h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Electronic Voice Phenomena. Also known as ITC, I forget why. Something trans-communication. Also known as Raudive voices.

A small group of us have been doing evp research over the past couple of months; in fact we've barely started, because there are a number of historic buildings in Lincoln yet to be sampled.

But today I finally finished a suite of web pages detailing some results of the work so far, which you can see at http://www.bonitovalley.com/evp/

It took a while because I had some issues with including audio. The only real solution seems to be Flash. Sorry, Marv.

Anyway, I would be interested to hear your reactions to this material.

Lincoln must be one of the spookiest places on earth... waiting for the EVP from the courthouse stairs...

Oddly enough, I no longer feel that it's spooky, if by that you mean scary. But there has been so much violence, way more than what Billy was directly involved in, and it has left a strong footprint behind.

Fascinating stuff. A man who worked for F over 30 years ago was experimenting with EVP. This was in the beaumont/Port Arthur area. He played us some of his tapes. Most of the words he claimed to hear just sounded like static to me. But there were a couple of places that were clearly voices. It was spooky and wonderful at the same time.

(I'll just keep the light on down here for now )

We were going to research the old courthouse this evening, but first one couple were too tired and then another couple were too tired. I decided to have a go at it myself, so Ira locked me in and went off to do something else for a while. I sat around feeling hot and stuffy, up in the "Billy room" (as they call the front east quadrant of the upstairs area) for half an hour, then became aware that there was an odd rhythmic noise in the corner. Which went away after a few minutes.

I went back downstairs to wait for Ira to come back, and we agreed that it would probably be better to reschedule the meeting.

When I got home to see if there was anything on the recording I discovered that I had forgotten to turn the microphone on. I have 56 minutes of total and dead silence.

is there anybody out there.
its a good job you reschedule the meeting
other wise you would have had hour of nothing on your tape

There's an EVP association (of course there is, Sweden being the holy land of associations) in my home town Eskilstuna. A representative was invited by one of my college teachers to come and talk about it. He also played some tapes for us, which were downright .

More than 25 years later, I can still remember the words that we could hear most clearly:
'*You* live in the darkness, die Toten live in the light'

We need to define spookiness. Does "spooky" mean that the evp frighten you?

Latterly, I confess to having a feeling of exhilaration when I download a session, work through it and find evidence of evp -- especially when one realizes that there has been some interactivity, that the evp take the form of a comment or response to what the people in the room are saying. I don't feel fear.

As a Quaker, I don't believe in devils and such: evil manifests itself quite sufficiently in some humans' behavior. But I think, and evidence seems to bear this out, that intense experiences, both negative and positive, can sort of soak into the walls. When psychics and ghost hunters report negative feelings or discomfort in proximity to some room or building, I suspect they are registering the emotions that played out in that place historically.

I asked the empty air about that once, during a session. I wondered to Drew whether we were picking up genuine interactivity or just the reverberation of emotions because of events that had played out in the casa, and a whisper comes up on the recording, saying, "It's the same thing." Which doesn't completely make sense to me. Maybe I would need to understand death before I can fully understand evp. Needless to say, nobody understands death until they've experienced it for themselves.

I mentioned above that I didn't feel fear when listening to evp, but I must confess that I didn't enjoy my solo session in the courthouse last week. First of all, the ranger locked me in while he went away to another appointment, secondly it was rather stuffy and warm in the building, and thirdly, I was bored for a while. But the staircase Phred mentions upthread, where Billy shot Deputy Bell and where bloodstains have been discovered at the top of the stairs, that area makes everyone uncomfortable including me. One of the other rangers was photographing the stairs during the FBI's application of luminol to the stairs, and he captured an 'orb' halfway down the stairs.

I spent most of the time sitting on a bench in the east front corner of the upper story courtroom. This corner used to be a separate room, and it's where Billy was held before he was to be executed. He escaped, shooting Deputies Bell and Olinger. Anyway, an odd rhythmic noise started up, way too slow and rhythmic to be a rodent, but definitely sort of scratchy. It went on for about a minute then sort of faded away. And it spooked me a little. I decided not to sit there in the dark any more, and headed down to the front desk, sat down, and read a book until Ira came back.

Imagine my chagrin when I found out I had neglected to turn on the mic!

The only other thing I would have to say is that some of those who've participated in the sessions are evidently uncomfortable, which they show by talking too much. Thus messing up the session. I can understand discomfort and skepticism, but I need participants to respect the process, and that involves allowing a bit of silence for the evp to happen in.

>> I wondered to Drew whether we were picking up genuine interactivity or just the reverberation of emotions because of events that had played out in the casa, and a whisper comes up on the recording, saying, "It's the same thing.">>

It's the possibility of genuine interaction that spooks me, I think, not knowing if 'their' intentions are good or evil, if they welcome my presence or resent it.

I tried to find something to compare the feeling with and thought that it's rather like walking into a room full of people talking but who, at the sight of you, go completely quiet. Is it a hostile silence, a surprised one, or an embarrassed one? You either bravely step forward or step back, intimated.

With real, live people, you can sometimes tell what kind of silence it is by the way they look at you and their body language - but with EVP it's like stepping into a room full of strangers and you simply have no way of telling their reaction to you.

This is fascinating, but I find it unsettling, too. I think it is because I want to know the how and why of it all. Not understanding it makes it creepy to me.

Lil, I saw this in today's news about the courthouse video in Santa Fe:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jPhCuMA-aaE

That's a cool video clip, but I agree with the other comments that it's a bug of some kind.

>>It's the possibility of genuine interaction that spooks me, I think, not knowing if 'their' intentions are good or evil, if they welcome my presence or resent it.

That's how I feel about a room full of living strangers. There are some humans I want no interaction with, whatsoever!

But your reactions, both of you, beg all sorts of questions. Why should evp have intentions one way or the other? How can we assume they hang out in rooms, let alone the same room as humans? Why would it matter to them how we feel about it? What is this "presence"?

All we can figure out so far is that there are certain things that draw them to a location in time and space, that it seems to be easier for them to perceive us than vice versa, and that they choose to attempt to communicate, whatever "they" means in this context. Keeping regular appointments in a certain place seems to improve the likelihood of evp "catches." That would seem to suggest that the communicators are not everywhere, and that they don't know everything. Everything about what's in the minds of some living beings in this time and space, anyway. And this may be because such information just isn't important in the Bigger Scheme of Things (which you can call religion if you want).

When we had the wall-heater bang, during our first visit, I couldn't figure it out at first. If something or somebody wanted to scare me, why not let me hear the bang live, so to speak? I really would have been frightened at the time (but not now), and I would have wanted to leave. So they couldn't have wanted me to leave.

I described my feelings about this event during my second session at the casa with Drew, and there's a whisper that comes in at this point saying (as far as we can tell) "It was ." Pointing the finger, as it were. So now we think it was a practical joke!

Gotta love the unknown.

We've decided to wait until autumn to continue the research; the crickets are getting louder and louder, the tourists are still on the footpaths after dark, and traffic volume is high. All these silence-killers interfere with the recordings and with our focus.

Meanwhile, the daughter of a neighbor has asked if I will come to her house in a nearby town, which used to belong to a composer of popular songs. She says she keeps hearing music and children singing, and that the light in the attic keeps coming on, even after they unscrew the bulb. She has no fearful feelings and thinks the energy is all positive, but her son has taken to barricading his bedroom door.