Six Feet Over

8. CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Telecommunicating with the Dead

THE NATIONAL Forest Service has a fine and terribly dark sense of humor, or possibly they have none at all. For somebody, perhaps an entire committee, saw fit to erect a large wooden sign near the site where fourteen emigrants bound for California were eaten by other emigrants bound for California when they became trapped by the savage snows of 1846 and starved.[28] The sign reads: DONNER CAMP PICNIC GROUND.

I got here on a tour bus chartered by Dave Oester and Sharon Gill, founders of the International Ghost Hunters Society. IGHS, one of the world’s largest (fourteen thousand members in seventy-eight countries) amateur paranormal investigation groups, sponsors ghost-hunting trips to famously and not-so-famously haunted sites. By and large, we look like any other tour group: the shorts, the flappy-sleeved tees, the marshmallow sneakers. We have cameras, we have camcorders. Unlike most visitors here today, we also have tape recorders. I am facing a pine tree, several feet from a raised wooden walkway that guides visitors through the site. I hold my tape recorder out in front of me, as though perhaps the tree were about to say something quotable. The other members of my group are scattered pell-mell in the fields and thickets, all holding out tape recorders. It’s like a tornado touched down in the middle of a press conference.

A couple and their dog approach on the walkway. “Are you taping birdcalls?”

I answer yes, for two reasons. First, because, well, literally, we are. And because I feel silly saying, We are wanting to tape the spirit voices of the Donner Party.

Thousands of Americans and Europeans believe that tape recorders can capture the voices of people whose vocal cords long ago decomposed. They refer to these utterances as EVP: electronic voice phenomena. You can’t hear the voices while you’re recording; they show up mysteriously when the tape is replayed. If you do a web search on the initials EVP, you’ll find dozens of sites with hundreds of audio files of these recordings. Though some sound like clearly articulated words or whispers, many are garbled and echoey and mechanical-sounding. It is hard to imagine them coming from dead souls without significantly altering one’s image of the hereafter. Heaven is supposed to have clouds and lots of white cloth and other excellent sound-absorbing materials. The heaven of these voices sounds like an airship hangar. They’re very odd.

The EVP movement got its start in 1959, when a Swedish opera singer turned painter named Friedrich Jürgenson set up a microphone on the windowsill of his country home outside Stockholm, intent on recording bird songs. As Jürgenson tells it, a titmouse was suddenly and mysteriously drowned out by a male voice saying something about “bird songs at night.” Soon thereafter, a man was heard humming “Volare.”

At first, Jürgenson assumed he had picked up errant snatches of a radio broadcast. Tape recorder circuitries can indeed act as receivers, catching snippets of radio, CB, or walkie-talkie transmissions—especially if the transmitter is close by. He concluded that this was unlikely because, over the ensuing weeks, he picked up voices seeming to speak to him by name and, curiouser still, to his poodle Carino.

Jürgenson wrote a book, and the book caught the eye of a Latvian-speaking psychologist named Konstantin Raudive. Raudive picked up the EVP ball and ran with it. He ran and ran until he had seventy-thousand recorded “voice-texts” and a book deal of his own. The publishing of Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead in 1971 spawned a proliferation of do-it-yourself EVP societies, from Germany and the United States to Brazil, many of which still exist.

Unlike Jürgenson, Raudive didn’t tape-record the air; he developed his own techniques. Often he taped radio static, the obnoxious hissing rasp between stations. Like Jürgenson, Raudive countered the possibility that he had recorded breakthrough radio broadcasts by pointing out that the voices spoke to him by name. And many, he said, spoke Latvian, though Raudive resided in Germany.

Around the time Raudive’s book came out, a Cambridge University student named David Ellis proposed to investigate EVP as the subject of a two-year Perrott-Warrick Fellowship. For the past three days, I’ve been reading Ellis’s book at the same time as I’ve been reading Unfortunate Emigrants: Narratives of the Donner Party, the latter having tainted my reading of the former, such that when Ellis refers to “disembodied entities,” I have to stop and think about whether we’re talking about souls or entrails.

As a parapsychology student, Ellis was more kindly inclined toward the research than, say, the average English or chemistry student might have been. I would hazard a guess that a student of most any other department might have rethought his fellowship topic upon encountering, for instance, Mr. G. A. Player, who believes the clicks and crackles of his old PTE radio to be manifestations of a disembodied female spirit. (“Mr. Player thinks she acts as a sort of capacitor,” reports Ellis with admirably neutral tone.)

One of the first things Ellis did was to get Dr. Raudive and his kit inside a room screened to block radio transmissions. Though Ellis never believed radio broadcasts to be the primary source of EVP, it was something that needed to be controlled for. On several occasions, Raudive’s recorded voices had been identified by others as having been part of broadcasts. What he interpreted as “I follow you tonight,” for example, turned out to be a Radio Luxembourg announcer saying, “It’s all for you tonight!” Raudive agreed to enter the screened room only once. No voices were recorded, though of course it’s possible no discarnate entities were passing through the neighborhood. Ellis tried making his own recordings. He did get a few faint voices, but deemed the results neither encouraging nor conclusive.

My fellow ghost-hunter Rob Murakami is rewinding his tape recorder. A minute ago, I watched him step off the wooden walkway, walk to a cluster of trees, and stand for half a minute, his head bowed and his back to the trail, as though relieving himself amid the poplars. Murakami gives the impression of a man who enjoys life, no matter what life happens to be dishing up. His business card identifies him as the chiropractor of the Rose City Wildcats women’s football team, suggesting that life routinely dishes up pretty enjoyable material. I’m guessing the trip was the idea of his girlfriend, who frequently feels ghosts “in the back of my throat, wanting to talk.” Last night at Louis’ Basque Corner, an entity in her throat dodged prime rib and potatoes to tell us that we “should have come when the melons are in season.” (Based on the things people report them saying, ghosts strike me as quite senile, which I suppose is par for the course when you’ve been around two or three hundred years. Their tape-recorded vocalizations lean steeply in this direction. A selection from Raudive’s collection of EVP utterances: “Please interrupt,” “Might be Mary-bin,” “Industrious!”)

“Hm,” says Rob. He puts his tape recorder up to my ear. “I got some odd thuds. Maybe I hit it by mistake, but I don’t think so.” He plays it again, this time for tour leader Dave Oester. I like Dave. He’s a middle-aged minister of unspecified affiliation, with sloping shoulders and glasses that constantly slip down his nose. He has a big round torso and a head that seems to sit right on top of it, like a snowman’s.

“Someone chopping wood,” says Dave, smiling. Dave smiles every other sentence or so, not because something funny has been said, but just to keep things friendly. This morning, before we left, Dave played us a recording made from his first visit to Donner Camp. To me, it did not sound like communications of any sort, except possibly the sort exchanged between turkeys. I heard a rapid, metallic “gobbalobba-ob.” Dave heard: “I need more milk.” One IGHS member said that, yup, she could hear it, too. Then again, during a dinner conversation earlier in the trip, this same woman heard “Siegfried and Roy” as “Sigmund Freud.” The resulting image—Sigmund Freud with flowing hair and tigers and too much men’s makeup—haunts me to this day.

Psychologists would nominate the “verbal transformation effect” as a possible explanation. B. F. Skinner once played nonsense sequences of vowels to subjects and asked them to tell him when they heard something with meaning. Not only did they hear words (with consonants), they were quite solidly convinced that their interpretations were correct.

The human mind is also adept at turning nothing at all into intelligible sounds. C. Maxwell Cede, an honorary secretary of London’s Society for Psychical Research, described for David Ellis an experiment in which a group of people were handed paper and pencil and asked to help transcribe what they were told was a faint, poor-quality recording of a lecture. The subjects offered dozens of phrases and even whole sentences they’d managed to make out—though the tape contained nothing but white noise.[29]

Konstantin Raudive seemed especially prone to the verbal transformation effect. At one point in Ellis’s research, he had a group of people listen to purported utterances Raudive had collected and write down what they heard. Where Raudive heard “Lenin,” others heard “glubboo,” “buduloo,” “vum vum,” a bullfrog, a sudden change in tape tension, and “a low elephant call.” Late in his career, Raudive became fixated on the vocalizations of a parakeet, which he believed to be channeling communications (in German) from the dead.

The most provocative recording to come out of Donner Camp this fine autumn day is a clear and relatively unambiguous whisper that turned up on the tape of a man named Charles. “Settings,” it says. The less far-fetched explanation would hold that Charles at one point said something under his breath about changing the settings on his tape recorder, and then forgot that he’d said it. Charles insists he didn’t say it, and while I believe him, it still seems more plausible than the alternative, which is that the soul of, say, George Donner manifested itself in Charles’s tape recorder.

In the end, I would have to agree with Ellis’s conclusions: “There is no reason to postulate anything but natural causes—indistinct fragments of radio transmissions, mechanical noises and unnoticed remarks—aided by imaginative guesswork and wishful thinking, to explain the ‘voice phenomenon.’”

Ellis’s conclusions are supported by the experiments of University of Western Ontario psychology professor Imants Baruss, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. Baruss is not a skeptic; quite the contrary. He told me he believes science has amassed solid evidence for life after death—in the form of research by Gary Schwartz (see Chapter 6) and Ian Stevenson (see Chapter 1)—but he does not consider EVP part of it. In eighty-one forty-five-minute tape recordings of radio static, he picked up the following: a low whistle, an occasional radio station breaking through, a squawking noise that “with imagination” might be a “hello,” a truncated sound that one technician interpreted as her name (Gail), the sound of a kiss after Gail the technician said “hello,” and a “Tell Peter,” which Gail claimed sounded like a deceased woman she had known whose husband was named Peter. “While we have replicated EVP in the weak sense of finding voices on audiotapes,” concluded Baruss, “none of the phenomena found… was clearly anomalous, let alone attributable to discarnate beings.”

I’d buy that (and I might not employ Gail next time around), but I’m not surprised the EVP community took umbrage with the study: If the source of those few voices wasn’t spirits, then what was it? I know it wasn’t the task of the study to answer that question. Still, it does rather leave one twisting in the wind.

Are there other explanations for these odd snippets of voice? I contacted the German electronics giant Telefunken, because I’d read that they investigated EVP in the 1980s. I got a reply from Jürgen Graaff, who recently retired from the company after forty years as an engineer and, later, a managing director. He said he had heard of EVP, but did not know of any Telefunken-sponsored research. Then he told me about something called the ducting effect. Every now and then, strange goings-on in the electronic layers of the ionosphere create small “ducts” that enable fragments of radio broadcasts or walkie-talkie communications to travel thousands of miles. “A taxi driver communication in New York could suddenly be monitored for a couple of minutes in Europe,” wrote Graaff in an e-mail. “From a classical engineering point of view, this ought not to be possible, as the power of a taxi transmitter is very small.” Yet it happens. “After a few minutes, the ducts collapse and the phenomenon disappears. You can guess what I want to express about EVP!”

Talking with Graaff, it began to seem that the world of electronic broadcasting could serve up all manner of seemingly paranormal goings-on. Sometimes a gap between two pieces of metal, or a piece of metal and the ground, can set up a sparking that serves to demodulate a radio signal if a transmission is especially powerful or the tower close by. Graaff recalls a hysterical East German woman whose roasting oven, she said, would speak to her whenever she opened the door. A man who lived in the same neighborhood was being addressed nightly by his heating system. Engineers dispatched to look into the reports identified the words as segments of the nightly Broadcasting in the American Sector broadcast and reassured the shaken citizens.

Graaff thereby confirmed something I’d long assumed was an urban myth: that dental fillings can pick up radio transmissions. Perhaps you recall the episode of The Partridge Family wherein Susan Dey announces that she can hear the Rolling Stones in her mouth. The show implied that the music is so clear that if David Cassidy were to put his ear right up to your mouth—close to but not quite my sixth-grade fantasy—he could name the song. Graaff explained that if two metals are used side by side—say, an old amalgam covered by a gold cap (or, in Miss Dey’s case, braces and a filling)—a small gap between them can foster what’s called a semiconductivity effect. A jumble of low tones could indeed be heard, though probably only as far as your own inner ear, meaning that Mr. Cassidy would have to work his head clear inside your eustachian tube.

I asked Graaff whether any of the Germans had interpreted their appliances’ words as dispatches from the Beyond. He told the tale of a farmer who owned the fields around the mighty Elmshorn transmitting station where Graaff used to work, just north of Hamburg. “He’d been walking the fields, checking the fences, when all of a sudden he came running to the station manager, deadly pale, saying, ‘Sir, I heard the Holy Ghost speaking to me! It came from a piece of wire sticking out of the ground!’” The Ghost spoke in the same cryptic, truncated manner effected by Raudive’s and Jürgenson’s ghosts. Graaff and the manager followed the farmer out to the wire, which was whispering and hissing when they arrived, and every now and again issuing an intelligible phrase. The manager leaned down and pulled the wire from the earth, silencing the Holy Ghost and leaving the farmer to more pedestrian concerns, like the effects of two-hundred-thousand-watt radio towers on farm animals.

You can see and hear your own Holy Ghost if you visit the grounds of an exceptionally robust transmitter, such as the ones operated by Voice of America. Wander up to the metal fencing around the facility after dark, Graaff says, and you might be able to see pale glimmering sparks here and there along the metal. Lean in close and you may hear the sparks singing—or talking, depending on what’s being broadcast.

WILSON VAN DUSEN was the chief psychologist at the Mendocino State Hospital in northern California for many years. This was an inpatient facility for the severely mentally ill—chronic schizophrenics and alcoholics, the brain-damaged, the senile—so he spent a lot of time listening to his patients talk about their “others”: the voices in their heads who cussed at them and threatened them and needled and harassed them—or, very occasionally, encouraged and inspired them. At one point, he decided to try to talk to the voices themselves. “I would question these other persons directly,” he wrote in a pamphlet entitled The Presence of Spirits in Madness, “and instructed the patient to give a word-for-word account of what the voices answered. In this way, I could hold long dialogues with a patient’s hallucinations.” At one point, he was administering Rorschach inkblot tests to the voices. I began to picture the hallucinations as actual inpatients, scowling men in ratty slippers, muttering in the corridors and disrupting bingo games. After interviewing twenty such patients, he decided that he agreed with the patients that their “others” were not hallucinations but inhabitants of a different order of beings.

Dr. Van Dusen is a Swedenborgian—a follower of the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century mining engineer/inventor/anatomist who began having religious visions in his forties. Swedenborg gained renown as a philosopher and wrote at length about the heaven of his visions, a dream realm inhabited by wingless angels and demons, which, he held, had once been mortal humans. Van Dusen began to notice that his patients’ “others” fell into similar camps of good and evil, with the evil well outnumbering the good, and that they shared numerous traits with Swedenborg’s opposing spirit entities.

You might be thinking, and I could not blame you, that it is more plausible that Emanuel Swedenborg was having schizophrenic episodes than that the schizophrenics were having Swedenborgian episodes. However, by all measures, Swedenborg was not psychotic. He maintained a productive existence as a statesman and theologian, and enough people took—and take—him seriously for the Swedenborgian Church to have become, and to remain, a thriving international denomination.

I was introduced to Van Dusen’s theories by an EVP enthusiast who was thinking of investigating the possibility that the voices schizophrenics hear are the same voices that wind up on EVP tapes, i.e., voices of discarnate entities. I ran this by the folks at England’s Hearing Voices Network, a support organization for people with auditory hallucinations. My e-mail was answered by a helpful and forthcoming staffer and “voice-hearer” named Mickey who said that although it is network policy to accept all members’ explanations for their voices, and although he didn’t know much about EVP, it was his personal opinion that the notion was nonsense. However, he did know quite a few people whose voices seemed so real to them that they tried to tape-record them. The voice-hearers inhabit the opposite conundrum of the EVP people: The voices are audible (to them) at the time, but the tapes are always blank.

Thomas Watson, coinventor of the telephone, describes in his autobiography being contacted on several occasions by schizophrenics who believed that the words in their heads were being secretly broadcast from distant individuals. Most sought his advice on how to block the signals, but one enterprising psychotic offered—for a fee of fifteen dollars a week—to let Watson “take off the top of his skull and study the mechanism at work”:

Mickey directed me to the research section of the Hearing Voices Network website, where it said that if a brain scan is done on a schizophrenic as he or she is hearing voices, the scan will show activity in the part of the brain involved in speech production. Meaning that the voices are the “inner speech” of the person who hears them.

BOTH JÜRGENSON AND Raudive have long since moved on to the other side of the tape recorder.[30] (David Ellis wrote Raudive’s obituary in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, noting, in a classic JSPR moment, that the “strain of a conference on the parakeet voices… proved too much for him.”) Their deaths did not extinguish the worldwide enthusiasm for EVP, nor did David Ellis’s fellowship findings. In skimming the newsletters of EVP groups, I find the phenomenon treated ipso facto as communication with the dead. Why, given the negative findings of respectable, open-minded academics, are these folks so certain?

“It’s one thing to get enough evidence to convince yourself, but it’s a whole other matter to produce a demonstration that would be acceptable to a community of scientists,” says Imants Baruss. Dean Radin, a former electrical engineer and the senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, agrees. “EVP researchers may be genuinely sincere, but insufficiently critical to assess their own results.” They’re convinced by what they’ve heard, and that is enough.

The sun is packing to leave when Dave Oester joins me on the walkway. I tell him I’m not getting anything. He asks me if I introduced myself to the entities before I started taping. “That’s important,” he says. “I always say, ‘I’m Dave Oester of the IGHS, and I’d like to document the existence of life after death. I’d like to get your permission.’”

I clear my throat. “HI, I’M MARY ROACH…” You can’t see where these guys are, so it’s hard to know how loud to talk. “I’M WITH THE IGHS, THOUGH NOT ACTUALLYA MEMBER AS SUCH.”

“You can say it to yourself, Mary. They read your thoughts.”

“They do?”

Dave nods his head. “Sure they do.”

Well, no wonder they’re ignoring me.

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, each new breakthrough in the science of communications is inevitably recruited by someone with a shining for things spiritual. As magicians like Houdini and Britain’s Harry Price began exposing the elaborate parlor tricks of the spiritualist mediums, promoters of the afterlife began incorporating gadgetry into their routines. Machines lent an air of scientific respectability to their claims. They promised a purer, seemingly less corruptible connection with the dead. You can’t trust a human not to fake ectoplasm out of sheep lungs, but you ought to be able to trust a machine.

So instead of a medium speaking in a trance, you had a medium operating a “psychic” typewriter or Morse code console or Vandermeulen Spirit Indicator. You hadn’t eliminated the middlemen, you’d simply outfitted them with impressive-looking machines. Séances were more technically complicated, but fundamentally unchanged.

Recording devices proved immediately popular with the spiritualist mediums—not to pick up otherwise inaudible communications, but to bolster believability. For what is a recording but a means of capturing and preserving something otherwise fleeting and unprovable? I think Dr. Neville Whymant put it best. An eminent—and eminently corruptible—scholar of the Orient, Dr. Whymant had been called upon by his friend Judge Cannon to speak for the authenticity of a phonograph recording of Confucius, speaking through the voice of medium George Valiantine, at a séance in Cannon’s home in 1926. Valiantine was said by Whymant to be speaking in a (conveniently) “extinct” Chinese dialect. “I think you will agree,” observed Whymant, “that though it is possible that you might hallucinate people, you could not hallucinate a gramophone.”

Phonograph historian D. H. Mason spent weeks trying to track down a copy of the Confucius sessions. He did not succeed, though he did manage to find an itemized description of a boxed set of Valiantine recordings. Highlights included a war whoop by Valiantine’s main spirit guide Kokoan, and “a pathetic song” sung in a shrill falsetto by Bert Everett, another Valiantine guide.[31]

Mason published a three-part article, including discography, on the topic of séance recording sessions. While the early efforts were merely recorded documents of the sittings—one particularly vigorous medium held forth sufficiently long to fill nine twelve-inch double-sided 78s—very soon the mediums took to singing while in trance, in the persona and voice of the spirit guide. Not surprisingly, given the preponderance of female mediums, the spirit guides (most of them male) tended to be tenors. It was an odd coupling: the high, sweet tones of the tenor register issuing from entities with hypermasculine handles like Power or Hotep. Perhaps this explains the appearance, in 1930, of an Italian spirit guide. Sabbatini, the Italian tenor, began turning up at the séances of prominent Cape Town medium Mrs. T. H. Butters. Mason quotes a description of a Sabbatini performance in a 1931 issue of The Two Worlds, the newspaper of the Spiritualists’ National Union: “While Mrs. Butters was under the control of the spirit, he delighted the sitters by singing Italian songs in a ringing tenor voice, and so powerful were the manifestations that in March this year the friends of Mrs. Butters decided to make a gramophone record of the voice.” The recording quality was diminished somewhat by Mrs. Butters’s tendency to stray from the microphone and move about the room “making operatic gestures,” but was otherwise deemed to be of excellent quality.

This obscure musical genre reached its peak on April 3, 1939, when London’s Balham Psychic Research Society held a séance inside the studios of the Decca Record Company. Presaging the current vogue of single-name recording artists, our singing spirit guide was billed simply as Reuben. Reuben, performing via the vocal cords of medium Jack Webber, entertained séance guests with baritone renderings of “Lead Kindly Light” and “There’s a Land,” an anthem made famous by renowned English contralto Madame Clara Butt.[32]

Whether the spirits sang or simply spoke, the new recording technologies expanded the medium’s options for income. In addition to holding séances, he or she could also sell tapes or records. The largest “direct voice”—meaning no spirit guide was employed; the deceased spoke directly through the medium’s voice—recording enterprise was that of British medium Leslie Flint. Flint, who died in 1994, managed to attract a highbrow crowd of discarnates to his séances. If you run a web search on him, you’ll find sites where you can hear lengthy postmortem recordings of Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Chopin (who has, we learn, resumed composing following a brief stint decomposing), the Archbishop of Canterbury, and renowned Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry. (More on Dame Ellen later.)

As was the custom, Flint carried out his séances in darkness. He insisted that the voices came not from his own voice box but from one built up, to quote one website, “from ectoplasm drawn from the medium and the sitters.” The site displays a circa 1960 photograph of Flint, seated calmly in a chair, wearing suit, tie, horn-rimmed glasses, and what appears to be the aftermath of a cafeteria food fight. The caption says, “Flint with ectoplasm resting on his shoulder.” I don’t know what Gandhi or Chopin sounded like while alive, so I can’t comment on the verisimilitude of the recordings. But I can comment that Leslie Flint said he discovered his gift one evening at the cinema, upon hearing—as one will at cinemas—“voices whisper in the dark.”

It was not only the mediums who were fond of gadgetry, but the paranormal researchers who put them through their paces. Initially, technology was recruited to prevent fraud or, more often, to document or quantify the mediums’ powers. With few exceptions, the devices were christened in the syllabically overwrought vernacular of the Serious Laboratory Device. Microscopes now had to share the lab bench with Dynamoscopes and Telekinetoscopes. The staid and stately Ometer family, heretofore limited to Thermo, Baro, Speedo, and Sphygno, was asked to take in the Sthenometer, the Biometer, the Suggestometer, the Magnetometer, and the Galvanometer.[33] I tried to track down even one of these machines, but, oddly and disappointingly, no museum or private collection seems to exist. “The psychical organizations didn’t approach these things from a historian’s perspective,” says Grady Hendrix, former office manager of the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City. “These gadgets weren’t something that more modern parapsychologists would have deemed worthy of saving. It’s not an era they’re proud of.”

As the reputations of mediums continued to erode, paranormal researchers turned their attention toward devising some sort of direct spirit communication device, something that would remove the medium from the process entirely. F. R. Melton’s Psychic Telephone managed to get the medium out of the room, but not entirely out of the picture. The “telephone” consisted of an inflatable rubber bladder attached to a transmitter, attached, in turn, to a pair of headphones. The bladder was said to contain “psychic air” full of spirit voices that could be amplified and transmitted into the headphones. How do you fill a balloon with psychic air? You have a medium blow it up. Magician-cum-paranormalist Harry Price tested the device in his National Laboratory for Psychical Research and found it to be, literally and figuratively, so much hot air.

THE LURE OF the gizmo remains strong among modern-day paranormal hobbyists. This is evident here this morning in Assembly Room A of the Golden Phoenix Hotel, where our group has gathered for Dave Oester’s morning lecture. It is a standard hotel conference room, with long folding tables and a wooden speaker’s pulpit and the blenderized teals and mauves of institutional carpeting. While they wait for Dave and sip at cups of coffee, my fellow enrollees trade tips about their kit, which they have spread out in front of them on the tables: meters, compasses, cameras, recorders. Spirits rarely register on human sensory systems, but, the thinking goes, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

People in ghost-busting groups posit that the reason humans can’t normally see or hear the dead is that they exist in and communicate via the far extremes of the visual and auditory spectrums: light waves we can’t see and sound waves we can’t hear. This is why ghost-hunting groups use cameras with film that is sensitive to infrared rays, and why Dave Oester used to carry around a bat detector. He reasons that perhaps the dead, like bats, emit sounds in the ultrasound range. When I got home, I called Bill Gerosa, the president of the company that makes a device called the Belfry Bat Detector. I told him that ghost-hunters say his device can be used to detect spirit communications. “I can neither support nor refute that statement,” said Bill after a few moments of quiet. He went on to say that not just bats, but rodents, insects, TV sets, and car brakes emit ultrasound, so there’s a distinct possibility that the entities communicating via bat detectors are katydids or Chevrolets.

The woman seated beside me is fiddling with a handheld meter of some sort. She has the instruction manual open. A heading says, “ELF RESEARCH IN THE 90s.” I like this woman, and I don’t want to think the things I’m now forced to think about her. I ask her if she has ever seen an elf.

She stares at me suspiciously, like she doesn’t need a Belfry Bat Detector; she can just see them flying around in there. “Nooo-o… Why, have you?”

I squint at the copy. “You can’t see, smell, or touch them,” it says, “but they are present in your everyday life.” I am working on the phrasing of my next question when her boyfriend leans forward. “E-L-F,” he says. “Not ‘elf.’ It stands for Extremely Low Frequency.” As in background radiation. As in microwave ovens and overhead power lines.

Aha.

Nearly everyone in our group has brought along either an ELF meter or an EMF (for measuring electromagnetic fields) meter. The link between electricity and spirits is a tenacious one, and it dates back some hundred and fifty years. Standing on Oester’s sloping shoulders are no lesser dignitaries than Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, and Bell’s partner Thomas Watson.

What you need to know is that the heyday of spiritualism—with its séances and spirit communications zinging through the ether—coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications—disembodied voices mysteriously traveling through space and emerging from a “receiver” hundreds of miles distant. (Bell and Watson’s claims for their telephone were initially greeted with more hooting skepticism than were the mediums’ séance shenanigans; like Edison,[34] they took to touring the country with their gizmos, doing public demonstrations.) Viewed in this context, the one unfathomable phenomenon must have seemed no more unbelievable than the other.

Electromagnetic impulses seemed to provide the missing explanation for—the absent science behind—mediumistic communication. If one accepted the workings of the radio and the telephone, spiritualism didn’t seem like such an enormous leap. These devices must have made it seem much more plausible that, as Gavin Weightman writes in Signor Marconi’s Magic Box, “individuals with special powers really could act as ‘receivers’ of invisible and inaudible signals.” Weightman adds that staunch spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would talk about how the greater distances traveled by nighttime telegraphic impulses were proof of “the mysterious ‘powers of darkness’ which spiritualist mediums exploited.”

Even the inventors themselves viewed the etheric and the electric with the same set of awe-fogged eyes. Electricity maverick Michael Faraday, in writing about his experiments with electric eels, marveled that the work was “upon the threshold of what man is permitted to know of this world.” Thomas Watson, in his autobiography, referred to electricity as an occult force. Like a surprising number of his peers in the scientific community, Watson dabbled in spiritualism. He spent two years believing he had a halo.[35] At one point, when prototype telephones were failing to reliably deliver coherent sentences, Watson endeavored—via a medium and without telling Bell—to ask those age-old experts in breakthrough communications: the dead. (The suggestions, alas, were “rubbish.”) Watson was constitutionally prone to thinking outside the box—nay, several counties distant from the box. In fine- tuning the speech transmission qualities of the nascent telephone, he tried out diaphragms—the part that vibrates when a caller speaks—of varying shapes and materials, including a human eardrum and bones. Watson borrowed the item from Alexander Graham Bell (Al, lend me your ear!), an authority on the mechanics of human speech. Bell got the ear from the aurist Clarence Blake, who got it from one of his patients after, Watson is careful to point out, he “had finished with it.”

Watson’s spiritualist beliefs colored his views of science, and vice versa. He viewed mediums as people with special powers to transform bodily radiations into a mechanical force, much the way a telegraph transforms pulses of electricity into audible bursts of Morse code. The science of electromagnetic forces offered a logic for the highly illogical rappings and table tiltings of the séance circle. Andrew Cooke, a Royal College of Art student whose insightful master’s dissertation popped up in one of my web searches, wondered whether spiritualism inspired, rather than simply influenced, the minds of some of the great inventors. Of course the invention of the telegraph prompted mediums to begin taking Morse code dictations from spirits during séances. No surprise there. More intriguing is the inverse possibility: that the coded raps of early mediums like the Fox sisters sparked the idea for long-distance communication via Morse code.

Watson’s faith in mediums was unique among the great electricians. Edison, Tesla, and Bell believed that the soul survived death and traveled, like a wireless impulse, to some etheric realm, but they did not, in the end, buy into the mediums’ claims. (As Edison put it in his diary, “Why should personalities in another existence or sphere waste their time… play [ing] pranks with a table?”) If anyone was going to make reliable, intelligible contact with the dead, they believed, it was inventors like themselves. Bell and his brother signed a pact to the effect that whoever died first would attempt to make contact with the other through a more reliable channel than the séance medium.

Tesla was a special case. He was, by his own description, exceptionally sensitive. “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time piece,” he wrote in his journal. “A fly alighting on a table in the room causes a dull thud in my ear.” Around the time his mother died, Tesla, under the sway of his mentor Sir William Crookes—famous for making rarefied gas glow green in vacuum tubes and infamous for thinking it was ectoplasm—tried to turn his antennae toward the paranormal. One night when his mother was on her deathbed, he slept with “every fiber in my brain… strained in expectancy.” Early that morning she did indeed die. He recalled a dream of an angel with his mother’s features, though he ultimately decided that the dream face matched a painting he had recently studied and that that explained “everything satisfactorily in conformity with scientific facts.” Despite a fascination with the mysteries of death, Tesla did not, as far as I know, try to build a device for postmortem communications.

But Thomas Edison did. He describes in his Diary and Sundry Observations being engaged in the design of an apparatus that would enable “personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Edison imagined living beings as temporary conglomerations—“swarms” was the word he used —of infinitesimally small “life units” that persisted after death in a kind of loitering, dispersed form, and eventually regrouped as someone or something else. He described his machine as a sort of megaphone. He reasoned that the “physical power possessed by those in the next life must be extremely slight,” and that, like the speck-sized Whos in Horton Hears a Who, they require a certain level of amplification to make themselves heard. Sadly, Edison himself departed for Whoville before completing the contraption.

Perhaps because of his amplifier project, Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of something called the Psycho-Phone. Dave Oester says that the Psycho-Phone is the inspiration behind the ultrasonic transceiver he himself, along with an electrical engineer he knows, has been working on. Their device, which Oester hopes will facilitate two-way real-time communication with the dead, is called the TEC, short for Thomas Edison Communicator.

I looked into the Psycho-Phone, thinking perhaps Edison had a plan B. According to Tim Fabrizio’s and George Paul’s Discovering Antique Phonographs, the Psycho-Phone did indeed exist, but it wasn’t designed for paranormal communications. It was an early, phonographic precursor to the modern-day subliminal self-improvement tape. As with the tapes, the listener sets the device to go off while he or she slumbers, in the hope that he or she will, say, to use an actual Psycho-Phone example, “wake refreshed—invigorated—and enjoy a regular bowel movement.”

In 2003, a Psycho-Phone was put up for auction. There was a website posting written by the winning bidder, who believed that she had come into possession of one of Edison’s devices. The woman was understandably puzzled by a transcript of one of the subliminal messages, which she found in the box and took to be a letter from “someone that perhaps was a little deranged”:

I enjoy drinking clean water or clean water flavored with the juices of pure fruit. Every morning I will get up in time to do a series of exercises to strengthen my body. My scalp is getting healthier every day as the blood flows abundantly…. My hair is growing luxuriantly dark and beautiful. My scalp is glowing with health and new beautiful hair is growing thereon. I am a good mixer & have a wonderful memory.

These days, electricity, radio waves, and telephonics are the stuff of everyday life on earth. They’ve left the realm of the mysterious, and in their place we have ultrasound, infrared, cyberspace. Ultrasound was the mystery force du jour among paranormalists long before Dave Oester began tinkering with it. In the 1980s, an electronics buff named William O’Neil, who had a taste for the paranormal and a lab full of oscillators and ultrasonic receivers, developed Spiricom, a device for spirit communication. He claimed to be having lengthy two-way conversations with the dead, or anyway one of them: a former NASA physicist named George Mueller. O’Neil and fellow paranormalist George Meek published hundreds of pages of transcripts of the Spiricom conversations, including lots and lots of shop talk:

The dead are surprisingly poor conversationalists, given all the novel and mind-blowing things going on in their lives. They’re like ham radio operators. I once stumbled onto a long series of ham radio transcripts on the web. Here you’d have these two men, say, a Minnesotan and a Vanuatan, speaking to each other from what may as well be different planets, and they can’t think of anything to talk about but their equipment. “What are you using there, a KW-50?” “Oh, no, I like a Hammarlund. Got the Q multiplier built right in.”

Dull as their man was, the concept of a chat with a dead man was pretty darn exciting, and Meek made the highly questionable decision to go public. In 1982, he booked the National Press Club ballroom in Washington, D.C., and sent out a press release announcing “electronic proof that the mind, memory banks and personality survive death.” A Chicago Sun-Times reporter expressed disappointment that, owing to technical difficulties, no “live” demonstration was possible. To make up for it, Meek played a tape of what he claimed were the astral voices—presumably obtained via Spiricom—of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and… the great Shakespearean actress Dame Ellen Terry.

Unlike Mr. Flint, Meek and O’Neil had no apparent plans to profit from their project. They let someone else write the book, and they handed out blueprints for the device at the press conference, encouraging others to try to replicate what they’d done. (No one succeeded.) If it was a hoax, it was a perplexing one. Way too much work for questionable payoff. If it wasn’t a hoax, it was… what? Real? There seemed to be no possible middle ground. I asked Dean Radin what he thought about it. “The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking,” he offered, “is unconscious delusion.”

LIKE MANY OLD structures in England, Staffordshire’s Westwood Hall has a long-standing reputation for being haunted. In 1998, the school’s caretaker was preparing a paper on the history of one Lady Prudentia Trentham, who died on the grounds and is thought to be the source of the alleged haunting. When the caretaker spell-checked his paper, strange things began to happen. For instance, when the program highlighted the misspelling “Prudentiaa,” it did not offer “Prudentia” as the proper spelling. The spellings it suggested were: “dead,” “buried,” and “cellar.” This sort of thing didn’t happen when he spell-checked other documents, and it happened on two different computers.

Thinking that the discarnate Lady Prudentia was trying to communicate with him via his spell-checker,[36] the caretaker called the Society for Psychical Research. The SPR took the claim seriously. This wasn’t, after all, the first purported instance of dead spirits using computers to communicate. Far from it. Spirits have also, if you buy into the literature on “instrumented transcommunication” (a close cousin of EVP), made use of TVs, VCRs, alarm clocks, and answering machines.

In 2001, the team of SPR researchers who were looking into the case hired software consultants Julie and David Rousseau to come take a look at the computer and the software to see if perhaps the caretaker’s system had been hacked into by capricious spirits still of the flesh. The Rousseaus confirmed that an experienced programmer could, without too much trouble, create the effects that the caretaker had seen. But a program like this would be simple to detect, and they quickly determined there’d been no foul play.

This left two possibilities: a bug in the software or a ghost in the machine. To test for the former, they attempted to recreate the phenomena on a document and computer of their own, using all the same steps and software (Microsoft Word 6) that the caretaker had been using. They soon succeeded. (It is worth pointing out that Julie Rousseau is open to the possibility that paranormal forces can influence computers. She serves on the council of the SPR.)

The bug involved the custom dictionaries that the caretaker had set up and the unorthodox manner in which he had modified them. Our man had noticed that the peculiar spell-check offerings always seemed to involve words from one of his custom dictionaries. Because he believed the spell-check anomalies to be communications from Lady Prudentia, he had decided to expand her vocabulary by seeding his custom dictionary with dozens of ordinary words—rather than simply the proper nouns and place names related to the file.

Rousseau found that when she used Word 6 on her computer, the bug commenced on the twenty-first misspelling of custom dictionary words. The anomalous offering, she figured out, is simply the word that was last taken from the custom dictionary as an alternative suggestion for a misspelled word. Because the caretaker had four custom dictionaries operating, the bug kicked in much sooner than it would otherwise—which helped explain why the bug hadn’t been reported by other users.

You would think that the matter would have come to rest there, but it has not. The caretaker insists that some of the anomalous suggestions are not words he added to his custom dictionaries. Again, the Rousseaus offered a possible explanation. The man had a side business typing theses; presumably some of the odd alternates are custom dictionary entries related to these papers. Julie Rousseau gives the example of “Pennyhough,” which was offered as an alternative for a misspelling of “Trentham.” (Pennyhough happens to be the surname of a cleaning lady who reported having seen Lady Prudentia Trentham’s ghost.) A web search revealed several authors of scholarly works who are named Pennyhough, so it isn’t hard to imagine that a student might have cited the name in a thesis and that it was added to the custom dictionary years back and since forgotten.

Julie Rousseau said that the researchers told her they find some of her explanations far-fetched and do not consider the case closed. It is interesting to come across people who feel that a ghost communicating via a spell-checker is less farfetched than a software glitch. Nonetheless, kudos to the pair for having IT professionals look into it.

There is a lesson here for both sides of the spirit divide, and that is that hasty assumptions serve no one. To make up one’s mind based on nothing beyond a simple summary of events—as believers and skeptics alike tend to do—does nothing to forward the pursuit of solid answers.

DAVE IS STILL talking. I’ve learned a lot of new things this morning, many of which make me want to raise my hand and go, What??? just like that, with three question marks. I want to say, Where’s your proof, Dave? How do you know ghosts drain power off your car batteries to manifest themselves? Where did you read that cemetery planners chose their locations to be near “portal openings”? Portal openings!? I’ll show you portal openings… But I seem to be the only one having these thoughts, so I keep quiet.

The last topic of the morning is spirit photography. Dave is talking about “spirit orbs,” supposed blobs of energy that are very similar to what shows up on your prints if a dust speck or raindrop was right in front of the lens. People often e-mail Dave photos of “spirit orbs” that are obviously dust, and he then has the unpleasant task of telling them this.

“People used to say that when old buildings were renovated, the renovation disturbed ghosts, because they’d get a lot of orbs on their pictures.” Dave smiles. “Well, renovation also disturbs dust.”

In other words, consider all angles. Take the link between electromagnetic fields and spirits. I called the manufacturer of the TriField Natural EM Meter and asked what made the company believe they had grounds to market it as a Ghost Detector. No studies support this; as Dean Radin puts it, “there is no evidence that EMF meters detect anything other than EMF.” The man on the phone said he didn’t know for sure, but he assumed that someone, possibly more than one person, had noticed that an EMF meter registered a jump when he or she was standing in a spot that felt haunted.

But what if we take the ghost out of the equation? What if exposing someone’s brain to certain types of electromagnetic fields could create a feeling of an invisible presence? What if the energy is the ghost?

Aiming to find out, I took my brain to Canada.