Mark Todd's Blog, page 4

Countdown for Halloween - our upcoming para talks in October

Halloween must be coming. We've had nine requests in October to bring our slideshow about the paranormal research we did for WILD WEST GHOSTS.

Of course, we're delighted. And we've prepared a combination of audio and video clips that document our various investigations, including EVP captures (EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, a theory that ghosts can manipulate electronic instruments to produce verbal communications), flashlight interactions, swirling angry orbs, and a whole slew of other experiences.Who knew Colorado was so haunted!

Some of the venue requests are special-interest or private-party events, but plenty are free and open to the public. If you're in the vicinity and free, we'd love to see you there!

Saturday, Oct. 10, 2 p.m. - Audio/Video para talk about WILD WEST GHOSTS at the New Castle Branch Library. 402 W Main St, New Castle, CO 81647 (This is the "New Castle" on the I-70 corridor near Glenwood Springs). For more information, call (970) 984-2346.Tuesday, Oct. 13, 6 p.m. - Audio/Video para talk about WILD WEST GHOSTS at The Book Haven. 135 F St, Salida, CO 81201. Open to the public, but RSVP required in advance since they provide food and entertainment for attendees. For more information, call (719) 539-9629.Monday, Oct. 26, 7 p.m. - "Ghost Hunting 101" at the Old Rock Community Library. 504 Maroon Ave, Crested Butte, CO 81224. For more information, call (970) 349-6535.Thursday, Oct. 29, 7 p.m. - Audio/Video para talk about WILD WEST GHOSTS in the West Wing of Savage Library, Western State Colorado University Campus. 600 N. Adams, Gunnison, CO 81230. For more information, call (970) 943-2103Saturday, Oct. 31, 2 p.m. - A Halloween Audio/Video para talk about WILD WEST GHOSTS at the Delta County Public Library. 211 @ 6th St. Delta, CO 81416. For more information, call (970) 874-8605. And yes, this one takes place on Halloween!The Halloween countdown is on!

(And watch for the forthcoming article about our investigation on Oct. 3 at the Old Rock Community Library.)

* * * We're still having as much fun analyzing the results of our ongoing investigations as we did conducting the investigations over the past year for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either your own armchair musings or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can buy the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

The very haunted Va City, MT, Opera House

Most ghost hunters (so the locals claim) overlook one of the most paranormally active locales in this frontier western mining town -- the Opera House.

Va City Opera House(This is part two of a three-part series on our investigations in Virginia City in July 2015. If you missed part one, where we encounter the "little girl ghost" in the costume shop, click here.)

The Opera House gives vaudeville and melodrama performances for visiting tourists throughout the summer, and the residents have preserved or restored the building to its former glory. But some of the best shows take place backstage: the paranormal ones, that is.

Laura Long, who manages the costume shop and also participates on stage as a player, invited us to continue our investigation of the premises inside the Opera House itself. What a great space! The theater holds wonderful Old West charm and must look much the same as it did during Virginia City's rowdier late 1800s heyday.

The Opera House cremona, said to have
hundreds of orbs surround it when it was
returned after renovations.Nestled at the front of the stage and next to the seating rests a renovated cremona in the orchestra pit. (A cremona is a kind of organ attached to various drums and flutes and once used in the Opera House to accompany silent movies back in the early 1900s.) In fact, other players had told us on the previous night that the organ had been shipped to specialists several years ago to make it functional again. Upon return to the theater, a flood of visible orbs crowded around the cremona, as though the cherished organ needed their protection and oversight.

The stage inside
the Opera HouseWe decided to start our investigation, however, backstage behind the curtains between the men's and women's dressing rooms. This is the site of the appearance of *another* little girl ghost on the premises. The one reported in the costume shop (named "Hannah," as our investigation revealed) has been described as having blond hair. But accounts of the separate apparition often seen backstage in the Opera House seems to have black hair.

We were eager to see if we'd have as much luck in contacting this second little girl. We set up the camcorder and conducted a session with flashlight, digital recorder, and spirit box. We captured no audio-only EVP with our digital recorder. (EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, a theory that ghosts can manipulate electronic instruments to produce verbal communications.) Nor did we have a response to our request to dim or turn off the flashlight.

But we did have success with our EchoVox spirit box, which produced an interactive conversation during that session. Among the multiple EVP we captured in the following video clip, listen in particular for the response just past the one-minute time stamp. Mark asks about the little girl and receives an almost immediate reply in a man's voice saying, "Yes, she's little," followed by a young girl's voice that might be saying, "I am."

An EVP conversation backstage at the Opera House
It's not uncommon for EVP to occur at a more rapid rate than normal speech. So notice how clipped many of the names sound after we asked those unseen presences to identify themselves. Our spirit box can also produce what's called a "Mode Burst" -- a concentrated blast of random sounds that allows spirits to create not only words but sometimes sentences. Among the many we later slowed down and parsed from the Mode Burst were two included in the above video clip -- one that sounds to us like "No big [two unclear syllables] anyway" in a woman's voice and then "We're doing okay" in a deep drawling man's voice.

We found ourselves at first skeptical about someone using the expression "Okay" back in the 1880s, but a little research uncovered that the word actually reached national prominence as early as the 1840s. So maybe it fits after all. Of course, we didn't have a chance to parse and isolate this EVP until weeks afterwards, so we didn't have the opportunity at the time of the investigation to ask the speaker when he lived. Maybe next time we visit the Opera House.

We moved to the front of the stage, next to the cremona, and conducted a second EVP session with the spirit box since the invisible "locals" seemed so chatty.

 Multiple EVP, intelligent & residual
Notice in the above video how the first part includes a recognition of our presence, and even answers some of our questions about the cremona -- are they, indeed, guarding it; and who is doing so? We get one answer of "Gustaf" (or Gustave). Lots of frontier mining towns filled with German and Slavic immigrants,and Virginia City had its share. Gustaf is a plausible response.

The second part of this video includes the raw footage from another "Burst Mode" with our spirit box. Although, as mentioned, the device generates only random sounds (no words), this time we captured EVP of not only words but also phrases and even sentences.

After presenting the raw footage, we isolate and extract a number of EVP that are either Class A (clear to understand) or Class B (most listeners -- but not all -- agree on what's said). We captured more than those we include from this Burst, but we considered several of these to be Class C (something's going on, but we can't definitively determine what is said). We suspect all of these EVP are residual. Yes, there are recurring themes (notice the same woman's voice repeatedly reassuring others that some unnamed event is "for the best" in various ways). We also included EVP saying, "Desperate," "Hide," and "Upset." We wish we knew what traumatic event this was all about!

The final capture we included was of a man's voice saying, "Walk this way." This EVP occurred at the very edge of the stage next to the theater seating and sounds to us like someone is stuck repeating the duties of an usher. We take this as a likely example of a residual haunting.

All in all, the time spent in the Opera House left us with the conclusion the locals are right: This building is one very haunted location.

Next time, we conclude the three-part series of our investigation in Virginia City, this time recounting our midnight investigation at the community's Boot Hill cemetery, site of the graves of five men lynched by 1860s vigilantes. The spirits are still not quiet.

* * * We're still having as much fun analyzing the results of our ongoing investigations as we did conducting the investigations over the past year for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either your own armchair musings or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can buy the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

An encore investigation in notoriously haunted Va City, MT

During our summer book tour for WILD WEST GHOSTS, we were invited to give a paranormal talk at the Thompson-Hickman County Library in the notoriously haunted town of Virginia City, MT. (Click here to see our summer 2014 investigations in this frontier mining town during .)

Thompson-Hickman County LibraryIt was a standing-room-only crowd filled with locals and, to our delight, many shared their own ghostly stories and encounters. After the event, several folks told us about the many celeb ghost hunters who'd come to town, but the townies said all these groups had overlooked what locals considered the most haunted location in town -- the Opera House. And they invited us to conduct our own investigation at this hot spot while we were in the vicinity.

Luckily, we brought our gear -- hey, you never know!

Turned out, we conducted three investigations over the next 24 hours: the Opera House costume shop (in a separate building), the Opera House stage, and nearby Boot Hill cemetery, the burial site for vigilante hangings in the 1864. We were not disappointed, capturing not only residual haunting EVP but also intelligent responses on both our digital recorder and our EchoVox spirit box. Read on.

The Opera House Costume Shop InvestigationThe Opera House gives vaudeville and melodrama performances for visiting tourists throughout the summer,
and the locals have preserved or restored the building to its former glory. But behind the Opera House, a separate little pioneer shack serves as clothing storage and workshop station for costumes and props.

The Opera House costume shop, where the
"Little Girl" ghost appears
Costume Shop manager Laura Long gave us the tour of the building the day after our book talk. The facility consists of multiple rooms clearly added on each time more space was needed. We invited Laura to participate in our investigation. Good thing, since she's the one who's had the most interaction with the "Little Girl," the most active ghost on the premises.

Other Opera House players have also encountered the "Little Girl," sometimes as a full-bodied apparition. Several have experienced her mischievous antics.

She's known to abscond with key bits of stage costuming or props just before a performance. But she always returns them just in the nick of time (to the exasperation and chagrin of the cast), often placing these items on Laura's workshop bench.

Laura Long before the workshop
bench favored by the ghostOur team established EMF baseline readings throughout the building at the start of our investigation. (EMF stands for Electromagnetic Field, and ghosts are said to draw on this energy to manifest their presence.) Then we set up camcorder sessions with flashlight, digital recorder, and spirit box for the locations most reported for the "Little Girl."

After an hour and a half without results, we decided to clear the building and let just Kym and Laura have a go at contacting the "Little Girl." (We'd heard from several local interview sources the previous evening that the ghost preferred women and was more likely to manifest to a feminine audience.)

Kym and Laura used a camcorder, a flashlight, and a digital recorder during the session. Wraiths in the Thick team member Fonda Porterfield provided an antique child's doll named Mandy to use as a trigger object.  This configuration turned out to be a good hunch in approaching the "Little Girl." Here's the evidence we captured:

EVP capturing the ghost's name, "Hannah"
Only during later analysis, when we amplified the recording, did we detect that Kym and Laura had actually gotten a response. The capture of the little ghost's name, "Hannah," is so clear it falls under the category known as a Class A EVP, where all listeners agree on what's said. (Class B EVP are those where most hear
the same thing, and Class C EVP are those where there are differing interpretations of what's said.)

During a follow-up session, we also captured on spirit box the name "Mandy." Guess the doll was a hit after all. (We came home from the Virginia City investigation with a ton of data, which we're still sorting and analyzing, and we'll upload the spirit box capture of "Mandy" to this article at a later date.)

When we shared the EVP of the "Little Girl" ghost's name with Laura, she in turn shared it with the summer Opera House theater players. They all agreed the recording did indeed say "Hannah." The cast members may have agreed, but it also so spooked (pun intended) the players that they were reluctant to visit the costume shop afterwards. By contrast, the EVP capture thrilled Laura, who now addresses her little friend by her name.

We packed up our gear and headed across the back parking lot to conduct our second investigation on the stage of the Opera House, and the subject of the next article.

* * * We're still having as much fun analyzing the results of our ongoing investigations as we did conducting the investigations over the past year for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either your own armchair musings or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can buy the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Messages from the "Other Side" - but who are we talking to?

The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, but we didn't realize the Other Side would start initiating contact with us!


(This is the final article in a three-part series on "When the Other Side contacts YOU!" If you missed part one, click here. If you missed part two, click here.)

Last week, we shared a strange photo that showed up on Mark's camera after an investigation at the Twin Lakes Inn in Twin Lakes, Colo. -- but he didn't take this photo. The images intrigued us because closer examination revealed several faces, particularly animal heads. We set the anomalous photo aside and continued our analyses of the many other findings we had accumulated for our book Wild West Ghosts.

Whoever -- or whatever -- had sent us that photo wouldn't be ignored.

The next conversation? This past spring the photo reappeared, this time showing up on Kym's camera. But that wasn't the strangest part.

To the left, you see the photo from Mark's camera. To the right, you see the version that later appeared on Kym's.

It's clearly the same composition, but the newer version is, well, even stranger, and for a number of reasons we've explored in recent months. The most obvious anomaly is that it seems to have captured the reflection of a flash. But Kym didn't take it; neither of us did. It simply showed up this way. Okaaaaay.

Set that observation aside for a moment. We'll come back to it.

Next, we showed the new version to a friend who has much more experience with "spirit photography." She played with the contrast and reversed the photo to see what she could come up with. (She doesn't use fancy photo editing software, by the way, just simple freeware designed to clean up photos minimally.)

Her tinkering revealed this image:

The large semicircle on the left side is the reverse of the semicircular iron backboard grate of the bed just above the flash. If you take a few moments to scan and inspect this close-up, you should be able to see a number of faces. Start with the profile of the bearded man's head looking to your left in the upper right corner.

Then find the face looking pretty much straight on in the very center of the picture.

Next, try to ignore the centered face and re-see the "cut off" top of his head as part of the larger figure of a woman. The tip of the man's nose is her chin, the darkened cut-off are eyes looking to the right, with her cheekbone defined on the right just below the cut-off. The man's eye becomes her mouth and his eyebrow becomes the tip of her nose. The bottom of his jaw becomes a necklace or collar, with her shoulder extending along the black space descending to the lower right in the photo.

These kinds of superimposed images are similar to the green boxer shown in the previous article that also has a cat forming the right side of the dog image (by re-seeing the dog's right eye as the cat's left eye.)

Could all of this be mere pareidolia (the mind perceiving images where none exists)? Of course, and we continue to ask ourselves that question.

But that solution isn't compelling to us because of the unexplained origins of the two original photos. Someone -- or something -- sent them to us, presumably with intent.

If another investigator had shown us these images, we'd feel dubious. No offense if we've already broken your willing suspension of disbelief. All we can do is assure you these photos are genuine, playing only with  contrast and color values to highlight what seems to be there already.

Okay, we're working our way back to the flash but with one more important observation along the way.

Look again at the flash picture earlier in this article, and this time notice the smeared lines running left from the green swatch toward the flash. Over the green swatch there appears to be a backwards capital "S" -- in fact, we think that's what it is.

To the right is a close-up of that portion of the photo, reversed and false-color-altered to enhance the "scrawl." The capped "S" might be the word "Send." And other words, or at least letters, appear above and to the left of that "S." We're open to suggestions.

We're still considering what the next step should be, and we're considering the idea of writing our own scrawl on the photo and taking a picture to see if it comes back altered again.

In any event, this latest series of photo-ITC encounters has led us to a number of tentative observations:
The faces and images embedded in these photos suggest a sophisticated level of optical manipulation, let alone the ability to generate and implant photos on our cameras. This ability seems consistent with the history of others' reported ITC phenomena as well as our own successes in capturing audio and video recordings. Both the flash and the scrawl seem to have been generated from the perspective of the Other Side -- remember we had to reverse the image to see writing, which suggests it was written *from* the Other Side and sent directly to us.We may have to rethink what constitutes the "Other Side." Or at least we may be oversimplifying what constitutes the Other Side. Perhaps paranormal encounters produce results from more than one origin. Certainly, the photos we received suggest some sort of technology beyond the means of our assumption that we're only dealing with etheric, disembodies entities (i.e., ghosts or spirits).Clearly, we got attention of someone or something, and they decided to contact us after our initial investigations. But who or what is the source of these communications?

Many of our audio-only digital recordings as well as the ghost box EVP we captured seem contextually consistent with our intended "ghost hunt" findings. However, we also seem to have established some sort of conversation that reaches outside the paradigm we assumed we were investigating.

We invite your comments and observations. We don't have answers to explain all the evidence our journey has uncovered.

Reality is undoubtedly much more complex and fantastic than we can even imagine.


* * * We're still having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either your own armchair musings or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Unsolicited Messages from the OTHER SIDE

The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, but we didn't realize the Other Side would start initiating contact with us!

(This is the second article in a three-part series on "When the Other Side contacts YOU!" If you missed part one, click here.)

The most startling encounter occurred through ITC (Instrumental TransCommunication). The interaction  described below began while researching WILD WEST GHOSTS, but the "conversation"  has continued since the publication of the book.

Read on.

In a world defined by anomalous experiences -- EVP, flashlight conversations, invisible footfalls, cold spots, ghostly touches, and all the things we've encountered on our journey -- the following "correspondence" may be the most anomalous of all.

One of the investigations we conducted for our book Wild West Ghosts occurred at the Twin Lakes Inn in Twin Lakes, Colo. The building harbors all sorts of supernatural events, including full-bodied apparitions -- two of these manifesting during a Halloween seance! (Here's the link to our investigation, and here's the link we collected about others' encounters.)

Weeks later Mark noticed two photos of the Twin Lakes premises he didn't recall taking. For one thing, the pics occurred at the very beginning of the camera's storage, separated from the other photos of Twin Lakes and way out of sequence of absolutely every other ordered shot recorded digitally for the entire haunted hotels project. The second anomaly about these two pictures was that the file size of each was only 50k; all the other pictures on the camera were closer to a meg each.

Odd.

But the biggest anomaly was that one of these two photos -- and they
were of the same boring scene -- included a vertical green swatch that seemed to have a figure in it. What was going on?

We'd had other photo anomalies during our visit to the Twin Lakes as well. Kym's camera had recorded a number of slanted and colored streaks mixed in with some of her other photos in the building. The main subjects in each of these photo compositions were in sharp focus, but the slanted streaks all looked like motion blurs. It was a new camera and we both decided these were defective shots, and so she eliminated them.

Bad decision! 

The Twin Lakes was one of our earliest investigations, and only later did we learn that photo aberrations are still part of investigative documentation. On a more recent occasion, we've captured similar streaks. These occurred in only one of several sequential shots from the same camera position and under the same lighting. Kym took several shots because her subject was a cat, which proved an uncooperative subject and kept turning its head. Nonetheless, she captured the same sort of colored streaks during the feline photo shot that we had observed in her pictures at the Twin Lakes. So this pic provides an idea of what we captured during the Twin Lakes investigation.

A friend of Kym's, who has analyzed many paranormal photographs, told us the green light in the photo was intended to convey friendliness. She also told us to take a closer look at the green swatch in particular. Only months later did we take the time, during our more careful analysis of all the data we had collected on the project.

To our surprise, the top of the green swatch seemed to display a face.
More surprising, however, atop that face is the head of what appears to be a dog, perhaps a boxer. To the left is an enlargement of the green swatch, showing the boxer looking slightly to the left of frame.

You might have to move back from the screen to see the image(s) more clearly. The more we studied this photo, other animal faces emerged, , possibly cat heads as well.

Who sent us this picture, and why? And who are these figures? We have no answers at this point. In fact, we chalked it up to one more intriguing anomaly of our investigations and moved on to other parts of our post-investigation analysis.

It wasn't until an additional variant image of the same mysterious (larger green swatch) photo popped up -- this time on Kym's camera (recall the the original photo anomaly occurred on Mark's camera) -- that we realized someone, or something, was still trying to contact us.

This time there was no mistaking the intention because the photo now contained writing across the front of the frame. And the focus of the final article in this three-part series.

(Also look forward to an article on the findings from our current inquiries at the Opera House at Virginia City, MT, investigation ongoing on site as we write this. In the meantime, see early excerpts of that investigation on our Facebook and Twitter pages.)



* * * We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

When the Other Side contacts YOU!

When we started trying to contact the Other Side, we didn't realize some of "them" would start initiating contact with us!


The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, given the wide range of encounters we've experienced and the considerable evidence we've collected. But we've also had a number of interactions we didn't expect. Some of these more startling encounters have occurred through ITC (Instrumental TransCommunication), others through less conventional means.

Some interactions occurred during research for WILD WEST GHOSTS while others have developed since the publication of the book.

Our first inkling we weren't entirely in control of our investigations began when entities started referring to us by our first names. (These instances began -- but continued -- before other researchers suggested we use the protocol of introducing ourselves at the start of all our sessions.)

 How do they know?
These interactions tended to startle us at first, but by no means did they freak us out. In fact, we got used to the salutations. However, we should have realized they -- whoever "they" are -- no more about us than we know about them. Are we an open book, or do they have "notes" and somebody forgot to copy us in? Either way, it's clear that many times entities are fully aware of who we are and whaat we're doing even at the onset of an investigation.

In fact, sometimes they seem to know about us even before we arrive! Read on.

When Hotchkiss Paranormal Investigators (HPI) invited us to team up with them for an investigation in Cripple Creek, Colo., the group had already arranged for an overnight lock-down in the Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum. We knew the facility was reputed to be the residence for a nasty entity known as "Joe," a pedophile who had died while incarcerated there. We decided the opportunity could up our game with a different sort of paranormal activity than our haunted hotel experiences had provided.

When we arrived, we were psyched to spend time in the confinement cell where Joe seems to be at his nastiest. But our first watch turned out to be on the third floor of the building, which to our surprise had also served as a sort of part-time orphanage.

We saw pictures on that third floor of the matron in charge of the children, an African-American woman named Amy. We managed to conduct successful interactions with her through both our ghost box and a flashlight session. (See our article on that investigation here.)

Then Kym decided to visit the orphanage section of the facility and to invite any child spirits to play with her in their bunk-bed room. Nothing seemed to come of her invitation, and she felt sad for them and hoped they were well.

A couple of days after we returned home, we shared the particulars of the investigation with our daughter. She told us she'd had a dream the night before we left for Cripple Creek in which an African-American woman sat at our daughter's kitchen table and told her the children were looking forward to our visit.

She thought nothing of the dream -- until we told her about the unexpected use of the jail we discovered once we arrived.

In some sense, the spirits seemed to know we were coming, even though *we* didn't know why we were (really) coming! Even more peculiar was how they knew in advance and clearly understood we would be part of the different investigative team who had made all the arrangements.

But the name-calling and the dream invitation have not been our strangest encounters, not by a long shot. What happened next has extended over several months and is still ongoing -- the subject of next week's article.


* * * We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Voices from the Other Side - not who but when - EVP/ITC Pt 5

Who are the ghostly voices we record on both audio-only digital recorders and spirit boxes?

The previous article questioned some basic assumptions we tend to make about communications we receive from the Other -- or at least from Some Other -- Side.  


It's now time (we mean that literally) to consider not just who but also when these voices come from.

This is the next topic in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here; the second, click here; the third, click here, and the fourth, click here.

(This article continues to use case studies from our own investigations to illustrate the perplexity of identifying the sources of EVP.)

Einstein has shown pretty conclusively that time is, well, relative, according to his General and Special theories. Space-time is an interlinked dynamic, and well-defined forces can warp not only space but also time.

If non-material entities are not bound by laws governing the physics of our own reality, then why would they be bound to the laws of how we perceive time? When we add in the variable of the paranormal to space-time, the notion of "real time" events becomes problematic.

Our own investigations have uncovered instances of what may well be residual hauntings at a number of locations. In several EVP conversations, we've found ourselves little more than eavesdroppers on scenes or situations that seem to replay past events. Our investigations at the Bross Hotel, the Creede Hotel, Cripple Creek's Hotel St. Nicholas, and the Twin Lakes Inn all include recordings that suggest, in part, residual hauntings that are not a part of current real-time events.

For example, listen to the exchange at the Creed Hotel which we slow down and replay at the end of the following video:

Are we even part of the end of this conversation?
When an EVP (delivered in a woman's voice -- if we trust the gender; see our previous article) announces, "I think I'm gonna shoot you," we doubt the remark is "aimed" at us. It seems more likely a pronouncement of one invisible presence directed toward another. In fact, the conversation has a context that's likely 120 or more years old! (See our Creede Hotel article for possible context.)

Other of our investigations have made us rethink other ways time may not mean the same thing for entities we have interacted with.

If an entity walks in step with us, so  to speak, in the direction we perceive time, we seem to hold real-time conversations. But time doesn't seem to mean the same thing on the Other Side -- if it means anything at all, that is. The most pronounced example we've so far uncovered from our own evidence occurred in post-investigation analysis of a very productive EVP session we conducted at the Hotel St. Nicholas in Cripple Creek, Colo.

That session took place in what was once an operating room when the hotel was a former hospital, and our use of a spirit box in that room included instances of residual haunting remarks by unseen voices talking to other unseen voices -- all relating to surgical procedures -- as well as real-time responses directed at us.

But that same session also included an instance where a voice instructed us to reverse one portion of the recording. Listen to the following, where we play the "reverse" instruction we heard in our own arrow of time, first at the original speed and then slowed down to hear all the allophones clearly. Then we reverse the recording and get what follows:

EVP in reverse to our arrow of time
These are clearly Class A EVP, no mistake as to what we heard. In this instance, one of the entities using the spirit box no longer walks in synch alongside us but instead seems to turn around and walk against our arrow of time, heading in the opposite direction! The voice telling us to "reverse" somehow understands we might not understand and alerts us to listen to that portion against our perceived arrow of time.

And note how we heard the "reverse" instruction more distinctly by slowing down the recording. A common characteristic of EVP is delivery that sounds a little rushed or sped up. We suppose that effect could be a by-product of the rapidly generated allophones of our spirit box and the manipulations by an entity to capture and rearrange these clipped sounds into intelligible words, phrases, and sentences. But it might also signal an attempt to manipulate and produce EVP in a space-time world that has no exact equivalent on that Other Side.

As a result of such recordings, we've altered our interview routine to ask if we're talking to something/someone who is contacting us in what we perceive as "real time," or a sequence in synch with our own arrow of time. In a very recent, new investigation, the response to this query produced an EVP of "Same time," which suggests the respondent recognized the question was relevant.

Our final observation about the dubious relationship of time and EVP: Kenneth Webster's book The Vertical Plane recounts ITC communication using an early computer that only had  32k of memory. Webster, who was a school teacher, and two friends renovated a house in Chester, England, set over an ancient foundation.

They began receiving typed messages on the computer screen and soon discovered they seemed to be communicating with a former resident of the original dwelling. (Recall this was almost a decade before the Internet or anything resembling the World Wide Web). This correspondent, calling himself Tomas Harden, claimed to be from the 16th-Century -- but even more incredibly, he claimed to be writing within his own 1500s time-frame and very much alive. Even more incredibly, Harden said he received a "leems-boyste," a light box or display unit, from someone living in the 2109! You can read a version of the account here if interested.

We're not quite sure to make of this -- except that such transchronological dimensions are also well within Einstein's relativistic description, which describes all space and all time as existing simultaneously in the fabric of space-time. Such musings have become more intriguing in light of 21st-Century physics' open discussions of parallel universes and multi-dimensional realities.

The nature of time and its relevance to both EVP and ITC may be more complicated than we ever imagined.

What made the above aside seem relevant to our own investigations involved peculiar photos we found on our cameras for one investigation we conducted -- photos we didn't take -- and subsequent appearances of other photos involving the same photographic compositions but including messages to us.

We seemed to have gotten the attention of someone, or something, and the subject of our next article, in two weeks.

* * * We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Voices from the Other Side - ITC & EVP, Pt 4

Who are the ghostly voices we record on both audio-only digital recorders and spirit boxes?

As we've developed in the previous articles in this series, these devices seem to produce authentic communication. But what is the intelligence behind such electronic phenomena?  

It's time to address who -- or what -- is talking to paranormal investigators when we use ITC to record EVP.

This is the next topic in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here; the second, click here; and the third, click here.

For this article, we use case studies from our own investigations to illustrate the perplexity of identifying the sources of EVP.

Recall from Part 2 that these voices are not produced by human vocal cords. Whether the voices occur on digital recordings or through ghost boxes, EVP are not disembodied voices since they occur as the result of electronics and therefore produce human-like speech but not human speech.

This observation leads us to challenge the fundamental assumption that  "female voices" originate with  female spirits and "male voices" originate with male spirits. For one thing, we don't even know if gender is relevant for some unknown Other Side! (A good analog may be the paranormal concept of reincarnation, where  disembodied souls may well re-embody in the opposite gender. In effect, that belief system describes the soul as genderless.)

It's particularly tempting to assign gender to audio-only recordings we've captured on digital recorders. After all, these voice phenomena seem to be produced by a more direct source. But audio-only EVP are still manipulations of instrumental equipment, and we've yet to hear voices on site with our own ears: The sounds we capture only become discernible through later amplification and sometimes by slowing down the recordings to make the EVP more resemble the delivery speed we expect from normal human speech. (Faster-than-"normal" delivery is a typically reported characteristic of EVP.)

One example suffices to make our point.

When we investigated the Forest Queen Hotel in Crested Butte, Colo., we discovered on later analysis that we'd captured what we assumed was the EVP of a former prostitute named "Liz-Liz," who had reportedly jumped to her death from the window of the hotel's upper-floor Room 4.

Listen to the following to see if you think that EVP sounds like a female spirit:

A "female" EVP?
At the time of the investigation, a housekeeping staffer told us the prostitute's name was Thelma, but our subsequent research revealed her name was actually Elizabeth, or Liz-Liz. Either way, we requested -- and got -- an interaction that sounds feminine in pitch to us. But then, that's what we expected. Again, no physical anatomical human organs produced this EVP. Neither we nor anyone else understands how this electronic production takes place. We only know that the response came almost immediately after we asked for interaction.

Was is it produced by the surviving personality of Liz-Liz? Maybe. Or maybe the EVP results from some other source. Since we discovered the EVP only later, no true conversation took place to clarify who -- or what -- produced the "voice."

The capture of this EVP suggests we need to return to that hotel to investigate further, hopefully initiating a more sustained conversation with whatever created the EVP we recorded.

We couldn't make out what the voice actually says, only that it sounds like speech. Such electronic captures are called Class C EVP, or electronic voices that are difficult to understand. (Class A EVP are voices most people can understand if amplified while Class B EVP are amplified voices where not everyone will agree on the same meaning for the words.)

The supposed gender becomes even more problematic for EVP we've captured by ghost box since any non-physical intelligence using such a device must rely on available sounds. Our ghost box doesn't scan radio frequencies as a source of vocabulary. Instead, we use a box that generates only random allophones -- the box supplies no actual words -- that must be assembled into words, phrases, and sentences. As a result, if the available random sounds have a higher pitch, the EVP will "sound" feminine; if random sounds happen to have a lower pitch, they'll sound masculine.

Using ITC of this nature may assist entities from the Other Side to produce EVP, but we're even further away from trusting pitch to assign gender.

For example, listen to this EVP produced by our EchoVox ghost box at the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colo.:


A mixed-gender trio, or simply available sounds?
What intrigues us most about this recording -- well, apart from the recognition of our names even though we didn't provide that information during the session! -- is the way three "voices" work together to complete one sentence. Are we interacting with three different entities acting in synchronized, coordinated effort to communicate, or merely one unknown entity using the medley of available sounds generated by the EchoVox?

The latter seems more plausible to us -- if we can be permitted to suggest plausibility at all!

Although our discussion so far seems to take us even further away from identifying the sources of EVP, our intent is to frame the question in a broader way that might help explain what's going on -- the subject (with more examples) of our next installment.

* * * We're actually having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website to learn more.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

The black box of ghost boxes - ITC & EVP, Part 3

Ghost boxes are something of a black box -- these devices produce voices, but why this occurs is still a mystery. Even more, no one knows for sure where these electronic phenomena are coming from. 

Who is talking to paranormal investigators when they use a legitimate ghost box?

This is the third in a series of articles on Instrumental TransCommunication (ITC) and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here. If you missed the second, click here.

 The original generation of ghost boxes relied on radio frequency (RF) sweeps as a source of words, claiming such utterances were RF manipulations to allow the Other Side to communicate. But this claim is difficult to defend except in those instances where captured words record correlations to investigator questions or else describe historical circumstances surrounding reported paranormal activity.

Even then, it's a tenuous argument to say radio-generated words carry the freight of new intentions, and skeptics aren't without some justification to suggest the explanation is a combination of coincidence and investigator expectation as a more likely cause for many ghost box EVP.

For our money, we find the newest generation of ghost boxes more defensible since these devices rely on so-called phonetic generators that use only random banks of sounds as a source of utterance. These boxes contain no words at all, which means the capture of intelligible words, phrases, and sentences are remarkable.

Such gen-2 ghost boxes may produce more reliable EVP, but the voices still originate from unexplained sources.

One long-term paranormal investigator and early ghost box user is Tim Woolworth, whose ITC Voices Website is filled with careful analysis of and thoughtful insights about the nature of the phenomena. (Woolworth is a former investigator for Central New York Ghost Hunters; he also has a background as a sound engineer. We highly recommend both his Website and his insights).

One of the more thought-provoking observations he makes is that ghost boxes don't just communicate with the dead. The devices can also result from the living when they dream. (See Woolworth's article, "Consciousness Projection: Voices of the Living Through a Ghost Box.")

If you checked out the ATransC "TransCommunication White Paper" on EVP characeristics cited in the previous article in this series, you've already encountered the notion that EVP are also reported from other possible origins such as coma patients, transmissions from other dimensions, and even telepathic communications from extraterrestrials!

Maybe we should be calling these devices "Consciousness Boxes" rather than Ghost Boxes!

Some reports go even further, suggesting communication from other moments in time -- both from the past and from the future. The notion is certainly consistent with the Einsteinian theories of Special and General Relativity, which state all moments in time exist simultaneously just like all locales in space. This corollary of Relativity may be over a century old, but it nonetheless challenges our own paradigm of reality.

Although the inquiries we made for our new book WILD WEST GHOSTS tried to elicit responses from lingering residents at the haunted locales we investigated, we seemed to have collected EVP that include other non-local sources as well.

In effect, our own paranormal investigations produced instances where recorded voices sometimes converse with one another -- occasionally commenting specifically on our ghost box or else the other technology we use. At such times, we felt like eavesdroppers. At other times... perhaps the subjects of someone else's paranormal inquiries from some undefined Other Side! (At least, that's our take during moments when we let ourselves consider such unsettling possibilities.)

* * *In light of our research into the phenomena of EVP and ghost boxes, next week we'll revisit some of our own EVP captures and puzzle over the range of possible sources for these voices as well as offer a few tentative observations and conclusions.

Don't forget WILD WEST GHOSTS is now also a Kindle book and available worldwide. Here's the USA link, but easy enough to find on Amazon from any other country. :)

Until next time, Happy Fourth of July to our stateside followers, and a good weekend to our many other international friends.

Happy hunting!

Communicating with the Other Side -- ITC & EVP, Part 2

Paranormal investigators who use ghost boxes do so with the expectation these devices may provide a means of communicating with the Other Side. But ghost boxes might as well be black boxes. Sure the results can be very impressive, but where are these results coming from?

(This is the second in a series of articles on ITC -- Instrumental TransCommunication -- and EVP and their role in paranormal investigating. If you missed the first article in the series, click here. You might  want to revisit the final part of that article anyway to get a running start into this one!) 

For one thing, we have to remember that EVP are *not* human voices.

That's a hard concept for us to wrap our heads around. Sure, one of the possible origins of the voices are the survival of  personalities after death, but the voices recorded are not really their actual voices. In fact, many paranormal researchers point out EVPs can fall outside the expected frequencies and characteristics generated by human vocal cords.

EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena, and the operative word is electronic, which has two senses: 1) voices captured through electronic equipment, but also, 2) voices *generated* through electronic equipment. That means EVP are not disembodied voices since they occur as the result of electronics -- they are, after all, electronic phenomena by definition! -- and therefore produce human-like speech but not human speech.

This is true whether we're talking EVP produced by ghost boxes or audio-only digital recorders since even direct recordings capture sounds that need to be replayed in order to hear.

Nikola TeslaA Short (& Selective) History of EVP Capture EVP production has a history dating back to the beginnings of practical electronics.

Seems like every time a new technology emerged -- telegraph, wireless radio, telephone, audio recordings -- inventors and users reported strange and inexplicable messages. Even Nikola Tesla picked up unexplained voices, and since no one else was transmitting within range at that early stage of radio development, he assumed he was receiving conversations from nearby planets.

Thomas Edison considered the phenomenon, correctly deducing that EVP (a term that wouldn't take on coinage until the 1970s) would be a matter of a device sensitive enough to amplify very faint signals.

In his private diary, Edison writes, "I do myself hope that personality survives and that we persist. If we do persist upon the other side of the grave, then my apparatus, with its extraordinary delicacy, should one day give us the proof of that persistence...."

Oscar D'Argonell described voices with discarnate voices through early telephones in 1925, and Edgar Wallace captured the first EVP on a 78 r.p.m. record cutter in 1932. By 1947, Attila von Szalay reported success using magnetic tape. Father Ernetti of the Experimental Physics Laboratory at Catholic University in Milan conducted oscillograph experiments with a wire magnetiphone in 1952, but when the wire broke, he still recorded voices -- and conducted and recorded conversations with his dead father.

78 r.p.m. record cutterWhen Swedish scientist Friedrich Jürgenson was recording bird songs in 1959, he also captured a voice commenting on his work. In further recordings, he captured his deceased mother's voice telling him, "Friedrich, you are being watched." He shifted his scientific focus to EVP.

Over subsequent decades, researchers like Konstantin Raudive, Franz Seidl, Marcedllo Bacci, Americans Scott Rogo and Raymond Bayless, Hans Otto-Koenig, Sarah Estep, and many others from around the world have continued to accumulate instances of EVP. Every time a new or refined technology advanced, EVP occurred in the new form-- as though voices on the other side were indeed "watching" progress and responding.

 And on this side, paranormal researchers -- especially the Association of TransCommunication (ATransC) -- have pulled together enough data to propose a growing list of characteristics that seem to distinguish these EVP. (In particular, take a look at the ATransC "TransCommunication White Paper" to skim through a list of 21 characteristics.)

There seems to be plenty of evidence of reported communication throughout the 20th Century, often from scientists and researchers who stumbled onto EVP even when they weren't looking for the phenomenon.

Ghost Box Tech But let's fast-forward to 2002, and the invention of the first ghost box by Frank Sumption, often called "Frank's Box." The purpose of Sumption's device was real-time communication with the dead, and he claimed he got inspiration for the design from the spirit world -- guess they were "watching" him as well!

Frank's box was perhaps the first device to combine white noise and radio frequency (RF) scanning to provide sounds that spirits could use for communication, and it received its share of criticism from skeptics and paranormal investigators alike, citing that even though words were random, the experience was still explainable as auditory pareidolia – a situation created when the brain incorrectly interprets random patterns as being familiar patterns. Not to mention other sources of transmission such as Citizen's Band radio!

Fair enough, and one of the plausible objections to many subsequent iterations of ghost boxes over the next dozen years. But the latest generation seems to have sophisticated the process in a way that no longer relies on RF. 

And at that point, the game just got more interesting -- the subject of the next article.


* * *
We're pleased to announce our book WILD WEST GHOSTS is now a Kindle, and it's available worldwide! Here's the USA link, but easy enough to find on Amazon from any other country. :)

The book recounts 14 investigations we conducted using both ITC and ghost boxes (guess it's something of a spoiler to reveal that the next article is going explain why we still buy into ghost box-generated EVP!)

In the meantime, happy hunting!