Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife (17 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human mind is also adept at turning nothing at all into intelligible sounds. C. Maxwell Cede, an honorary secretary of London’s Society for Psychical Research, described for David Ellis an experiment in which a group of people were handed paper and pencil and asked to help transcribe what they were told was a faint, poor-quality recording of a lecture. The subjects offered dozens of phrases and even whole sentences they’d managed to make out—though the tape contained nothing but white noise.
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Konstantin Raudive seemed especially prone to the verbal transformation effect. At one point in Ellis’s research, he had a group of people listen to purported utterances Raudive had collected and write down what they heard. Where Raudive heard “Lenin,” others heard “glubboo,” “buduloo,” “vum vum,” a bullfrog, a sudden change in tape tension, and “a low elephant call.” Late in his career, Raudive became fixated on the vocalizations of a parakeet, which he believed to be channeling communications (in German) from the dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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