Skeptics, have you ever tried the EVP thing?

Question

If you have did you come up with anything that sounded like a message?

If you haven't, do any of you have a suitable recording device to try it? I am curious to see what the results would be.

Answer 1

You don't need electronics, you can hear voices in any white noise generating phenomenon, such as moving water (as in "babbling brook"). EVP really is nothing more than that. It is the audio equivalent of seeing faces in clouds.

Answer 2

I am always surprised when people try to find things where there aren't any. If only they put all this effort to communicate with actual human beings... As for the question, SkepDoc 2.0 has already said everything there is to know.

Answer 3

I've tried it, but I'm not a skeptic. I never got anything but I was just using 1) a regular tape recorder or 2) a microphone hooked up to my computer. I would like to actually get something recorded, so I follow the procedure of talking to it, and even try to egg it on some.

Answer 4

I have done some limited stuff, but only in my own house, which is only haunted by cats, a dog and my little boy.  The results are in the link below, along with a description of my equipment.

(By the way, my Lexmark printer says "help meeee" every time the print head goes back and forth. I can't help but hear those words in the noise for some reason. I'm pretty sure no spirits are trapped in the printer, though)

Edit: Cute question about spending the night in a haunted place. Sure, if it piqued my interest and the place was safe from living persons who might cause harm (e.g., no druggies using the place to get high). If it's just to prove a point to some person, then no, it's probably not worth my while. I need to be entertained.

Answer 5

I WAS a skeptic about evp until I recorded one.   Having had paranormal experiences I had to give  it a shot even though I really didn't believe it would  produce any kind of evidence.   I was wrong.

Answer 6

I have been doing paranormal investigation for about 6 years and I have only gotten 1 evp ever. So, I do think they can work. Some devices to try are a digital voice recorder, or do some research on Frank's Box. It's a relatively new tool.

Answer 7

No, I have too much going on to sit around recording nothing, then listening back to nothing trying to hear messages in it.

Answer 8

The best luck is typically obtained with Olympus digital recorders. I hate to sound like I'm advertising (no, I don't own stock in or work for that company), but the others seem to use noise-cancellation technology that distorts and reduces the volume of EVP's, basically negating the purpose of EVP recording.

The Olympus ones don't reduce the volume or distort the sounds. And yes, before you ask, I've had the same EVP (thus, not heard by human ears) picked up by multiple recorders at once.

There are lots of EVP's which sound clearly like people, but which are completely unintelligible. The really amazing ones are in English, and I've even heard regional accents on them before.

Most EVP's benefit from volume-boosting through an audio-processing program like Audacity (which is free), but be careful you don't try to change the audio too much, or you'll defeat the purpose of having the EVP evidence (which is to "prove" that something is there that's picked up and intelligible without having to alter the sound, and which is clearly not simple pareidolia). When you have to alter the sound in order to get anything, most paranormal investigators call this "contamination" of the evidence. It's considered poor practice.

I should note that the spookier, creepier places tend not to have great EVP's. Medium-to-large, vacant buildings at night tend to give me the best results. Also, home environments tend to really work in some places, but most places get nothing.

I've gone 8 months without an EVP before, and then got one in a place I wasn't expecting (because I'd already recorded there before). I typically get one or two really great ones, and then I go for months at a time without them. It's not something that can be predicted readily, because there is so little empirical data on collection methodology, other than paying attention to your own feelings of paranoia (feeling "creeped out") in an environment. Denying your emotional state isn't healthy anyway, but it's especially useful, because the paranoia levels you feel because of being alone in the dark (as a general rule) vary from "nothing" to "totally creepy" when you're paying attention to them. As to why this happens, I don't know. No study's actually been done.

I've seen good results on basically everything from low-end to high-end recorders. I saw a refurbished one for $30 on Amazon.com which I know for certain obtains usable results.

Happiness is a full battery charger. 'Nuff said on that.

Above all, finding places where lots of people congregated at one time but which is not in direct use (such as old hotels, shopping centers, etc.) and which the owner says is haunted will typically give you a 20% chance of getting an EVP over an 8-hour (all night) recording session. In my experience, only about 10% of these captured fail to be readily classified as pareidolia (picking out familiar patterns in random samples).

It literally took me over a year to pick up one sample that was clearly a human voice where none was actually heard by me. And since it was my recorder and I knew that I hadn't altered it or otherwise tried to "skew" the sample, I failed to be able to dismiss it, being that it was actually louder than my own voice in the room, as though someone was speaking directly into the recorder, in English, with a regional accent that sounded like New England (I was in California). It said, simply: "Can you hear me, sir?"

It gave me chills, but I've been a believer in it ever since.

Answer 9

EVP and Ouija Boards or any form of unnatural communication tools used to talk to the dead is Satanic...

Don't mess with them! some people can get possessed and some people die if the demon or evil spirit is not exorcised or expelled from the body...

this is a dangerous game you are playing!!

don't play with that stuff!!!

Peace :)

Answer 10

I am not a skeptic but this is something that really needs to be studied. I am telling you, this is a real phenomena. All a skeptic is, is someone who has never had an experience.

Just curious but would you be willing to go to a known haunted place overnight by yourself?

Answer 11

noo waste of time .

Answer 12

Like so much of what passes for research in paranormal investigation there are unfounded assumptions behind EVP

In this case, that spirits/ghosts/the dead are first of all assumed to even exist; and are non-corporeal yet are capable of manipulating air pressure to create sound waves that can be heard as speech

I also laugh when I see "paranormal investigators" using thermal scanners looking for cold spots, and radioscanners and compasses looking for EMF "anomalies"   We are surrounded by white noise, EMF anomolies and thermal irregularities.  It's called nature.  They don't know what they are looking for, there are no standards of what temperature or EM frequency ghosts may exist at, so how the h**l can they call every little blip a ghost?  It's just stupid pseudoscience.

Take any sound  recording an put it on a short loop...listen to it for 10 minutes and you'll be surprised how much you hear.  I remember doing this for a psychology class, and it was fascinating what ones brain can create out of random noise.  We are pattern seeking animals...see faces in clouds, the Madonna in grilled cheese sandwiches, and the crucified Christ in bathtub stains.

(At TAM 6, they showed a pilot for a new show called The Skeptologists where they did follow some ghost hunters and investigated the equipment they used, and what sort of frequencies etc it detected.  I doubt this show will be picked up, but look for it if it does)