About the EVPs in My House

 

     No, I'm not talking about Electronic Voucher Payment Systems or Electric Vehicle Plugin Stations. I'm talking about Electronic Voice Phenomenon.

     I lead a busier life than you may think. Those that still tune in to my semi-regular rantings about all things political know that I'm also a working novelist, although I haven't published, nor completed, a new book since 2020. So I write fiction and about politics. Like any good Bay Stater, I follow the Red Sox during baseball season. And, of course, I do all the things necessary to running a household.

     But over the last several years, especially lately, I've been nurturing a growing interest in the paranormal. It's the closest thing I have to a secret life and I don't even talk about it much with my sons. It runs parallel with my interest in UFOs. By that, I don't mean to say I accept anything that doesn't fit our preconceived notions of what's believable. Things that seem paranormal or extraterrestrial in nature could simply be pareidolia, which, according to Merriam Webster, is "the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern."

     If anything, I'm actually a skeptic. Sometimes, that statue on Mars is actually a rock. Sometimes, that flying saucer you see really is a weather balloon. If anything, I'm skeptical of the "evidence". I'm not skeptical about the existence of extraterrestrials or ghosts.

     Having said that, I've seen and heard things in my life I cannot explain by any rational means. I've seen vacuum cleaner cords suddenly fly out of wall outlets, heard my dead cat's voice meowing at me from the floor on my side of the bed. And I've heard EVPs.

     There's an old saying in the paranormal investigative community- Never do your first EVP session alone. Yet, when Barbara was in Florida once years ago, that's just what I did. That first night, I heard what sounded like a woman humming. That same night, I heard a stereotypical ghost's voice, a male, tell me, "Fuck you." Yes, sometimes, they can have an attitude.They're dead. Don't expect them to be happy about it.

     Then years went by before I did another EVP session. Lately, after certain self-interested psychopaths made me an involuntary bachelor, I began doing more EVP sessions. Last night was such a night.

     Last winter, I captured a couple of EVPs in back to back sessions. I asked, "Is there anything I can help you with?" And the immediate response was, "I need help." When I heard that on playback, I asked, "What do you need help with?", the reply was, "Everything." There's such a thing as Class A EVPs, or the clearest ones. These were what I call Class A+. They were so loud and clear, you didn't even need head phones to hear it.

     The creepy thing was not what it had said but how it sounded. It was Central Casting's idea of what the Devil should sound like. I have a very deep voice but this entity sounded positively demonic. So, since we were working on the audiobook version of Hollywoodland, I sent the audio files to my narrator, Marnie Sher at Sweet Tone Sound. Being an audiobook narrator, Marnie has the audio software in her recording studio to analyze, isolate and loop certain pieces of audio.

     I told her what I'd picked up on digital audio, recorded on my cell phone, and asked if she could analyze the demonic voice I'd picked up. So she downloaded the audio files and put them on a loop, which I could plainly hear on her end over the phone. And we heard, "I need help. Everything," over and over.

     Finally, Marnie announced she was deleting the audio files and even the email in which they arrived. She then made me promise to never do that to her again, which I vowed to. Yes, the voice was so creepy, she made me promise to never send her anything like that again. And I haven't.

     So, OK, I got a creepy male voice (Later that night, I read him the riot act and told him to get the fuck out of my house. I haven't heard him since). I've gotten other male voices speaking words here and there. But never really something I could definitively identify as a female voice.

     Last night, that changed.

     Lately, I've been doing EVP sessions specifically calling on female spirits to contact me. Dozens of EVP sessions. Since ghosts and spirits are not trained performers, and they resent being treated as such, they don't appear on command and likely can't even hear you. So I'd say over 90% of the EVP sessions I conduct end up disappointing me.

     Several nights ago, I let my temper get the better of me and I said in no uncertain terms that if I didn't start hearing something interesting enough to keep me going, that I was going to stop the sessions that night. Once again, I got nothing I could take to the bank. So I stopped.

     But last night, I had a feeling that if I didn't do another EVP session, I'd be sorry. So I did a few last night, got little to nothing. Then I went to bed and continued doing them. I was far from the refrigerator's condenser, there were no cars on the road. Little to no chance for evidence contamination.

     Then I got the idea to do less talking and to simply place the phone on the bed while I went on with my normal routine of reading. During one such session, I asked, "What's your name?". At precisely 4:37 in, I heard a little girl's voice say in a sing-songy tone, "I don't have a name." Now, I have a theory as to why she feels she no longer has a name but I'll keep that to myself for now.

     I told a couple of my Facebook friends about what I heard. One of them was Kent Burris, who runs the heavily-trafficked Ghosts of Carmel Maine Youtube channel and I asked him for his opinion.

     Unfortunately, I can't post the audio on either Facebook or this blog unless I sign up for a Sound Cloud account, which I'm not going to do. 

     But if you could hear it, you'll note the stark difference in tone and timber. I have a very deep voice and there's no way I can make my voice sound that high. Plus, I'm literally the only living creature in my house as all my neighbors moved away. There's no way that a 64 year-old guy with a deep voice can make himself sound like a little girl.

     This EVP alarmed me in a way that I haven't been since at least last winter when I heard that demonic voice. It marked the first time that I'd ever heard a complete sentence, five words, from what was unmistakably a female entity during an EVP session.

     But rewards can be double-edged. Yes, I got what I'd been tirelessly asking for for months. I got that female voice, a lost little girl out there in the ethers and one who thinks she doesn't have a name. My heart went out to her and I know she's real. If you could hear the audio file (and I can email it to you if you email me at crawman2@yahoo.com and ask for it), you'd hear it, too, and know that I'm not out of my gourd. It's not as if I'm the first person who ever picked up clear EVPs before.

     Earlier last night, I also picked up something, another female voice that sounded as if it was screaming or crying out, "Noooooo!" Sometimes, they, too, are alarmed at what they hear. More often than not, they don't realize they're dead. Last July 25th, I got a male voice that said, "I live here." Not "lived", past tense, but "live." Sometimes they see or even hear you and can't understand for the life of them, for want of a better phrase, why you're there. Sometimes, they resent your presence. Sometimes, they're trapped and baffled and furious and can't understand why they can't continue their journey and they ask us for help.

     And I do have an honest desire to help these spirits, just as Kent does. Kent has actually solved murder mysteries and found human bones beneath his kitchen at the Lamb House in Carmel, Maine. He's helped usher lost souls to the next realm, such as Rachel Mitchell, whose bones he'd found, and solved her sister Naomi's murder in 1912 (It wasn't J. Sherman Gray who did it but a drifter named Butch Powell).

     This morning, I got a DM from Kent who announced he wasn't doing any more paranormal investigations for the time being because of the sudden death of one of his sons on August 3rd. This is not something unusual for Kent, of late, because just recently, he lost his brother to skin cancer and several friends had also suddenly died within the last year, always, it seems, just before they were to go to the Lamb House in Carmel to do an investigation.

     I don't know what this line of investigation will do to me in the long run but right now, I feel like that stereotypical moth getting drawn closer and closer to that flame. The dead, as I keep saying in my crime novels and thrillers, still have untold stories to tell and they depend upon we, the living, to tell them.

     So I will. Because I am, after all, a storyteller.