Digital Voice Recorder - DVR

I remember the first time an EVP really bothered me. “EVP”, if you don’t know, stands for “electronic voice phenomena”, which is thought to be voices of the dead caught on recording devices. The bothersome EVP was captured while I was in Jerome, Arizona for a ghosthunting training session, led by Debe Branning and her MVD Ghostchasers out of Mesa, Arizona.

My husband was supposed to accompany me on the trip, but he isn’t really into the paranormal. So, he bowed out, and my ever faithful sister went with me instead. We arrived at The Connor Hotel, which is situated in the tiny town of Jerome, where residents tout the town as a teeming territory of ghosts. Most of the day was uneventful, so we went out on the town in the evening to dine at the Haunted Hamburger, followed by a walking tour of Jerome. We ended our night out with a visit to the local cemetery. Still, we didn’t encounter any ghosts, so we went back to The Connor Hotel for a midnight ghost investigation. We had reserved the entire second floor of the hotel and proceeded to check things out. I had my digital camera in hand, while my sister walked the halls with her video camera.

At the time, my sister’s husband was laid off from his job, and we considered this our last chance to spend time together, since her husband was considering relocating her household out of state. We didn’t talk about this possibility of her move, yet it was weighing heavily on our minds.

Not long into the investigation, the temperature dropped drastically. We were freezing, so I grabbed a comforter from our room, and fashioned a nice, warm shroud for myself. I looked like a ghost, so I fit right in, I thought. We thought we were alone on the floor, but an elderly man emerged from his room, dragging an oxygen concentrator behind him to fiddle with the air conditioning controls. We deduced that he was the caretaker of he hotel. He didn’t address us while adjusting the temperature. When he was finished, he returned to his room. It got even colder after that, despite his tinkering.

It was around this time that I passed my sister in the hallway, who was going past me the other way. I turned back to look at her, and she was examining her video camera with a puzzled look on her face. She looked at me and said that someone had whispered my name into her ear. I said, “No way!” She rewound the tape and, sure enough, there it was. It was simply my name. Some EVPs are scary enough, but when your name is hissed by an unseen voice, it’s sort of scary. My sister would tell you, like she has told everyone else, that I didn’t like that one bit. I was scared. In my opinion, if it says your name, it is aware of you and it is stalking you. I told her that I was going to sleep in the car. I tried to be reasonable about it and settled for sleeping with the lights on, and the TV blaring in our room. The temperature stayed cold all night and we used every extra blanket in the room to try to stay warm. Still, I kept hearing that voice on tape, as it replayed in my mind throughout the night. My sister has a theory that our emotions over her impending move was the cause for the ghost to utter my name. At the moment she heard the unseen entity say my name, her heart was heavy that she might have to move. She didn’t have to. Her husband got another job here in Tucson. We still have that eerie EVP as a memento of the sad time when we thought we would be seperated.

If you’ve never listened to eletronic voice phenomena, you can visit the website of The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena (AA-EVP) and listen to some examples there. The AA-EVP awarded a grant to The Windbridge Institute, right here in Tucson, to perform controlled research into the phenomenon. A few months ago, I attended a paranormal research training session with Mark Boccuzzi, co-founder of The Windbridge Institute. Mark is also the Director of Tucson Paranormal Research, a team created to “Investigate, Analyze and Document, anomalous events that fall outside the realm of conventional scientific research.”

This training session I attended was part of a 15 credit hour class for new members of his team to learn to investigate paranormal phenomena. During this particular session, we talked about EVPs and the different methods used to capture the sounds. One interesting method is the utilization of EVPmaker software. The program divides recordings of speech “into short segments and then plays them back continuously in randomly order.” It is quite interesting, but the random utterances generated by the software do tend to become irritating after a while. If that sounds interesting to you, then give it a try. You might find that the random nonsensical sounds generated by the software soon form a specific message, meant especially for you.

As far as an EVP that address me specifically, it still scares the heck out of me. However, I’ll keep trying to capture those creepy voices, all in the spirit of research.

They're baaack...

There has been another letter abducted from the Google logo this morning. Today, it is the letter “L” that appears to be missing, depending on the way you look at it. This is less than two weeks since the “O” in Google was taken by aliens during Google’s last “Unexplained Phenomena.” The UFO from last time that my sister said looks eerily like a sombrero, has returned for a cyberspace encore.

The Google Doodle depicts the UFO hovering over four crop circles that are shaped like a “G”, 2 “O’s” and an “E”, of course. I dispute that the “L” is missing, because an “L” just isn’t “circular” like g, o and e (which arranged correctly, spells “ego”…no comment). There’s a line there with the green dot, same as last time, at the top of what I consider to be the “L” in Google.  Clicking on the Doodle returns “crop circles” search results.

Like last time, Google utilized Twitter to send a cryptic tweet around the world just past midnight. This time, the tweet simply read:  51.327629, -0.5616088. The message was quickly decoded as a straightforward map coordinate. The coordinates, 51.327629, -0.5616088 lead us Surrey, England. Surrey is a UFO hotspot. Of course, crop circles have been cropping up in Surrey since the late 1800′s…at least that’s when they were first noticed. Surrey is where H.G. Wells called home. Of course, Wells authored The Invisible Man and The War of The Worlds. Surrey was the setting for the latter novel, a tale of alien invasion. Are we honoring H.G. Wells this time? His birthday isn’t until Monday, so Google must want to start the celebration a week early.

I can’t think of The War of the Worlds, without thinking about Orson Welles’ 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air radio broadcast of a play based on that book. The play was so well performed, that it managed to panic and terrify some listeners, who actually thought it was a broadcast of a real alien invasion. We are smart enough to know it isn’t really an alien invasion – at least most of us are level headed enough to know that. It is likely not Google’s intent to try to panic us, though we are skeptical about Google’s intent with this invasion of the Google UFO Doodles. So, what’s with this alien invasion that the folks at Google are broadcasting to us from inside the walls of the Googleplex?

University of Toronto

From my observation, there are two types of people who are attracted to ghost hunting. On the one hand, there are those who wish to find answers through planned, methodical research. Then, there are those who simply are looking for that “high” that comes through the thrill of the chase. Unfortunately, a 29 year-old woman, who fell into the latter category is dead. Her thrill of the chase ended the other day when she literally fell three stories from the top of a university building at the University of Toronto. The woman was intoxicated, and her death was labeled “Death by misadventure” by the authorities.

Most of us have set out on some sort of adventure to get that thrill of the chase at one time or another, typically during our youth. Some have tried to contact the other side by playing with Ouija boards. Middle of the night visits to cemeteries by others. Who doesn’t love sitting around a campfire to conjure up spooky, ghostly tales? Contrary to those urban legends that claim otherwise, these ghosthunting activities are typically harmless. To die from paranormal “misadventure” is a rare occurance, but it has happened.

I write about the paranormal due to my interest in the “science” behind it. Only through scientific research will we get answers to the questions we pose about unexplained phenomena. Tucson is fortunate to have so many paranormal professionals. Dr. Gary Schwartz, Mark Boccuzzi and Professor William Everist are just a few people involved in actual academic research at institutions of higher education. Professor Everist teaches a course every Fall semester at Pima Community College, called “Investigating Paranormal Psychology.” The class, which caps at 35, is in progress and is only half full. It could be that the class is held on Wednesday evenings and that it isn’t convenient to commit to an entire semester. Professor Everist is speaking at Columbus library on September 21st, with the topic “The Paranormal is the Normal Unexplored.”  There are 4 spots left on a Monday night. To RSVP, you need to join the Tucson Metaphysics group. Unfortunately, thrill seekers won’t take advantage of training and aren’t the least bit interested in the research.

With so many people interested in ghost hunting these days, I need to communicate that ghost hunting trips should never be spur of the moment acivties. If planning to visit a location at night, you absolutely must first visit in the daytime, to enlighten yourself of potential dangers, using natural daylight. Never set off on a ghost hunting adventure alone. Tell other people where you are going and what time you will be back. Most importantly, don’t go off on a ghost hunting adventure while intoxicated. That’s simply stupid.