My First “E.V.P.”

When I was around 11-12 years old, my brother and I decided we were going to experiment with EVP.

For those unaware, EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, and in practice, involves attempting to record voices of those that have passed using audio recording equipment.

Modern techniques for capturing EVP vary greatly, and if you regularly watch popular Ghost Hunting shows on TV, you’ll see Investigators using a range of equipment like small dictaphone devices, old-fashioned reel to reel recorders, and often new pseudo-scientific inventions such as “Spirit Boxes”, a device that rapidly scans multiple radio frequencies, with the belief that spirits can communicate through the radio waves whilst the device scans.

When I was younger, the most popular technique amongst Amateur Ghost Investigators was to record radio static (also known as “White Noise”) on a standard home radio, whilst asking questions to any spirits present, in the same way a group might speak to a Ouija Board, or during a séance.

It was a Sunday afternoon; my mum was cooking the Sunday Roast downstairs, and my Step-dad as usual was drinking up an appetite whilst propping up the bar down the pub. For my brother and I this meant that it was a quiet day, and would be perfect for contacting the dead. We switched on my brothers CD/Tape Recorder, put in a blank tape, switched the Radio to AM Band, and began turning the dial from 526.5 kHz upwards.

As a kid, I always found White Noise alone to be creepy, and it was even worse when we were hoping to hear the dead, and our hearts would skip several beats whenever we heard faint voices. But as we fine tuned each frequency, it would always become apparent we’d found just another boring “old persons” channel, as we called them, or a French radio station (a common occurrence as I live in the South East of England). But this didn’t break our enthusiasm, and we eagerly continued going up and down the frequencies, asking questions as we went along.

And then, it happened.

At just over 1600 kHz suddenly the static cleared, and we heard a female voice talking as clear as day. There were never any radio stations at this end of the dial, and more to the point, it didn’t even sound like any radio station. There were no DJ’s, no music, no advertising, just a woman talking. Well, at first it was a woman, but it soon became clear there was a second voice, a second woman. It was a full-blown conversation!

We were excited to say the least and began asking questions to the voices, hoping they would hear us and respond.

“Hello, can you hear us? Who are you? Are you with us?”

We were ignored. On and on the voices jabbered to each other, and in the end, we gave up asking questions, and decided to just keep recording, and listen.

The women mostly spoke about one of their elderly mothers and from what we could gather, the mother had been having some issues lately possibly related to Dementia. The entire conversation went on for about 10-15 minutes, and my brother and I were completely beside ourselves the whole time. Not only had we set out to record EVP’s, but on our first attempt we had contacted two spirits talking about one of their mothers who we assume was still alive. While we left the tape recording, we discussed where and how these woman may have died. We theorised on whether they were watching the mother who may be close to passing, and where the mother may be. Both women were English and based on their accents, sounded local. Maybe they were visiting one of our neighbours, we thought. Our road was very quiet in the mid 90’s and we had several elderly neighbours so it was entirely possible. We had so many questions, but frustratingly no answers as the voices continued to ignore us.

And then without warning we got our answer. As the conversation drew to a close.

“Well, I best go love, I’ll give you a call again next week”

“Alrighty, let me know how it all goes on Tuesday as well!”

“Will do, see you later.”

“Bye”

This was shortly followed by a brief dial tone before silence.

As it turns out, we had in fact not recorded what would have been the most convincing and groundbreaking EVP in history, and these weren’t the voices of those whom had passed. Instead we had recorded the phone call of two very chatty middle-aged women who were very much alive.

At the time my brother and I had no idea how we picked up the phone call, and also subsequent phone calls over the next few weeks from a range of different people. We felt almost like spies, and I suspected at the time that we may have been picking up stray mobile phone signals, as mobiles were beginning to really hit the market in a big way around 1997/98. But I later found out that Cordless Home Telephones around this time operated on analogue radio signals, without any form of encryption, and as a result could be picked up with standard radio receivers, and was known to be quite a common occurrence, much in the same way that even today you can occasionally pick up stray signals from cheaper baby monitors if you hit the right frequency.

So whilst my first experience of attempting to record EVP was a monumental failure, it was an important lesson learned. It’s fun and exciting to believe that everything we see, hear, or record during an investigation is definite and solid paranormal evidence, but in our ever evolving wireless and digital world, where Paranormal Investigators and Inventors are coming up with more and more hi-tech pseudo-scientific ghost detection devices, you should never take any evidence as fact, until you have researched and exhausted every possible means of debunking it.