HAUNTED MONDAY: The Haunted History of EVPs

Hi, I’m Gail from In the Shadows Paranormal, and it’s Haunted Monday.

Today: EVPs.

EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon—sounds or apparent voices captured on recordings that weren't noticed at the time.

And the idea has a surprisingly long history.

In the late 1950s, Swedish artist and filmmaker Friedrich Jürgenson began reporting unexplained voices on recordings he made with a tape recorder.

Then came Konstantīns Raudive, a Latvian psychologist and writer who became fascinated by Jürgenson’s work. During the 1960s, Raudive conducted thousands of recording experiments attempting to capture unexplained voices.

His work helped turn EVP from an obscure experiment into something people around the world began investigating.

But here’s the important part:

Not every strange sound on a recording is a ghost.

It could be background noise. An animal. Radio interference. Someone talking in the distance. Or our brains may simply be trying to turn an ambiguous sound into recognizable words.

That phenomenon even has a name: auditory pareidolia.

So when we capture something unusual, we don't start with, “It's a ghost.”

We start with:

What is that?

This weekend, I was recording in Colorado's Black Forest. Remmi was with me—you'll hear her breathing—and I was talking to her.

Then this happened.

Black Forest (raw version)

Did you hear anything?

Listen again.

Black Forest (slightly cleaned up version)

What I hear is something like:

“They say you won't.”

And immediately afterward, you'll hear me say:

“Excuse me?”

Is it an EVP?

I don't know.

More than sixty years after Raudive began experimenting with a tape recorder, we're still asking essentially the same question:

What did we just record?

And maybe that's the most interesting part.

Listen. Question. Explore.