From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Bald, mission control deck, and most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. We're returning to the world of the paranormal this evening, returning in a way to earlier explorations of things like divine intervention and the phenomenon of hearing voices. Which is funny, right, guys, because right now our fellow conspiracy realists are using electricity to hear us as voices in their heads.
We tell yeah, we're hearing each other as voices in our own heads currently too.
Also a good point. Yeah, we have the benefit of being able to see each other in little thumbnails. We are participating in something called electronic voice phenomenon or EVP. Tonight's episode is about something similar, with one crucial exception. We ask you, folks, what if instead of hearing podcasters, people are claiming to hear ghosts. Here are the facts. Here, Here are the facts. Keep it.
Oh yeah, you did spell it that way in the outline. You had to say it elt because people wouldn't get the joke otherwise.
Yeah, let's talk about ghosts. These are the facts. Some people believe that when a human being or any other living beings, sometimes even what we would consider to be non living beings, die, they live on in some way, or perhaps they linger in our corporeal world, and maybe at some point they move on to some other realm. But for some reason, whether it's through trauma, through some
kind of wrongdoing, just there. If there's a time period in which they remain, these dead people and dead beings stick around.
People have been believing in ghosts forever, literally since people were peopling. We're wondering what happened when folks passed on. As you said, Matt, it's part of it's because the human species has no universally agreed upon understanding of what happens after physical death. That is a very frightening, very true thing. The study of death is called fanatology. We even made up a word for it.
Yeah, fanos, isn't he like the lord of death or something.
He has a crush on death, that's rights.
Did they handle that in the movies. I don't think they did, but I did hear that that was the thing in the comics.
No, it's a reasonable thing to think about, you know, I mean they you know, everyone alway, jokes are morbidly notes that it's the one thing that we all experience, but no one has any idea what it's like.
Yeah, but it is important to stress here this is a belief in some form of after existence that can be experienced by humans here right.
Absolutely, and no one you know, obviously, no one on this show is going to poo poo anybody's personal belief or personal value system. What we can say conclusively is that at this point, no single theory, no single proposal about what happens to human mind or soul after physical death, has ever been accepted by everybody else alive on the planet. People die, no one agrees what happens after and this
remains the fundamental question moving civilization. There are a lot of people who believe they have to say covered the answer, or have perhaps philosophically reconciled it with their own existence. They cannot convince everyone else of the truth. And this is the basis for most religious conflict throughout human history. A lot of people, also, perhaps a bit less ambitiously, will say, look, I don't know the ins and outs of the universe. I'm not the emperor of metaphysics or
ice cream A shout out to the poetry fans. But they will say I do believe, however, that I have experienced or seen something that science cannot yet explain, just saying look, I don't know the specifics, but I was there at the Dave Embusters. That lady was transparent. I felt a chill in the room as she turned the corner, walked through a wall and disappeared.
And then I was weirdly coded in a thin film of gooey material.
Spooky ghosts, But in this case, it's maybe you heard something when nobody else was in there.
Right.
But there's there's something else that's added to this, and that's in those religious beliefs and movements you're talking about there, Ben, there's not just the spirits of human beings, right, there's also other worldly entities within most religions that exist outside of the human experience, right, or maybe can enter our world at certain times or just you know, make a
brief appearance. So you're you're also talking about angels and demons and smokeless fire beings and all kinds of yeah, and all kinds of other There's so many other types of beings that are in within belief systems that could be maybe thought to be a ghost by one observer, right, or could be something completely different, or are just you know, as we've seen some of the mundane explanations for these things. It could be any number.
Of the tangible but into intangible yet somehow interactive under the correct circumstance.
And that's a great way to put it.
Like every religion, I mean, I think for the most part, every religion that I know of has some form of these things, whether it be like dibbicks, you know, and the Jewish faith or you know, demons or whatever you might call them. They're all kinds of different kind of genres of these things that exist in this parallel universe, you know, between different faiths.
It's pretty cool. Yeah.
Well, but and then you've also got the science added to that, right, which is some of the fundamental laws of physics about energy not ever being able to be destroyed, right, it can be reshaped and changed. But the fact that human beings can't at this moment prove that which is
the experiencer in humans? Right, We've got some pretty good ideas of what that thing is that you right now listening to this and processing the words and having thoughts about yourself in the world as you're hearing these words. We can't prove what that is. We have some good
idea is. But theoretically that spirit, that soul, that thing, that energy that's inside of each and every one of us right now, may there may be some key to it that we just haven't figured out, or some lock that we haven't opened yet.
Right there chance, you know, there's a ghost of a chance to solve it, to solve this question as star stuff, I mean yes, obviously, Look, hardcore skeptics in the crowd, you hear the word ghost, you hear the G word, and you might say, ah, fiddle d d or fiddlesticks. Right, that's how, that's how, that's the very.
Character you're in a nursery rhyme, And that's all skeptics.
Are characters in nursery rhymes apparently. But if you are a hardcore skeptic and your world is normalized such that you don't run into people who feel they have had a supernatural experience. You may be surprised to learn this is a relatively common thing in the West, in the US alone. Back in twenty nineteen, there was a poll from a French marketing giant named Ipsos, and they found that nearly half of all Americans polled believe in ghosts.
Forty six percent of people, when asked, said they believe in the spirits of the dead or in these intangible, maybe non human entities that can be communicated with, even if they felt they had no personal, firsthand experience with such fun fact, by the way, that same poll says that seven percent of Americans believe in vampires. Six percent of Americans believe in zombies. Shout out to Shout out to at borat on Twitter who ask how many believe in zompires?
Oh nice, you gotta believe in something, That's what I say, And I mean was really quickly speaking of belief. I mean the tenant or the crux of like all of these faces is answering the question of what happens, you know, after you die, some form of moralistic kind of you know, framework that gives you points, you know, in the afterlife for the stuff.
You do in this life.
And they're all kind of their own set of rules and they vary, but they usually have some sort of commonalities too.
Yeah.
Well, and just forty six percent feels like such a large number because we're a society. America is not one, you know, cohesive thing, right, It's a bunch of different cultures coming together. And I'm just imagining in my experience, in the experience that maybe I see in representations of America.
I'm thinking of family friend groups. We are not a one large, cohesive culture that venerates the dead in some large way, not at least not when compared to many other cultures across the world, right, Like we don't have you know, generally, I get you can't really speak this way, but there aren't a lot of shrines for dead family
members in like Middle America household. I don't think, at least from my experience that I say, right, there's not a lot of places where you go in days on which you go and venerate the dead members of your family and your ancestors. While that is an experience that I think a lot of us have right, I would say it's probably more few and far between than a lot of other places in the world.
The shrine, Yeah, agreed, You're right, Matt. The shrine has been replaced by the simple tombstone in the United States without the same schedule of veneration. And going back to there's something really interesting with the idea of science versus spirituality. Science attempts to explain how something occurs, and spirituality attempts to explain why something occurs. So indeed, it may be true that science as a philosophical perspective is unequipped to answer certain questions.
Yeah, I mean one of the whole points of faith is having the why not matter ins sort of putting your trust in something that's bigger than you that you don't fully understand, and that you acknowledge you don't fully understand. That's sort of part of it, too, is just believing without proof. Well, I'm not saying I'm saying that as I think. I'm not saying that as a good or bad thing. I just think it's interesting.
Yeah, And I love the observation too about ancestor worship as it would be called some places, the veneration of those who came before, because you can go to any number of other countries, you know. I remember speaking with some folks in Japan who were saying, Hey, you know, these shrines may seem commercialized to outsiders because there's a you know, there's a shrine every couple of feet or whatever. There's a shrine next to the McDonald's or what happened?
Can you buy ad space on the shrines?
Though, that's what I'm picturing. I haven't been in Japan. I'm just wondering what you mean by commercialized the idea.
Yeah, the proximity, the approachability, the ubiquity. But then there's also something beautiful about that, about having the spirituality exist in the same space as a very secular system. I mean, that's what I think. Like this number forty six percent of Americans in an increasingly secular era of time, the fact that almost half of people in the US believe in ghosts, I think it tells us a lot about
the society in which these beliefs occur. You know, it goes back to sort of the old question about technology, right, Like, for a long time, there was this belief that technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries would put previous supernatural experiences squarely in the realm of the mundane and the explainable, and that is simply not the case.
You know.
We know science can explain some things, but the assumption of the technology versus the spiritual is woefully incorrect. Fears of the parent normal fascination. It just adapts with emergent factors.
For sure.
And with today's episode, just to that point, Ben, we would figure, Okay, there's some weird sounding stuff on this recording. It sounds kind of like a human voice. But maybe with science or just with enough examination, we can figure out what that actually was. Right, But like, that hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, think about it, hasn't it.
I mean, it's happened in some cases, but there's not a silver bullet answer.
But we're also talking about something that has occurred and not necessarily to someone, an experiential thing that someone has reported having happened to them. And then how could you possibly expect to recreate those exact circumstances, you know, I mean, if it is truly a spiritual occurrence and not just some thing that could be explained like crossed waves or whatever it might be.
You know, what I mean, But there's still a tangible artifact.
Yes, I can just get it.
I just think, you know, that would be more of a thing that as associated with a place that you could then go test. But if someone's being spoken to by the divine or they're hearing something.
Like that, how could you possibly test.
For it knowing where and when it will occur if it's based on the individual.
I don't know. I'm just spitballing here, guy, I think that stuff.
I think that's the really cool thing about today's subject because it is a scientific attempt to prove something that we cannot currently prove with science. Right, We're trying to collect an evidence that would be proof enough to test and further test and further test to be like, oh, that's actually what's happening.
And this is this is mission critical because we know we know technology does not dispel the supernatural. That's why, for instance, tales of the the unsealy or the hidden folk, or fay auctions and changelings. That's why when UFOs became a thing in popular culture, that's why all those fairy tale abductions became UFO abduction stories. Look at it, folks,
beat for beat These are the same stories. Ghostly armies become ghost trains, when trains become a thing, Haunted crossroads give way to ghostly hitchhikers, on and on and on. This applies to the ways in which people believe they experience ghosts. We want to thank everybody who wrote to us in our previous episodes about encounters that you may have had that you can't explain. You know, people might believe they've seen a ghost, but that's just the beginning.
You might feel a ghost, a chill in the room. What's weird about this? Dave and Busters? Now a brush of a hand along your shoulder in the dark, or you know, smell is a big thing, right. People will say I lost someone, I was at their grave, or I was thinking of them, I held an object of great import and I smelled their perfume. Or I went to the sight of a great wartime tragedy and there was still a persistent odor of gunpowder in the air.
Technology just gives us new avenues of paranormal experience. To your point, Matt, the question tonight is what if you don't see ghost what if you can hear them? We're going to pause for a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy. The fancy term for this is electronic voice phenomenon or EVP, and I think a lot of us have stories about this kind of thing in the world of ghost hunting or parapsychology, as doctor Vankman puts it. In The Ghostbusters not the Cat, the character
played by Bill Murray. EVP just describes sounds encountered on electronic recordings that are interpreted as the voices of spirits.
Yeah, and you may have seen these on things like Ghost Adventures or any of the other myriad of shows out there where people are hunting ghosts on your television or on your phone. Probably now it's weird because it's so broad at this point. It could be just audio that is captured with a microphone, right when people are walking around with their cameras and their microphones and they're asking questions in the dark, and there's a response.
Right.
Sometimes that response is audible that you can hear right as you're watching the television show that all the actors slash ghost hunters on the television here as well in the moment. Other times it sounds that occur on that tape or on that electronic recording well after the fact, right, and they're only heard after the team goes back to the van and plays it back and they enhance it, and then you've got some kind of audio on there.
It really is a pretty wide range of just some kind of audio that is recorded, whether or not it's actual vibrations being recorded or let's say the machine being manipulated in some way to create audio.
Dude, I so funny bring that up.
I was texting with our friend of the show, Alex, you know, ephemeral theme and just a wonderful dude good friend about this microphone that I saw as a company
that make synthesizers and they also make a microphone. They're called Soma, and it is designed to record electromagnetic interference in the air, and like you can take it anywhere and it just like it's tuned in almost like a reverse radio kind of to record like all of this stuff, whether it be microwaves or you know, radio frequencies or whatever.
And a lot of people in you know, kind of electronic nerdy music synth community use these for few recordings and you know, convert them into weird soundscapy kind of things. And I sent it a mi link to it because he's into that kind of stuff. And he responded, that's how you hear the ghosts.
Man.
I want to buy one.
I really want to buy one and hear what it's all about. I haven't even heard any samples, but I'm fascinated by this idea and.
What he said. I think there's something to it.
Everybody check out Ephemeral while you can. I think all of us have some involvement with it in the interest of transparency. I truly believe it's one of the best shows out there. The question about EVP reminds us also of photos of Bigfoot. I know it sounds dumb, but photos of bigfoot camera technology, photographic technology has come so far, but every photo of bigfoot bit blurry, bit indistinct. And indeed this is the case with audio recordings purported to
be example of EVP. The recording may often be staticky, scratchy, as if the voice on the other end of the line is coming from far away. It's faint, it's muddled, maybe indistinct. To the true believers, this is hard evidence of life beyond the grave, and we owe a lot or EVP. We should say, oh, it's a great deal. To the Spiritualist movement, which it's weird that we've never done a deep dive on the spiritualist movement because it's endlessly fascinating.
Oh for sure. I was just gonna say, before we get into spiritualism movement. One of the weird things about EVP now is that sometimes it's extremely easy to hear, and you can it's crisp and clean, But it has more to do with the technology that's being utilized rather than the actual recording of whatever is supposedly speaking to people. You guys have seen those boxes that they have now
that will randomly pull in radio signals. It's like a it's like a radio randomizer that plays stuff across like all the spectrum.
Like the entryway too, the iHeart offices.
Yeah, kind of like that. But they will do that now, and you'll see someone on you know again on television. You'll see someone in a room in the dark asking questions, you know, to the nothingness in the room or the thing or whatever it is they're trying to contact, and this thing will randomly play actual DJs basically saying words at random, and so you can hear really well exactly
what's being said. But it's not. It's just so strange how it becomes muddied when you when people are trying to apply new technological advancements to this thing that then actually make it maybe even less real to me.
So, Matt, are you saying then that there are very crisp, clear proven recordings of ghosts.
Well, there are crisp, clear proven recordings of someone playing a radio randomly that appear to be answering the questions that are being asked in a room in Yes, but so like you can hear it and it's clearly that, and it's like someone asks, well, what is your name Bob? You're like, oh, wow, that's clearly Bob. But uh, it was just some DJ you know in Tennessee somewhere that said Bob randomly and the thing selected it.
And you know, it's sort of like walking down the street, like in a busy city and overhearing snippets of people's conversations, and you know, if you wanted to interpret it, you could take a word here and a word there as how is this about me? Yeah, one hundred percent. But like you know that that's just an electronic version of that. When you're scrolling through the dial and you're you're tuning between stations and hearing little snippets of whether it be
commercials or people talking or whatever. You can pull something out of it if you think about it or enough audio.
R Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't mean interrupt. Just for me. It's just weird because we're in this weird space where it's like it's hard to tell. It's so hard to tell. Well, no, no, what it is is you have to decide. So it's all about belief. So in the end, you have to decide if you believe that the technique that's being utilized is either scientifically sound or matches what you think a ghost would.
Do, right, put oneself in ghostly shoes, you know. And that's also I think that's a fantastic point about the role of technology. Technology again does not dispel the supernatural. That is a dangerous assumption, right, and I think it dismisses a lot of human experience. Spirituality or excuse me. The spiritualist movement had their heyday for about a century
eighteen forties nineteen forties. Peters out in the last half of the twentieth century, and their whole thing was that they could the belief was we can use the scientific method technology to interrogate this continual cross cultural experience with what appears to be ghostly entities through things like photography, through the scientific measurement of ectoplasm, you know, do some double blind test with mediums. Houdini was a fan of that all of this could help society better understand some
hidden world. Spiritualism has a ton of problems, number one being honestly, folks, the Charlatans and grifters who made a lot of money in the game. But I think it's safe to say most of the folks who were interested in this were acting in good faith. They're humans, they want to understand the world, they want a need to discover, recognize and leverage patterns.
Because as you said, they made money on it. But they were also saying that they could just communicate with the dead, you know, and not even use technology.
So the.
Technology like for the show of it all on the table move and using like air pumps and things like that. I mean, I'm sorry, I'm being a glib I guess, but I tend to think that a lot of the members of the spiritualist movement were in some way taking advantage of people's spiritual beliefs, you know, but.
Just the fact that there were enough other humans who were interested enough in those seances, in those techniques that you're describing, There been where it's like they wanted to believe in that enough that these people the charlatan. The
Charlatan's made some bank. So it's like it and now we see it moving into the TikTok generation where it's this neo spiritualist movement that is now based There's so much based on taro, so much based on astrology, so much based on feeling and interpreting and intuiting everything that you know, whether it comes to interpersonal relationships and dating to how you view the world and using the secret to manifest your whatever. It is massive.
Right now.
My toxic trade is texting romantic interest at eleven eleven or on eleven and just be like thinking.
Of you portals.
I didn't mean to sound like I was throwing the baby out with the bathwater there. I know that there are members of you know, these kinds of things that aren't just trying to rip people off or using it for clout. I mean, but I guess when I think of the spiritualist movement, I think largely of the bad apples, and that may be on me, oh like the theosophist and so on. Well, yeah, and just like the you know, phony mediums and things like that.
I didn't mean to put that on you that way, Noel, in that response, I just mean that it's so popular right now and as it was then.
Right I'm just walking back what I said. I didn't want to sound I mean, it's just I do realize that there are people that genuinely believe all kinds of things. But it's easy to focus in on the negative parts.
Of that history, I guess.
And maybe I'm just a spiritual kind of skeptic or a little bit jaded about that kind of stuff because of my own upbringing.
You know, there's nothing wrong with that. There's the argument again, is that technology once again does not dismiss the supernatural. It becomes a new avenue for the exploration of such right of these experiences. And Noel, I would say that point that you make holds true in the modern day, or what we call the modern day. It is going to be hilarious, by the way, in thirty twenty four when people listen to this and say, aren't you guys technically now ghost on a recording, well.
One hundred percent, No, that's I mean, that's at the heart of a lot of this as recordings are memory. I'm sorry, ghosts to me in a lot of ways, our memories and the ways.
Shut out think of me.
Well, God, it doesn't I mean cross lyric if it's not one hundred percent already. But I mean, I think we've talked in the past about how a lot of times places hold so much power because of the things that have happened there, because of the history, and the history feels palpable sometimes when you're in a place and
I just feel like, to me, that's what goes. Hosts are in a lot of ways for me personally, and like memories of the loved ones that we have that'll come over you like a ghost and use this feeling of being haunted. It can be a positive haunting, but it's still very much like something external moving through you.
You know.
I think it's interesting, just really, I think this is the thing that really caught me in this section. Vin Spiritualism lasted pretty much right up until World War two broke out, right, and I'm feeling our society in this thing this neo spiritualism thing or whatever, it is growing and growing and growing right before World War three. Bro feeling like.
It's true though, because that's something we set up earlier in this episode. With these ideas, this interrogation of that which cannot be currently explained by modern science, these ideas are on a rise when social factors become just so, a certain unease with the status quo, a certain lack of stability. It sends people searching for answers. So it should be no surprise. You know, during the nineteen twenties, right before the Great Depression, by the way, people were
super gassed about audio technology. I can say something, it'll be on record. What could go wrong? This will help us talk to ghosts? Right, Like, what else can this amazing do? It's a good question.
See even short walk to that, right, even the magical feeling around. I mean even still to this day, I don't understand how vinyl record works. I barely understand the science of capturing you know, vibrating, you know, sound waves.
It's mystical to me.
It feels like capturing a spirit, you know, or like a soul or something.
It's I would argue it's rediscovering ancient technology, which far be it for me to sound conspiratorial. But there's some excellent stonework that is very very old that channels vibrations just so. It's beautiful stuff. This was very popular. This was the crypto of its age. The papers of note were talking to the tycoons of the day. In Scientific American, there's this interview with Thomas Edison in I think like the nineteen twenties, and someone asked him there's a good
faith question. They said, well, mister Edison, can your technology, your amazing audio technology, could it? We know it can record voices and messages from humans and from I don't know what's a popular animal back then, giraffes, humans and giraffes. But what about ghost and Thomas Edison, who is kind of a pill. Just to be honest, he had a pretty interesting response. Credit where it's due. We're pulling this from a book called Edison and the Man Who Made
the Future by Ronald W. Clark. Edison's response is low key hilarious. Do we have someone who can do like a silly voice for it?
Oh goodness is Edison probably did have a silly voice. It is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence, a sphere, who wished to get in touch with us in this existence Osphea, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and.
Raps and huija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.
Masterclass and acting folks. That's mister Noel Brown.
That's my oscar clip.
Well, think about the technology we're talking about there, like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham, Bell stuff, Thomas Watson, those early inventors and using liquor wid materials and then try like trying to figure out, oh, we can get sound through this liquid and you know, and the way microphone technology has worked. He in this moment, Edison is imagining probably what we've got now with these the microphones that are in our cell phones, and like these it's just a material.
That they're never off.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've already knew the liquid part of the research that led to that stuff. But I have seen lots of like TikTok and Instagram videos where people will take a table and send vibrations with a speaker that's underneath the table and like have like, for example, that sort of magnetic dust kind of stuff, and it will literally, yeah, move into the shape of the waveform on the table, and liquid.
Will do the same thing.
If you send sound through it, it'll start to make ripples in the shape, like concentric circles of like what it's It's wild.
You're welcome Weja board for your new design WIJA two.
I know.
I mean like this this quote from Edison is massive because well, first, here's why it's hilarious. Edison himself doesn't have any strong religious views at the time of this interview, and pretty much his entire life. He wasn't a jerk about it. He just said, look, nobody really knows what happens. But in this interview, this guy is such a salesman that just in case ghosts are real, he says, I could do better in Luigia board. You know, I like
like recorded audio. We're we're doing that. What else can it do? And that's that's crazy. He might not believe in ghost but he sure believed in making a buck. He's an always be closing type of guy.
Well, yeah, but I get I think he maybe believed, like, yes, yeah, this new technology like you could record the unrecordable.
If it doesn't know, he doesn't know what's possible.
It's a wonk of a that's respectable. But I would argue if he didn't have some seed of belief.
Then doing this would be an utter kind of gross cash grab because he would know that what he's selling his snake oil. Because if he doesn't believe that it's possible, how could he possibly put his belief into a technology that purports this to be possible.
So he's a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, or he's Merlin in that story. He believed his own magic to a detrimental degree, as history would prove. As far as we know at least, no matter what he said in this interview, there is no there is no evidence that he designed or constructed this hypothetical device. He just said he would do better than we chparts.
For some reason, I thought there was like a forgotten patent for this thing.
Later I looked and I looked, and I looked. If there is one that Edison made, Folks, let us know there's.
A thing here, guys. Okay, we we know, we know about crystal radios. There's a weird thing. There's a weird story with Wayne Williams of all people and creating a crystal radio, and like me, that's how I learned what a crystal radio was back in the day.
Yeah, I guess I don't fully understand the tech behind it. I know that it's you know, some wiring and some rudimentary circuit that's then wired up to a crystal of some kind and that acts as the antenna or what's the deal exactly?
I know what you're getting for your birthday?
Yeah, radio?
Yeah, didn't didn't do space camp, didn't build a crystal radio. But is am I getting that roughly right, Matt?
Or what are you doing?
Yes, it's crazy. You can use quartz to work either as a microphone or as a receiver, which is crazy because the crystal itself is the thing that vibrates in the way. It's like it's it's crazy and it.
Needs only a little bit of power. Yes, it's like super costly.
But think about them, the crystal, the concept of quartz crystals and how how massive that is in popular culture right now, as like a powerful substance that you can use like crystals and all that stuff, but then actually being able to use it to make a microphone. I think the Courts microphone, like one of the oldest ones, goes around. I think that's the key to getting ghosts boys.
Just the last thing about this kind of malleability of text tech and rudimentary things. You can take a telephone and wire it and reverse and it becomes a speaker or the same thing like you can turn into a microphone. All you got to do is switch around some wire, so like a speaker or a headphone when wire differently can become a sound capturing device.
You can also use an electrical outlet for Wi Fi, right, you can you can pass it through, that's right, right, So it is fascinating and look Edison. When we say Edison is kind of a pill, we're talking about a different set of activities on his part. We do know that we can find no proof of him purposely designing or patenting some sort of ghost radio. Which is a super cool phrase.
But exist this says a band or like a rapper or something.
It's got to I was super disappointed when when I found out that snack God is a name that was already taken. I had like six songs that were just about snacks, and I can't use them because there's a guy already calling himself snack God. Shout out to you, well played.
I had a silly idea for a bumper sticker and be rock out with your calk out like calking guns for you know, like people in construction would wear these, And of.
Course you google it and there's t shirts already.
Nothing.
Well, good for us for trying. I mean, at this point, Edison, if he's if he's not being like a cynical salesman, he's speaking to the great possibilities, the pioneering frontiers that exist. At this point, recorded audio still had that new car smell. Cars still had that figurative new car smell, and cars themselves would become a vehicle, get it for new iterations
of supernatural stories and tropes. It makes total sense that humanity would encounter this astonishing technology of recorded audio and say, well, what else can it do? I mean, that's a good question. It's a question that people asked when telephones came out. To your point, now, it's a question people asked when the telegraph emerged, When television emerged, with online communication today
as well. To your earlier point, Matt, I think it's fair to say humanity just kind of likes the idea of a ghost in the machine.
Also a cool techno thriller from the nineties, Ghost in the Machine, nineteen nineties. The nineteen nineties we were talking about, like you know, all these movies that happened in the two thousand that were part of them. But there was also a bit of a nineties trend for technology based thrillers like the lawnmower Man stuff.
Virtuosity. Wait, yeah, that was two thousands.
I think I think it was still nineties.
VI.
Virtriciosity was like probably ninety nine, ninety eight.
Nineteen nineties. I'm dating myself by pointing that out.
I got to.
So there there are a lot of people who are interested in this spiritualism as a movement. To the earlier point, it declines pretty rapidly, like you were saying, Matt, and the lead up to in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. The fascination though with audio technology is a gateway to the other side of the grave that remains, and that's where we get to shout out. I thought I thought we'd love this name. That's where we get to shout out at American photographer named wait for it,
this is his real thing on his birth certificate. Attila vaud sees the.
Hun the third esquire.
That's all you would, dude, you, I feel like this guy would be really good. Hang if he were still alive. Probably he built a podcast, Oh he sure did.
Yeah.
And also you know he's a photographer.
I was just gonna mention briefly, like just the idea of ghost photographs and capturing auras and stuff.
That's that's a whole other.
Top photography, super super weird and and you know I can't explain that stuff either.
Well, Attila had a great idea. Often in photography, one of the things you're focused on is isolating light, right, so like where is light hitting on in this space that I'm going to attempt to photograph and where is it not hitting? And his idea was, well, what if I could isolate the sounds rather than the visuals the sounds.
What if I could create a place where there would be where most of the audible sounds that are existing an environment go away and I can just hear what's happening in this tiny little I guess cabinet or booth like you said.
Hm, whisper booth.
I forget it's in a research universe or something. But somewhere in the world there is this room that is apparently so perfectly quiet that it's it'll make you go insane.
If there's several chambers, is.
I always really cool wood looking room, beautifully designed. But yeah, I've never been in one, but it sounds like it would be a trip.
Microsoft has one. I think it's warfield labs. I want to say, uh, but there, But yeah, these If you are a human existing, there is a level of background noise which you must always encounter. When you're in a room without sound, you begin to hear your own body, and that's what bothers people. That's like the sound of your blood moving through your veins right, your pulse, the clicks in your ears, the little the little dances that your tongue and your teeth do this.
Well to me, I imagine it being a little bit like if you're in if you're flying in an airplane and your ears do that thing right where pressure do the pressure It's it's like that ah that it's almost an out of body thing, like you don't feel as though you exist in this plane, on this plane anymore.
Not funny, Matt, I barely made it off that plane.
It's true. It's true. Some of those people in Alaska a ar, sorry, everybody, just a bit fell off.
You guys were right by the way it was or Field Labs. That was exactly the one I was thinking of. It's these crazy wood extrusion kind of things. It's beautiful to look at, but it's apparently there's a lot of think pieces about it because it is kind of thinking to your point, like all of the sounds that we take for granted, when you strip them away and we're left with the actual deafening silence that is just our bodies, it could probably become overwhelming.
Gunnis World Records calls it the quietest room in the world. Why Why is a beer manufacturer and a world records good question.
As a tire manufacturer given out stars for fancy restaurants, so they know what they did.
Isn't that Frank? Isn't that Frank Guinness? I forget?
Oh, you know, Frank.
That's sorry. Yeah, And I've been listening to a lot of comedy Bang bang lately. I love it when they have their holiday stuff that comes down the best OF's with Paula Tompkins and all that. Sorry, just shout out to you guys.
Shout out uh this guy, and shout out Attila, because he did do a good faith effort nineteen fifty six. He builds what you would what you would recognize as a voiceover booth. And to your point, matt it is pretty good science for the time. He's saying, let's let's eliminate as many variables as we can and then let us interrogate analyze what it is that remains. So he would have someone sit in this booth and he would sit in it pretty often, and then he would gather
sounds from the external recording device and speaker. And if you hear him tell it, sorry, if you read him write about it, then what you'll see is a continual sense of curiosity and amazement. At one point in his experiments, he says, we're getting really weird recordings and there's no one in the room, So where is the sound coming from? What's talking into this mic in this insulated cabinet? He calls it. The first question would be like, well, if
there are ghosts, let's play along at home. What do the ghosts say? The first messages are revelatory, revelatory, They're going to change your opinion of the afterlife.
The first one sounds like this hot dog art hot dog art.
The way, is it like making art on a hot dog, like using mustard and ketchup stuff? Or is it exclusively images of hot dogs done in tasteful fashion?
They never they never explained because upon question maddening there was a response like, you know, who is this? Who is this wreath that approaches our weird booth? And they said.
This is G.
I don't have G.
Christmas and happy Now, Yeah, that's definitely not people down the streets.
These were parents.
This is always the part of the twist in the Agatha Christie story where it was the parrot the whole time.
You know, yeah, this is uh, it's a good question. Are these ghosts just sending the equivalent of text messages? I mean, is it is it someone down the street? Is it a bit of a susceress down the street?
Can I can I really quickly until you have the story? Okay, so old house I used to live in I was in the process of preparing it to be sold, so moved everything out, did a bunch of painting. It's an empty skeleton of a house basically right, all wood floors, all bare walls. I went into the house late one night to pick a few things up. I ended up,
I don't know, just feeling squirrely, feeling weird. I ended up pulling stuff out of the house, put it in my car, went back into the house with all the lights off, and I went back into the master bedroom where I slept for, like, you know, a long time. I slept in that room every night for a long time. And when I walked in, I felt this thing that you described at the top of this episode, Ben, this like feeling. I had a sensation. All the lights are off,
it's very dark in there. I had the sensation that there was something in the corner of the room. I can't explain to you why it is, what it is, anything like that. I just felt something. So I walked over to that corner of the room and I stood very close to where I was feeling the sensation, and I felt the you know, the chills that you get, the full body chills thing that's like a wave that
goes over you. I felt that happen and I decided I was going to take my phone and hit the voice recorder and lay it in the center of that room where I felt something and just let it record for about ten minutes. And I just left the house. Okay, let it go for ten minutes. Then I came back and listened back to it. I didn't hear anything but the sounds of that room when I just played it
back on my phone. Right, I took it home, I plugg I plugged it into You know, we use Adobe audition right for a lot of the production de noise.
They're like trying to separate the spectrum I did.
I boosted the signal so all of the electric all of the electrical impulses that my microphone based picked up now goes up by like ten twenty decimals.
You should have used the Soma mic. You wouldn't have had to run any plugins at all.
But I'm just I'm just getting it something here to where I then raised the level of what it actually heard. Then I reduced the noise a little bit, and I heard my neighbor watching television of Thrones. I'm pretty sure. I'm not sure, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure is Game of.
Thrones, that intense conversations, right, you heard you you basically used you know, enhancing kind of a technology to here's something you shouldn't have been able to hear or separate it out, do you know.
But but again, like it was, it was my interest in this feeling that I had, thinking well what if I what if there was something that wanted to communicate with me. I attempted these things and realized just through my own attempt, oh wait, I'm just picking up stuff that's happening outside of where I want to be, which I think at Tilli's idea is so great.
Here do you think you might have felt that feeling just just the Devil's advocate because you were feeling that emotional thing that I was talking about, that memory, you know, and that comes over you and you in a place that has meaning to you, and then therefore you're like kind of you're internalizing that and it's sort of represented by this washing.
Over you kind of.
I mean, I've experienced that before. I just wonder what you think about that.
Well, look, this is my opinion, guys, but I think that's what that is kind of what we set up at the top here it's a it's a thing where you want to explore those feelings that are emotional, that are spiritual, and we are attempting to find well, what is that thing? Is there something else extra that I can gain from this or that I can explore this more? And we use the technology for it. And that's what I did.
And if you've ever received a text message from a ghost, we can't wait to read it. Send it to us conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. We're going to take a brief break for some more voices in your head. We'll be right back, and we have returned Attila's experiments or only one example of the ongoing interest and EVP. The modern iteration of this stuff owes a lot to a
parapsychologist whose name bedevils me. It's Constantine's Raudeeve, Constantine's Raudeev. Anyway, nineteen seventy one, this guy publishes a book on EVP. It's called Breakthrough. He's not the first person by any means to investigate the idea of recorded audio ghost, but he is the person who popularizes it in the West. And he also doesn't say that he gets any like I feel like this is in his defense. He doesn't say he gets any great epiphanies or revelations or observations
on the nature of the afterlife. He gets messages instead that say things like stuff you might hear down the street to your point, Matt, stuff like I follow you tonight, please interrupt, or of course, might be Mary Ben. I don't know what mary Ben means.
Well, And remember these are all interpretations of people believe they are hearing rights with audio. If it's garbled at all, it can like you can have twenty people listen to the same piece of mildly garbled audio and you will get twenty different phrases or sentences.
Which is why bad presidents only do press conferences by helicopters.
But no, but this is very true. Think about some of the maybe tiktoks or instagram reels that you've seen in the past, where it's if you read different words while you're hearing audio, you will hear your brain will interpret those sounds as different phrases entirely.
And this this phenomenon, all all of these observations lead folks like Robert Todd Carroll or the Skeptics Dictionary to respond by say, apparently the dead have very little of interest to say to us, but the belief continues. You know. We're talking a little bit off air about a two thoud thousand and five film, absolute banger to some people called White Noise, starring Michael Keaton, who you may recognize as Beetlejuice and Batman Think about It. In the film,
Keaton is a troubled architect. He plays a character named Jonathan rivers a drift in the world after the disappearance of his newly pregnant spouse, and so he comes to believe that he is able to contact her or hear from her, at least in via EVP. And the question is always with EVP. One can hear things or interpret them, but can one also communicate? Is it a two way ghost? Radio critics panned it. The audience loved it because people love patterns so much so that we have to introduce
another factor into the explanation of EVP. Paradoliadlia. It's a fun word to say. It does sound like an indie album. It's a real thing. If you've ever looked at if you've ever woken up and there's a pile of clothing in your bedroom and you think there's someone in the corner watching you for just a second. You have encountered this. Your brain told you a thing was there because it interpreted something.
Well, yeah, I'm going back because if you hear I follow you tonight. What if we're actually it's not a dead person. What if you're actually doing the parallel universe thing you've gotten overlay and there's just someone who doesn't care about you, Robert Todd Carroll. Maybe they actually don't have anything to say to us because they're just living their life and we're accidentally picking up on it somehow, just saying come on, man, we gotta keep an open mind about this, rob.
Eves dropping into other universes the nerve.
Maybe accidentally we didn't mean to, but sure, I mean, but that's also like good fodder for science fiction and stuff where someone will have this sort of chance, you know, glimpse through the veil and then get obsessed with trying to recreate it and harness it in some way, you know, like and that's what a lot of the you know, these kind of techno thrillers are about, too, where people will try to, you know, control the spirit by controlling
the technology, and especially with one more man is about it's not I guess it's less about the spirit world. But there are definitely a bunch of films quote unquote films in that genre where that's a thing is the idea of trying to play god, you know, by using technology to breach the spirit world in some way.
You know.
But but yeah, let's get back to where you're talking about there, Ben, It's uh, it's about interpretation, right, yeah.
In the audio as well as the visual sphere. You know. This is why photographs gain so much attention in popular culture. The picture of the famous face on Mars, remember that one where it was in the Weekly World News. It's on so many blogs.
It was a dang face. Okay, I don't care what anybody eat.
Mars is a single entity. We found its face, like.
The man in the Moon.
I don't know about the Mars man.
It's it's like a I don't know, a dome that looks like a face. It looks like a giant sculpture that you can see from a telescope on Earth, a specific ale.
It looks a lot like a face.
The monolith, it's the two thousand and one monolith.
No, no, but but it was proven that well, it was shown that it really was about shadows and the human interpretation of shadows, and then us are pattern making thing, right, that's what this phenomenon is about.
I mean, if you believe telescopes and scientists, but what.
It was it earlier Lotti da poppy Cock, man, I want to hear from no scientists. They're always lying to us, confusing exist.
I like, I don't know how magnets work, and in the same sentence, I reject the explanation of anyone who is an expert.
I'm that same Ben, I feel the same way.
We got a great voicemail and I forgive me, I cannot remember the name you gave yourself. Awesome person that called in with a very positive message to us about that song, like how it's actually about connection and love and the human experience, and it's not actually about how magnets work.
I don't think we're.
Actually ranging on them though, it's mainly just that it exists.
Is a delight for the soul. You know.
The person person was very positive and not even negative towards us, just like it really is a song about togetherness.
Honestly that is super wholesome, Like like the if you check out our show Ridiculous History, where where in some of this conversation and these references originate, we are we are talking as fans of the Jugglo experience and community, or fans of the family. They would say the idea though, that perception plays such a key role in things. This
idea is common to every single human experience. The way you think a sandwich taste or the way you think a donut taste is influenced by the environment in which you consume that donut and how you were feeling before it took the first bite. Why would another sensory experience be any different.
It's true.
It's like, you know, you've talked on the show often a bit about how you don't perceive color, and it's sort of like trying to describe a color to somebody you know who hasn't perceived it.
It's completely subjectives.
When you start to try to do that, you realize how impossible it. It's described blue to somebody, or to describe a taste, you can describe it based on common ingredients or stuff like that, but you can't really describe your actual experience of it, you know, at all.
And for the same reason it is if we're being honest, it is technically impossible to prove a mundane cause for every single purported EVP experience throughout history. Scientists will say they can categorize things in a couple of different buckets, like interference from wireless communication. That's true, it's much more commonplace than it was in the time of the spiritualist, even in Attila's time or Constantine's time, like CB radios, AMFM, smartphones.
And then there are things like modulation, ion is fair reducting. There are scientific explanations, but those scientific explanations we could also argue they missed the mark a bit, because the real question is what does the experience of EVP tell us about ourselves as the entities experiencing that. That's the real question. It's kind of like how taro is an effective diagnostic tool. Magical ritual can be seen as ritualized psychology,
you know, like the or weaponized psychology as well. I think Thomas Edison is correct, it's kind of EVP can also be seen as a scrying device, wijaboard, crystal ball, black mirror. I don't know, auditory ruorschack test is that dismissive?
I don't want to think, well, yeah, it is about yeah, it's all about interpretation. What we need is a mini anichoic chamber that is some kind of mobile device that can be that has a single microphone in the center of it. It's about the size of oh, I don't know, guys, like a refrigerator box or small small like a mini fridge box.
Right, anything but the metric system.
Well, but just imagine a box that is sizable but fairly small, that has a lot of that stuff inside of it that were you were describing their noll for the antichoic chamber, and has a microphone inside of it, and it's completely soundproof. You cannot hear any sounds outside that thing. You take it and you place it in places that are supposedly haunted or have a lot of you know, their way activity. Then you hold the seance even right next to it, or you ask questions, you
get what's what's his name? To be like come on, just go bro, come on bro, no ghost grow Christ get that dude, and just like ye, but the thing, the microphone inside the end mini anaco chamber can't hear him, and then if anything gets recorded inside that box, you'll know that some other being reached inside that thing and manipulated the condenser.
MIC would be a baseline test.
I think you're right there, but again, it's all about set and setting, and how can you ever assume that these things, if legitimate, are ever happening in.
Location based ways?
You know you it would be.
Like you can wait there, No, no, I see what you're saying, Matt. You don't want to be able to move this thing around, right, you'd want to like, yeah, try it?
Okay, got it?
Because I was thinking.
About how can I build one of these in my shed?
It it could be I don't know a studios have a.
Cool guys, let's make a hydro cod.
Hydro coic.
And kok? Sorry, got it?
We got We've got Like I think this is where we we reach. Uh, we reach a turning point in our exploration, folks. Everything we've assembled shows that we cannot logically dismiss EVP experiences out of hand, which means we
want to hear your own takes on this. Email us directly, any recordings you have, Write your tales of unexplained voices, let us know what you see, let us know how technology h emergent social media as well becomes a vehicle for future paranormal experiences and let us know what you think of the future of EVP. We can't wait to hear from you, whether living, dead or somewhere beyond. We try to be easy to find online.
That's somebody You can find us at the handlic Conspiracy Stuff, where we exist on YouTube, Facebook and x FKA Twitter. We are also a conspiracy stuff show on Instagram and TikTok.
Give us a call. Our number is one eight three three st d WYTK. You've got three minutes to leave a voicemail. Give yourself a cool nickname and tell us your story. Tell us all about that EVP you recorded, and once you're done recording it, let us know if we can use that recording on the air. Hey, and if you've got a recording file, why not send it to us.
We are the people who read every email we get conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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