greater maryland paranormal society

What Are EVP's?

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Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) are said to be manifestations of voices of ghosts or spirits made audible through static on the radio, or on electronic recording media. According to psychologist Konstantin Raudive, who popularized the phenomena, the "voices" are typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase. Later authors have said that they are observed on diverse media, including: radio, television, tape recorders, video recorders, and digital recording devices, and are sometimes answers to questions asked during the taping. EVP are considered by paranormal researchers as a subset of instrumental transcommunication. There is an absence of documentation regarding EVP in mainstream scientific literature.

The possibility of spirit communication through electronic recording devices has been a subject of interest since at least the 1940s when the first recordings were attempted. Originally labeled “Raudive Voices,” after Raudive, they were later renamed “electronic voice phenomena,” a term introduced by the publishing company Colin Smythe Ltd in the early 1970s. Various individuals have studied the phenomena and believe that the most likely explanation is that they are produced by spirits of the deceased. This explanation was first introduced by American photographer Attila Von Szalay, who believed he recorded the voice of a dead loved one in 1956. This lead to research conducted through the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, notably by psychologists Raymond Bayless and Konstantin Raudive, and film producer Friedrich Jürgenson. In 1980, inventor William O'Neill, backed by industrialist George Meek, built a 'Spiricom' device which was said to facilitate very clear communication with the spirit world.

In addition to deceased spirits, various researchers and their critics have suggested that EVP could be due to: psychic echoes from the past, psychokinesis unconsciously produced by living people, apophenia (finding of significance or connections between insignificant or unrelated phenomena), pareidolia (interpreting random sounds into voices in their own language which might otherwise sound like random noise to a foreign speaker), the thoughts of aliens, misidentification through lack of quality of equipment, or simple hoaxes.

Culturally, EVP has spread into several areas of interest. EVP has become a tool of paranormal investigators, used when attempting to contact the souls of dead loved ones or during ghost hunting activities. References to EVP have appeared in the reality television show Ghost Hunters, the fictional Supernatural and Hollywood films such as White Noise and The Sixth Sense.-From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia