Sorry, you’ve got this backwards. It’s up to to the people who claim that something unusual exists to provide the evidence. I am 100% sure that unicorns don’t exist. If you say there really are unicorns, it’s not up to me to disprove their existence: You need to show me one. Until then, it’s only ordinary common sense to say that there are no unicorns.
By the same token, there’s no reason to believe that ghosts exist until someone provides some really solid evidence. And that evidence will have to be examined closely by a number of people doing their best to debunk it. In that process, much of it will be proved to be invalid: caused by natural phenomena, equipment malfunction, or fraud. A small percentage will not be explainable. But that that doesn’t mean it’s evidence of ghosts, only that no prosaic explanation has been found. It may be evidence, it may not.
Note also the unwarranted assumption that the voices are ghosts. Why ghosts? Let’s grant for the sake of argument that these really are recordings of voices, and not random noise. What’s the evidence that they are the voices of dead people? Why not aliens, or future humans sending messages back through ormholes, or unicorns, or some other weird explanation?
I’ve listened to the EVPs on the Web site in the link and I am not impressed. To me they are the audio equivalent of seeing horsies in the clouds. The mind is very good at finding patterns in random information, and I think that’s what happening with EVPs. When you amplify noise, you will hear random stuff. That’s what noise is. Our ears pick out sounds in the range of human voices and try to turn them into meaningful signals. The Web site helps you by telling you exactly what to listen for. If those links didn’t include the words you’re supposed to hear, in most cases you probably wouldn’t hear the same phrase.
Nothing happening here, folks. Move along.
(Oh, BTW, I’ve worked in audio engineering for more than 30 years.)
I wonder how much of this is just accidentally, and poorly received, radio or TV signals. Back in the 90’s I had a neighbor who was a 2-way radio enthusiast. When he would broadcast, his voice came over my TV, radio, and telephone. Mind you, the telephone was a regular model, not a cordless, and the TV was hooked up to a cable system, but I could hear him running his mouth anyway.
Sorry this EVP thing sounds like random noise to me. I had someone click the links so I couldn’t read what was being said and it was just garbled noise. Once I was told what to listen to, it was still hard to make out what was being said. At least I could imagine it sounded like something.
Nothing scary here. And hoo boy some of these phrases…
Still, I get creeped by ghost stories. Don’t believe in 'em.
I listened to several of those EVPs and nothing sounded particularly spectral to me. A lot of static, some background noises and maybe some voices, but that doesn’t mean they’re from dead people.
I hope these folks aren’t trying for the JREF prize with recordings of such poor quality.
Same here. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I sure as hell didn’t hear anything meaningful in those samples. I mean, the supposedly backward masked “Here’s to my sweet Satan” in Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” is more understandable than anything I’ve heard on that website.
What about ghost writing? Huh? Hasn’t that been proven literally hundreds of times?
:dubious:
Yeah, that was silly.
While I have yet to actually admit to myself that I 100% believe one way or another on anything, and many well planned hoaxes have occured since the dawn of the technological age, there still appears to be a slew of stuff that defies explination with our current resources. Or, it could be bull shit.
I saw the trailer for that before Shaun of the Dead a couple of weeks ago. I like horror movies, but I tend not to be too scared by them – a few jumps, a little nervous laughter, but I’m O.K. by the time I leave the theater. However … that trailer scared the beejeezus out of me. I can’t even bring myself to watch it again. I’m a skeptic and I think EVP is among the most suspicious of all “ghost”-related phenomena, but man … “Get out of my house!” CREEEE-PY.
That IS a creepy trailer, though I think the creppiest part is the photo of the baby with the woman looking through the window. I love those “ghost photos”, even though I know they are a bunch of crap.
I saw the episode of “Ghost Hunters” that I think the OP was talking about as well, and I have to agree that it was really a pretty spooky voice that I didn’t want to think about late at night for some time. But I also thought it seemed that the first three or four times the ghost hunters listened to it, the noise was pretty clearly definable as:
and only after they started to clean up the signal and really listen hard did the scary “We don’t want that” voice appear. I have to imagine that, consciously or not, the ghost hunters heavily modifed that signal to get the voice to appear.
On a broader note, I sometimes think that skeptics (and I consider myself to be one) can be more scared of alleged “ghost” voices than someone who might believe in ghosts would be. If I believed in ghosts, I might say, what’s the worst that can happen? Some annoying comments, maybe moving around small objects in the house…the dead are so annoying. Whereas for those of us who feel the world is a rational place where things can be explained by physics and chemistry, a ghostly voice can come across as a threat that our whole worldview is about to unravel at a moment’s notice. If the dead can wander around talking, what’s next?
Really? Lots of things can sound like voices to me - water in pipes, the rattling of a furnace, really quiet static… And if you’re predisposed to think you’ll be listening to voices anyway, wouldn’t you be more likely to interpret the random noise as patterned speaking?
Hey, I’ll be the first to admit my fallibility. However, there are a lot of these things that sound too damn like a voice for me, the skeptic, to dismiss off hand.
There are a couple that could easily be random noise… there’s one that resembles a child’s voice saying “flashlight”. This could easily be a million high-pitched squeaky things, like a rusty nail rubbing against wood, or a branch scraping a window. There are several other one-word or two-word examples on the site I linked to that are easy to dismiss.
However, there are a couple that really seem to have a structure and pace to them. I’ll post a few examples when I get home. If they’re mere aberrations, then it’s one hell of a coincidental resemblance. Or maybe they do a lot more processing than they imply. Or maybe it follows one of the possible explanations that the Skeptic’s Society has put out.
Whatever it is, I vociferously stand by my assertion about its amusement value.
I just finished listening to all of the EVP’s in the link. I was prepared to hear a bunch of garbled noise, but DAMN! Most of them were really clear. And who knew that ghosties had a sense of humour?
I’m not absolutely certain that ghosts exist, but the recordings were picking up some type of voices.
Aside from the EVP captured on paranormal investigations, some EVP are apparently the voices of a person’s deceased loved ones. These voices will sometime answer direct questions which pretty much shoots holes in the stray radio broadcast theory.
AA-EVP has a lot of explanation and examples of that type of EVP.
I really didn’t want this to become a debate, I just wanted to discuss the irony of being freaked out by something I truly do not believe is supernatural.
I also went to the site…and listened. It is true, some of them are recognizable human voices. However, I am not clear on how these things are recorded-to people set up a cassette recorder in record mode insdie a mausoleum, or on top of a tombstone, and just leave it (till the tape runs out)? Or are they actually carrying the tape recorder into a house/cemetary/whatever, and actually HEAR what they are recording?
If the first case, I suspect that the tape is picking up stray radio signals (police radios, CB transmitters, etc.). That would explain the phenomenon nicely. If the second case, then there might actually be something here. I know that if I entered a tomb and heard a voice, I would be seriously freaked out.
Another thing…the voices don’t seem to have much to say…you hear things like “I’m here” or “They are lighting up the cemetery”…it would be a bit more believeable if the spirits would actually say something like" I was murdered by John , avenge my death!"
They carry the recorders with them while they’re investigating the places. But they don’t hear the voices as they’re being recorded. In some instances, the investigators are speaking and the ghost voices are responding.
Example:
An investigator falls down the stairs and drops his equipment and says “dammit!” A child’s voice says, “are you okay?”
No, it doesn’t. Random phrases from TV and radio signals will seem to answer direct questions “sometimes”, too; especially if you want them to.
The supernatural is all horseshit, but this is the horseshittiest turd on the heap.
The “mundane” explanation: pattern recognition (the tendancy to see order in otherwise random stuff), a healthy imagination, and the subconscious fear of being helpless.
The “there might be something out there” explanation: they do exist, but we are largely unaware of them except in a few cases, and it’s kind of interesting, but basically irrelevant to us.
The “OMFG break out the tinfoil”: the Universe is teeming with Unfriendly Creatures, and we must get Them before They get us. :eek:
I’m usually somewhere between the first two explanations, but sometimes I get a little paranoid…
