liz-Liz. Either way, we requested -- and got -- an interaction that sounds feminine in pitch to us. But then, that's what we expected. Again, no physical anatomical human organs produced this EVP. Neither we nor anyone else understands how this electronic production takes place. We only know that the response came almost immediately after we asked for interaction.

Was is it produced by the surviving personality of Liz-Liz? Maybe. Or maybe the EVP results from some other source. Since we discovered the EVP only later, no true conversation took place to clarify who -- or what -- produced the "voice."

The capture of this EVP suggests we need to return to that hotel to investigate further, hopefully initiating a more sustained conversation with whatever created the EVP we recorded.

We couldn't make out what the voice actually says, only that it sounds like speech. Such electronic captures are called Class C EVP, or electronic voices that are difficult to understand. (Class A EVP are voices most people can understand if amplified while Class B EVP are amplified voices where not everyone will agree on the same meaning for the words.)

The supposed gender becomes even more problematic for EVP we've captured by ghost box since any non-physical intelligence using such a device must rely on available sounds. Our ghost box doesn't scan radio frequencies as a source of vocabulary. Instead, we use a box that generates only random allophones -- the box supplies no actual words -- that must be assembled into words, phrases, and sentences. As a result, if the available random sounds have a higher pitch, the EVP will "sound" feminine; if random sounds happen to have a lower pitch, they'll sound masculine.

Using ITC of this nature may assist entities from the Other Side to produce EVP, but we're even further away from trusting pitch to assign gender.

For example, listen to this EVP produced by our EchoVox ghost box at the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colo.:

A mixed-gender trio, or simply available sounds?

What intrigues us most about this recording -- well, apart from the recognition of our names even though we didn't provide that information during the session! -- is the way three "voices" work together to complete one sentence. Are we interacting with three different entities acting in synchronized, coordinated effort to communicate, or merely one unknown entity using the medley of available sounds generated by the EchoVox?

The latter seems more plausible to us -- if we can be permitted to suggest plausibility at all!

Although our discussion so far seems to take us even further away from identifying the sources of EVP, our intent is to frame the question in a broader way that might help explain what's going on -- the subject (with more examples) of the final installment in this series.

* * *

We're actually having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website to learn more.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

The black box of ghost boxes - ITC & EVP, Part 3

Ghost boxes are something of a black box -- these devices produce voices, but why this occurs is still a mystery. Even more, no one knows for sure where these electronic phenomena are coming from. 

Who is talking to paranormal investigators when they use a legitimate ghost box?

This is the third in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here. If you missed the second, click here.

 The original generation of ghost boxes relied on radio frequency (RF) sweeps as a source of words, claiming such utterances were RF manipulations to allow the Other Side to communicate. But this claim is difficult to defend except in those instances where captured words record correlations to investigator questions or else describe historical circumstances surrounding reported paranormal activity.

Even then, it's a tenuous argument to say radio-generated words carry the freight of new intentions, and skeptics aren't without some justification to suggest the explanation is a combination of coincidence and investigator expectation as a more likely cause for many ghost box EVP.

For our money, we find the newest generation of ghost boxes more defensible since these devices rely on so-called phonetic generators that use only random banks of sounds as a source of utterance. These boxes contain no words at all, which means the capture of intelligible words, phrases, and sentences are remarkable.

Such gen-2 ghost boxes may produce more reliable EVP, but the voices still originate from unexplained sources.

One long-term paranormal investigator and early ghost box user is Tim Woolworth, whose ITC Voices Website is filled with careful analysis of and thoughtful insights about the nature of the phenomena. (Woolworth is a former investigator for Central New York Ghost Hunters; he also has a background as a sound engineer. We highly recommend both his Website and his insights).

One of the more thought-provoking observations he makes is that ghost boxes don't just communicate with the dead. The devices can also result from the living when they dream. (See Woolworth's article, "Consciousness Projection: Voices of the Living Through a Ghost Box.")

If you checked out the ATransC "TransCommunication White Paper" on EVP characeristics cited in the previous article in this series, you've already encountered the notion that EVP are also reported from other possible origins such as coma patients, transmissions from other dimensions, and even telepathic communications from extraterrestrials!

Maybe we should be calling these devices "Consciousness Boxes" rather than Ghost Boxes!

Some reports go even further, suggesting communication from other moments in time -- both from the past and from the future. The notion is certainly consistent with the Einsteinian theories of Special and General Relativity, which state all moments in time exist simultaneously just like all locales in space. This corollary of Relativity may be over a century old, but it nonetheless challenges our own paradigm of reality.

Although the inquiries we made for our new book WILD WEST GHOSTS tried to elicit responses from lingering residents at the haunted locales we investigated, we seemed to have collected EVP that include other non-local sources as well.

In effect, our own paranormal investigations produced instances where recorded voices sometimes converse with one another -- occasionally commenting specifically on our ghost box or else the other technology we use. At such times, we felt like eavesdroppers. At other times... perhaps the subjects of someone else's paranormal inquiries from some undefined Other Side! (At least, that's our take during moments when we let ourselves consider such unsettling possibilities.)

In light of our research into the phenomena of EVP and ghost boxes, in the next article we'll revisit some of our own EVP captures and puzzle over the range of possible sources for these voices as well as offer a few tentative observations and conclusions.

* * *

We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!