I heared about voices of ghosts turning up when using a tape recorder. For example, look at this site: http://www.ghoststudy.com/new/evp.html
What’s the straight dope on that? Fabrication? Something else?
The human brain is hard-wired to detect faces and voices. It is how we can tell people apart much better than we can tell, say, rocks apart. It is also the cause of many misconceptions. Because of the way our brains are wired, we want to see recognizable shapes in everything. This is what prompts us to see clouds as being shaped like sheep or dragons instead of just “random puffs of water.” It is also what drives people to see “ghosts” in photos or in a darkened room - the pattern of shadows or the static on a TV can be perceived as a face, because that is what we are designed to see.
The same applies to our hearing and voices. You’ve probably heard people describe birdcalls using words - such as the whippoorwil and the killdeer, named for the words their calls supposedly sound like. Obviously the birds are not actually saying “whip poor Will,” but that is what we hear because we are made to detect language. See also the tendency of small children to interpret the various nighttime household noises (water in the plumbing, the roar of the furnace) as monsters or ghosts coming to get them.
There’s also a pretty good amount of, for lack of a better term, wishful thinking. (That’s not the word I want but the right one has slipped my mind.) If you expect to hear a ghost, you will hear one. If you expect to hear God talking to you, that’s what you’ll interpret it as. If you expect to hear a coffee machine… then you hear a coffee machine.
I have a CD called Friedrich Jurgenson, From the Studio for Audioscopic Research, which is a compilation of numerous recordings spanning a few decades. Jurgenson bought a tape recorder to record himself singing, and later noticed all sorts of strange voices popping up on the tapes. Each snipet has an explaination and translation for each ghost voice (most in German some in Swedish). When I’ve listened to it, on the one hand it seems awfully spooky, but then on the other hand, it sounds like the translations are being read into the sounds, like the weird voices are just audio flukes and Jurgenson “heard” what he wanted to hear in them. I believe in a number of paranormal things, I’ve experienced too many things I can’t explain, but I’m not sure about these recordings.
Just don’t start playing the tapes backwards, then the entire aspect of Speech Reversal would be re-opened.