Electronic Voice Phenomena--Do the Dead Speak?

Are EVPs Ghostly Voices Captured on Recording Devices?

Mar 17, 2009
Melody Rhodes

Detecting EVPs With Recording Devices - photo: Rollingroscoe

The invention of recording devices has seen the emergence of mysterious words and messages that have come to be called electronic voice phenomena or EVP.

Is electronic voice phenomena (EVP) emanating from beyond the grave from souls trying to contact humans? Is electronic voice phenomena a real phenomenon or are the sounds random noise picked up by sensitive instruments?

Skeptics believe that so-called electronic voice phenomena is nothing more than outside noise that eager listeners interpret as words coming from spirit messengers. The listener's belief in life after death colors what he hears. Skeptics attribute unexplainable sounds as probable bleed-over from radio transmitters.

Believers who have heard EVPs are convinced that the words are coming from a paranormal source. Listeners feel the ghostly messages are too telling to be dismissed as outside noise.

Early Investigations into Electronic Voice Phenomena

Early visionaries believed in an afterlife and the possibility that contact could be made with spirits using electronic means.

1928 – Thomas Edison thought it was possible, using the right type of equipment, to actually capture words or messages from spirits on the other side. Blueprints were purportedly discovered after his death for one such device.

1956 – Medium Attila Von Szalay was the first person to try recording spirit voices using a reel-to-reel tape recorder and was apparently successful at capturing EVP recordings.

1965 – Dr. Konstantin Raudive was a Latvian psychologist who devoted ten years to the study of electronic voice phenomenon. Under strict conditions, he recorded thousands of spirit voices and later authored a book entitled Breakthrough--An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1971.

EVP Research Protocols

Researchers have gone to great lengths to rule out obvious and suspected contributors to EVP phenomena.

Recording devices have been set up in heavily shielded rooms, designed to prevent radio wave penetration

Specific questions have been asked, over just listening for random sounds which could later be interpreted according to listeners' preferences

What Picture Has Emerged about Electronic Voice Phenomena?

Voices have been recorded in rooms designed to eliminate outside influences

Specific questions have elicited specific answers

When responding to questions, some of the spirit voices have even named the questioners!

The EVP phenomenon has spawned certain questions: How do EVPs make their way onto recording devices? How could a non-physical entity produce sound frequencies that humans produce via physical organs?

The answer may be that entities, in their attempts to contact humans, manipulate existing sound frequencies to get their messages across.

Modern day research methods employ both digital and analogue recording devices. Low frequency microphones are favored because EVP occurs at low frequencies.

While controversy surrounds electronic voice phenomena, their emergence provides compelling glimpses of a possible afterlife. In the end--and perhaps one the best discoveries of all: EVP investigators receive messages that portray love and concern for the human race.

Sources:

Raudive, Constantine, Breakthrough--An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1971.
Noory, George/Guiley, Rosemary Ellen, Talking to the Dead, Forge Books, 2011
Cardoso, Annabela, Electronic Voices: Contact With Another Dimension, O Books, 2010