By James E. Alcock, PhD

Voices of the Dead?

When we talk about communication with the dead, we are usually referring to “mediums” who talk to the dead on our behalf, or who allow the dead to speak to us through them.

What if, instead the dead could speak to us directly, without the middle person?

Imagine for a moment that you are the dead person, that your body has died, but your mind / personality / soul lives on. You are surprised by this, and you want to tell people, especially your skeptical friends, all about it – you want to communicate with us.

You have no voice box therefore you cannot speak. You have no arms or legs or any means of moving objects. But you are – as they say – an “energy field.” Could you reach us by interference with devices that rely upon other energy fields, a radio or tape recorder, for example?

But if you were able to generate some sounds on a tape recorder, would any one even detect them, or pay attention if they did? It’s often hard to detect weak signals – and you are but a wraith, a spirit, and probably without a lot of energy.

However, there is hope for humans, as Ray Hyman points out, because humans are the best pattern detectors in existence. Pattern detection, in this example, would be the ability to discriminate signal from noise.

This is exactly what is happening, according to some people. If you listen carefully, they say, you can hear the voices of the dead in tape recordings.

What do the voices of the dead sound like? Here are two examples of actual recordings where people claim to hear spoken words, the words of the dead.

This from the webpage http://members.tripod.com/~GSOLTESZ/evp.htm#listen:
“In this EVP recording, you can hear a voice saying, almost in agony, ..."Save Me."
You might have to play it a couple of times but you can't miss it. This recording has only been enhanced by myself using a sound editing program. The reason was to cut down on the "noise" and "bring out" the actual voice.

Here are two other examples from Dr. Michael Daniels, psychologist and parapsychologist (www.mdani.demon.co.uk)

The website instructs:
"To hear the voices at their best you should play them at maximum volume through headphones. In both cases you should be able to hear a definite "English" male voice. You may need to replay the recordings several times in order to make out the words, which are quite indistinct. The first clip seems to be saying something like "do you like potatoes?". The second clip sounds to me rather like "five thirty and four-eye". Different words may suggest themselves to you." (Dr. Daniels points out that there is divided opinion about the reality of EVP).

So – it’s not so easy to hear the voices, is it? These are examples of what are called electronic voice phenomena, or EVP.

We are informed by another website that:

“EVP is a process whereby unexplained snatches of  voice or voices are embedded onto magnetic recording tape by a process that is not yet fully understood. The embedded "ghost" voice can be heard when the magnetic audio tape is played back on a standard tape recorder/player.”
(www.hauntedhike.com)

Again, the Web informs us that:

“Recordings typically last only for a few minutes. This is because intense concentration is required in order to hear the voices on the tape, which usually has to be replayed several times in order to decipher the speech. Use of headphones is recommended.”
(www.mdani.demon.co.uk)

The best way to understand the development of EVP it is to go back a little in time.

With the rise of Spiritualism beginning with the “mysterious rappings” of the Fox sisters in the nineteenth century, there have been many attempts to “contact the dead,” while claiming to be engaged in scientific study.

Thomas Edison saw new technology, part of which he invented, as a means by which spirits might try to contact us. Apparently, he strove to make contact through some sort of phonograph device in the 1890s. Then, in the late 1920s, he tried to make contact with the souls of the dearly departed by means of some sort of special chemical equipment. It is claimed that spirit voices were first captured on phonograph records in 1938, seven years after his death.

However, it was with Friedrich Jürgenson (1903-1987) that the study of EVP really begins. Jürgenson was in some ways a Renaissance Man – an archeologist, a philosopher, a linguist, a painter who was commissioned by Pope Pius XII, a singer and recording artist, and a film documentary maker. . Jürgenson’s interest in Electronic Voice Phenomena apparently began when, after having recording bird songs with a tape recorder, he could hear human voices on the tapes, even though there had been no one in the vicinity.

This surprising event naturally piqued his interest, and he turned his attention to making recordings of nothing – that is, recordings made in a quite place with no one around. He continued to detect voices on these tapes, and his studies led to the 1964 publication of his book Rosterna fran Rymden (“Voices from space”).

He subsequently recognized some of the voices that his tape recorder picked up, including that of his mother, who called him by her pet nickname for him. However, as we say where I grew up, his mother was already “on the wrong side of the grass;” that is, she was deceased. It seemed natural to him to assume that she was communicating from beyond the grave. Thus, he came to the conclusion that all the voices that he had recorded were voices of the dead. In 1967, he published Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (“Radio-link with the dead”).

Dr Konstantin Raudive (1906-1974), a student of Carl Jung, was a Latvian psychologist who taught at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He was preoccupied with parapsychological interests all his life, and especially with the possibility of life after death, and he kept in close contact with leading British psychical researchers

In 1964, Raudive read Jürgenson’s book, Voices from space, and was so impressed by it that he arranged to meet Jürgenson in 1965. He then worked with Jürgenson to make some EVP recordings, but their first efforts bore little fruit, although they believed that they could hear very weak, muddled, voices.

However, one night, as he listened to one recording, he clearly heard a number of voices- and when he played the tape over and over, he came to understand all of them – some of which were in German, some in Latvian, some in French. The last voice on the tape – a woman’s voice – said “Va dormir, Margarete” ("Go to sleep, Margaret").

Raudive later wrote (in his book Breakthrough): “These words made a deep impression on me, as Margarete Petrautzki had died recently, and her illness and death had greatly affected me.” Amazed by this, he then started researching such voices on his own, and spent much of the last ten years of his life exploring electronic voice phenomena. With the help of various electronics experts, he recorded over 100,000 audiotapes, most of which were made under what he described as “strict laboratory conditions.” He collaborated at times with Hans Bender, a well-known German parapsychologist. Over 400 people were involved in his research, and all apparently heard the voices. This culminated in the 1971 publication of his book Breakthrough, mentioned above. His impact was such that these phenomena are now often referred to simply as "Raudive voices."

Raudive developed several different approaches to recording EVP, and he referred to:
Microphone voices: one simply leaves the tape recorder running, with no one talking; he indicated that one can even disconnect the microphone.
Radio voices: one records the white noise from a radio that is not tuned to any station.
Diode voices: one records from what is essentially a crystal set not tuned to a station.

Raudive delineated a number of characteristics of the voices, (as laid out in Breakthrough):
“The voice entities speak very rapidly, in a mixture of languages, sometimes as many as five or six in one sentence.”
“They speak in a definite rhythm, which seems forced on them.”
“The rhythmic mode imposes a shortened, telegram-style phrase or sentence.”
Probably because of this, “… grammatical rules are frequently abandoned and neologisms abound.”

Of course, to the skeptic, these characteristics are what one might expect if indeed the “voices” are simply misinterpretations of random, “white” noise.