EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) are electronic voices that appear in conjecture with radio broadcasts, recordings, transmissions, and white noise. These voices are created by the butchering and cannibalization of various recordings and then reconfigured in such ways that they are believed to be attempts at communication with the receiver of the messages by some unknown entity or force. These voices have no traceable origin and seem to appear at random intervals of length in communication. The voices often seem to home in on those using radio equipment as a communication device and have been known to answer in cryptic fashions to radio operator’s questions. Theories about where the voices originate range from coincidence, alien contact, ghostly contact, or potentially even other dimensions. While considered by today’s standards as a pseudoscience, the study of EVP was once a serious phenomenon that was studied as an emerging result of the growing use of radio and television in the early to mid-20th century. While the story below the links involves my first experience with EVP and will mainly discuss this, you should take the time to check out the links below and learn a little bit as I will not be relaying some nimrod story about bumbling around an abandoned house with a tape recorder asking spirits redundant and pointless questions about how it’s like being dead and stuck in a shitty limbo while being bothered by the living.
For more information on EVP, check out the following links.
Friedrich Jürgenson: Considered the first pioneer of the study and understanding of EVP
Dr. Konstantīns Raudive: Parapsychologist and the father of the modern study of EVP
The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP: A fantastic CD that explains the history of and offered several samples of EVP. I even own a copy myself.
Overview of EVP: For those who are unaware, EVP wasn’t originally a phenomenon that half-wit ghost hunters on television discovered with crappy tape recorders. There actually is a bit of science behind it.
It was the loud screaming of an unfamiliar woman’s voice through the speaker in the police scanner that violently awoke me from my sleep. Stirring awake in a bit of confusion, but mostly irritation, I quickly realized I had dozed off in the remarkably comfortable rocking chair on my front porch while listening into the lives of people I had never met, and from some of the conversations I’ve overheard, I’d probably never would want to meet. As I stretched a bit, I turned my attention to the police scanner and began my search again for another interesting glimps into a nearby neighbor's life, the conversation with the screaming woman involving her torrent love triangle between her husband and lesbian lover had settled into sobbing, and even I knew that it was best to turn the channel. I thought for a moment that I heard something cutting through the static of one of the channels as they scanner passed through several channels. A voice it seemed was building in the background white noise and I waited with a sort of reserved anticipation, but nothing conjured and I passed it off as nothing else but a weak signal that failed to reach. Sometimes when the signals become entangled through the transistors, conversations and music from distant locations fight and meld into a strange ambiance that I cannot help but to feel is being somehow controlled by some unforeseen force. At times, I’m reminded of my childhood with my grandfather and a strange event that some would consider paranormal.
On cool, fall evenings with the dimming, twilight sun barely illuminating the seemingly endless corn fields of my grandfather’s farm I would listen along with my grandfather to his police scanner and CB radio while he spoke about bits and pieces of his youth. I never realized at the time as he went about the stories how the conversations and voices coming through the police scanner seemed to form a sort of strangely constructed soundtrack that, now that I think about it, became an unsettling background score for a man unfolding bits and pieces of his life to a child that, at the time, did not fully grasp the weight of the words. Every so often, whenever a specific message would come through the CB radio, my grandfather would pause from his story and speak into the CB, and, after receiving some muffled confirmation, would continue on with whatever exciting point we were on in one of his past misadventures. One has to wonder why a farmer out on the countryside would need these tools to communicate to truckers and vagrants of the highways. Perhaps it was some strange network of human connection for those without a home that my grandfather provided. Maybe he was running a bootlegging operation. Hell, maybe it was something that I should best leave to the confines of the past. I suppose the men who keep such secrets probably knew it was best to keep them to their grave. To this day, I’ve never found an answer.
It was during one of these evenings with my grandfather that I had my first experience with EVP. As usual, my grandfather and I found ourselves on the front porch of his home listening to the CB while my grandmother brought us out bowls of her special chicken and dumplings. The crisp, fall air brought about the lovely scents of distant things that I can only describe as pure nostalgia, but for a kid it meant the aroma of warm chicken and the faint smell of a camel cigarette slowly burning between my grandfather’s fingers. The perfection of that moment has now been outlined with some unspeakable ominous highlight that I all but now can recognize with each replay of it in my mind. The CB radio, with a distant voice of a trucker asking for directions, was scrambled by a voice that I can only describe as ethereal and familiar. I remember my grandfather becoming rigid as this female voice began to sing in strange lyrical tones that seemed almost an amalgam of various songs sewn together with only the voice remaining the same. I cannot remember the words of the voice, but my grandfather intently held onto each of them I know because he spoke each of them silently as I watched on. He scrambled to pick up the microphone and held it wordlessly to his lips as the lyrical voice stopped. As he lowered it for a moment with a blank expression on his face, the voice returned and spoke again in the lyrical tone, and I could have sworn I heard the name “Julian” within the song.
The significance of this being the fact it was my grandfather’s name. My grandfather kept repeating a name through the microphone with muddled urgency. “Claire? Claire…Claire?” His voice repeated until it became an almost inaudible whisper. Abruptly, my grandfather stood up and nearly ripped off the power switch off the CB radio as he mumbled to himself angrily. He turned to me and with a look of absolute fatigue asked me to go inside. “But who was that grandpa? Who’s Claire?” I asked as I slinked to the door. He looked up to me before I entered into the house and mumbled “She passed away a long time ago”. I could tell from his voice that I was not to tread any further with questions. I never told my grandmother or anyone else about that night, simply because I knew even then what had happened was nothing that could quite be explained, only described in the often obscured lines and shades of words that will never hold the appropriate weight of the event’s significance. Years later, long after my grandfather had passed away and those wonderful Fall evenings had become only memories, I still have the CB radio and police scanner he used, in which I might add still work perfectly.
On nights when my hermitic nature takes over, I find myself sitting alone on my porch listening to the CB radio and scanner in an attempt to find any myriad of fascinating glimpses into others' lives through the speaker. This usually goes on for several hours of the evening and morning until the liquor or wine that I bring out with me has been emptied, and my body has become rigid from the rocking chair I usually occupy. I still wait until the last weight of the day’s events bring my eyelids to a close, clinging to some strange and hesitant hope that one day I’ll hear a familiar voice from my past through the speaker, singing those familiar lyrical tones that haunted my grandfather that one night when I was a child.
