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.

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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!