Testing 1,2, 3…………

On June 5th our team decided to test our audio recorders for those never ending questions that eat away at us about what we are picking up when we investigate. Once an investigator logs more than a couple hundred hours listening to audio recorders, whether digital or analog, you are confident in what you are listening to and what is NOT paranormal evidence. However, there are still many,many voices that are picked up that can’t be explained away and yes, at the time we will consider them to be paranormal but it haunts us as to whether or not we can say with certainty that this voice is that of a spirit.
Our group has learned some of the technical aspects of using recorders, how to transfer them, how to clean them up to hear a clearer version but we are still far away from being experts in using audio recorders. It is our intention to learn and grow in this field of paranormal research so with that in mind we decided to test our equipment in a very closed enviroment to see if we pick up the same voices that we have picked up in places such as Prairie View Nursing Home, The Villa Kathrine and especially the Cunningham house where we picked up numerous voices that were not ours.
At Prairie View we picked up children’s voices saying “Get back” and “laughing” even though there is nothing around the old nursing home for at least 2 miles. It also, does not have any electricity in the building itself although the barn, probably 100 ft away does have lighting. At the Villa Kathrine, we picked up so many undercurrents of voice inflections that it was clearly hard to find evps amongst all the undertones. Yet we did, clearly. And clearly they were in response to what we were saying. The Villa, however, is located on one of the highest bluffs in Quincy Il, along the Mississippi River. There are many radio towers in the area, was it possible that we picked radio waves that just sounded like they were in response to us? Finally, The Cunningham house. Wow. In a word , Wow. Not just one recorder, or a couple of recorders but many recorders picked up evps. This home is in the middle of a small town in Illinois. They do have neighbors and those neighbors did come out on occasion the night of our investigation, but it was all noted by us on our recorders and in our logs. Still, in the wee hours of the morning, we pick up “Kathleen bring my coat”, or “I saw you coming” and probably most importantly, 2 recorders picked up the sound of a ball bouncing at the same moment the team heard it. In our hearts we believe this was all paranormal, but what kind of investigators would we be if we never questioned our work??
On the first Saturday of June, 2010 we traveled to one members house in the countryside of Missouri. The closest neighbors are 1/2 mile down the road and there are trees between the homes. The closest radio tower is over two miles away. The house itself is modern with all the modern conveniences, such as TV, DVD player, computers, CD players, etc. Only our team members were present for the testing and we decided to test a couple of our own theories about evp recordings. The first one is whether or not a digital recorder could pick up someone calling on a cellphone, talking into their cellphone while calling and the person they are calling not picking up. The second theory, whether or not recorders can pick up voices as far as a mile away or as close as 50 ft away. And our last theory, can recorders somehow pick up thought waves. Again, let me say we are not experts on technology, no one is our group is an electronic engineer, so most likely according to the electronic schematics, some of these theories are not possible. The reason we tested these is because we have had a couple of occassions where it made us wonder if what we caught on our recorders wasn’t what had transpired away from where we were. So we wanted to test these for those reasons.
We had two recorders going simultaneously in each area that we placed them in. Two were in the upstairs kitchen, 2 were outside on the front porch and two were in the basement of the house. We had two members drive a mile down the road and say something in their vehicle. We had two members seperately walk the perimeter of the property and say things out loud or bang on things. We also, had the members in the vehicle make a cellphone call to two members sitting in the kitchen who did not pick up the call. Very simple testing for us, we weren’t worried about the megahurtz as much as we were worried about the recorders being set exactly alike.
The results are uneventful. We picked up absolutely nothing on our recorders, except for the banging on a metal shed which was picked up on the outside recorders, so apparently metal banging sound waves can travel further than a human voice sound wave. No evps were picked up from the members voices only 50 ft away from the house, no evps were picked up from the cellphone call and definitely no evps were picked up from the thoughts waves being sent to the two members in the kitchen. So what is our conclusion to our testing???
Honestly, it isn’t conclusive of what evps are as much as what we know isn’t happening now. We are more confident that when we do pick up a voice that can’t be explained with the surroundings of the building, that it may be paranormal activity. Our team will continue to work on evp’s and decipher what we have but at least now those nagging thoughts that it’s something we are doing can go away and leave us open to other possibilities. We know many people do not believe we have picked up these evps. We know that. Yet, when you have an evp that is picked up in the middle of nowhere of a child’s voice where no children are living or visiting, tell us how to explain that away. We will listen. We are open to this and love to find answers to the questions we ask. Our forum is for learning and we welcome other investigators points of view. For now though, we will continue to search those areas that are said to be haunted, we will listen closely to our recorders for any sign of paranormal actiivity, no matter how faint and we will believe that audio recorders are indeed one of the strongest tools in paranormal investigating. Without them we would never have received our very first evp recording in the Villa Kathrine of the german woman’s voice yelling at two of our investigators which mapped out our course for future investigations. Our photographic evidence had nothing. Our personal experiences were nil. EVP recordings have been and hopefully will be our key to researching the paranormal and without them our journey would have been much different.

Jun 23, 2010