Electronic Voice Phenomenon

I have listened to Coast to Coast when Art Bell hosted it for many years, then to a couple of other radio shows that he hosted briefly before dying recently. I don't listen to Coast to Coast much since George Noory took it over, but I do sometimes.

I do listen to several paranormal podcasts, not because I believe all of this stuff, but because it's interesting.

EVPs are creepy, or they can be. Unfortunately, most of the time, when someone plays an EVP, they will first tell you what was said, which is really what they have decided was said. Of course, once they've put that suggestion in your head, you're more likely to hear it.

Sometimes, I still don't. A lot of the EVPs could be any sort of noise artifact, and that's assuming that the ghost hunters aren't intentionally being deceptive, which is not something that can safely be assumed.

I wish they'd let it play a few times before telling us what they have decided the message was so that I could hear it without the suggestion in my head, but then probably too many people would conclude that it was BS. They rarely do that.

Some of them are really creepy though, particularly the ones that are clear and that seem to be actually speaking to something. Particularly creepy are EVPs of kids. Of course, there is also the strong possibility that the ghost hunters are making it up.

Here's one from TAPS, which you've all heard of. I suppose it's important to understand that these people have made a fairly good career of this stuff, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're phony.



Here is the opinion of the Skeptic's Dictionary.

 

By the way, this isn't a poll on who believes in EVPs. I don't know that I believe in EVPs but I don't mind talking about it.

 

I have listened to some of the C2C episodes where they had the ghost hunters and the recorded EVP’s, and I felt just about the same way as you are describing, Ken. It is very hard to understand what the “voice” is saying, and when they tell you what they believe the words are, then you can hear that it does resemble that statement.
However, once we are told what to hear, then that is often what we can hear, and we just accept that was what the sounds said.
We have probably all listened to some of those “bad lip syncing” recordings where they take some well-known event and change it into a totally different conversation from what the people actually said, and then you watch the video, it does sound like they were saying that, even though we already KNOW they said something different than the lip-sync.

I think that my biggest objection comes from a personal experience.
Years ago, before they died, my mom and dad owned and ran an old hotel in a small Idaho town. The hotel was historical, and was owned by the town historical society for many years after my folks died, as they worked on the restoration project.

Several years ago, apparently someone brought in a team of ghost hunters, and they recorded their trip through the musty old areas of the long empty hotel. Some of the things they claim to hear would have been from my mother or father, and none of them were anything like my parents would have EVER said. In one place they try to lure my dad out by talking about having a beer, and neither of my parents were drinkers, so that obviously would not have encouraged my dad at all.
Also, I am positive that neither of my parents would have chosen to stay at that hotel and haunt it, they both liked our house at another nearby town much better, or even the property where my son now lives, and that my folks lived on when I was born. They would neither one have stayed around the hotel, assuming that kind of thing were possible.
After watching this (and being totally DISGUSTED), I pretty much decided that probably most of the other places that they do a ghost hunt were done in probably the same manner as this one.

 

I just watched it. They have a radio and, early on, someone upstairs was talking to them on the radio, and that's where it sounds like the EVPs are coming from, and if you take enough film in a darkened building, the chances of finding something that you could point at and say that it's a shadow person are pretty high, since there are sure to be darker areas.

I have seen some video that was pretty impressive, and have heard some EVPs that were downright creepy, but there's never any way of knowing that they were legitimate. Most of what I see or hear on ghost hunter shows are hype, with phony startled reactions to nothing that I can see or hear, sounds that seem to be coming from someone's radio or walkie-talkie, most of which could never be interpreted without someone telling me what it's supposed to be saying. When they start talking about orbs, they totally lose me. Orbs usually mean that they need to clean their camera lens or quit stirring up dust. Or maybe turn the laser light off. I have a hard time imagining someone deciding they wanted. to hang around some in a basement or cellar of an old building in the form of a speck of dust or a ball of light.

I have seen a lot of them, some way phonier than others. While I am not willing to say that there's nothing at all to it, I will say that I don't think there's anything to most of them.

 

There is another part to this video that I posted, where they actually get out of the furnace room in the basement, and go into some of the old rooms upstairs, and that is where they claim to be finding the orbs.
I don’t say that there can’t be some kind of spirits at some places, and maybe even some that try to communicate with us; but I think that a lot of what we see on youtube or on television/radio shows is simply hype, just like this phony video is.
The thing is, just like with the obviously faked Bigfoot sightings, when people see fakes like this, we tend to dismiss the whole possibility that there is some truth to it.

Back when I was married to my ex-husband, and he was doing drugs so heavily, he said that someone tapped him on the shoulder, and told him not to do drugs anymore.
He said he thought it was my dad.
This was not at the hotel, but was in the same town, and I can come closer to believing that my dad would ask my ex to not take the drugs than that he would speak (unintelligibly) to some strangers making fun of him with their cameras.
The voice that my ex heard was perfectly clear, understandable, and he was able to recognize the voice.
I am not saying that this was actually my dad speaking either; but I would a lot more easily believe that than the things in that video.

 

I watched the whole thing. You're right. If they really thought they were communicating with an actual person, now dead, they were awfully disrespectful. Would they talk that way to anyone else?

 

This is my mom and dad, taken in the lobby of the hotel, and they were both either in their 80’s or very close at the time of the photo. It is impossible for me to relate this picture, which is how I remember my folks, with the rude questions and supposed replies from that video.
I think that these ghost-hunter people never even consider what their shows will look like to a relative of the person/ghost they are supposed to be tracking, or how we will feel about seeing it.
I was doing some kind of search for more information about the old hotel when I accidentally ran across these videos, and totally wished that I had never found them.

 

A lot of things have been within the realm of the paranormal until someone was able to figure it out or to prove it. On the other hand, some things are just BS.