The earliest known scientific attempt at receiving communication with the so-called dead via recording equipment - apart from Edison's solitary work in the 1920's - was on April 23rd, 1933, in the studios which later became known as Decca Records. Member from the American S.P.R. and engineers from Western Electric Co. worked with the studio engineers.

These engineers had devised test conditions that they thought would eliminate any chance of fraud. However, a deceased engineer and an eminent research engineer in the science of sound spoke many times into many unusually placed microphones and they also moved their voice levels up to 3 - 5,000 cycles, way beyond the range of any human being. Records were kept at the ASPR offices, but the crucial test stayed in the hands of the studio engineers who refused to testify publicly that spirit voices had been recorded. such as cemeteries, abandoned buildings, old churches, battle fields, old schools, etc..

I remember just a few years ago when I played some EVP utterances that were on the non-magnetic side of my reel-to-reel tape to an 'open-minded' electronics engineer. Unable to account for them, presumably, and because he knew that they couldn't be there, he walked out on me. We should not expect to be believed, when we talk of paranormal subjects, unless we know that the listener's mind has already reached a certain stage. If he is new to the subject or has not yet had his negative presumptions sufficiently weakened by the bombardment of evidence from various sources, then he simply is unable to believe us.

I remember hearing about the judge who said that the evidence for the genuineness of the phenomena was overwhelming, but that they were impossible, and he must, therefore, decide against the evidence. As Arthur Ellison knew well, there are critics who can never accept survival reports of an evidential nature because they 'know' that physical phenomena are impossible. Bearing all this in mind, I shall assume that the reader of this has already practiced EVP and knows enough about the background of it, or is sufficiently a believer and wishes to go further. EVP is the only unexplained phenomena that affects matter objectively and this effect, captured on tape, can be re-played and measured in scientific laboratories. It was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1971 with the publication of Konstantin Raudive's book BREAKTHROUGH.

Well do I remember the first time I listened to discarnate voices emanating from magnetic recording tape! It was 1981 in the Maryland house of Sarah Estep, the writer of a down-to-earth book, VOICES OF ETERNITY and the founder of the American Association of EVP. For three hours I sat enthralled, knowing full well that this was a day that was to change the course of my life.

When 1 returned home, armed with a borrowed recorder, I started trying to communicate with any passing spirits who might hear me, or, as Benson Herbert in his Paraphysical Laboratory would later remonstrate with me, any body or any THING from any other plane of existence! I immediately heard 'sounds', unintelligible whispers that I was fairly certain should not have been there, and in a matter of two weeks, I heard my first intelligible word TINA.

Since then, apart from some long months when I was unable to record, I have contacted my EVP friends on a daily basis, where in the world I happened to be, using the simple equipment with which I started out. Looking back over the last twenty years, what has been my progress? At one point I discovered, to my joy, that if I hung my recorder around my neck and walked around my flat as I was recording the EVP utterances became magnified and much more abundant. I began hearing from entities who would give me their names, details of their lives such as addresses and names of relatives, living and dead, to such an extent that I have been able to look people up in the local phone-book, people formerly unknown personally to me and - after a tactful probe - have been able to tell them that I have messages for them from beyond the grave.

I have often heard from 'Kosta' Raudive who always calls me CHRISTINA, and, in fact. just a couple of months ago I captured an EVP utterance on my BT call-back system which BT kindly duplicated for me. A woman's voice says: HERE 1S KOSTI CALL YOU followed by a male tone saying: TINA IT 'S NOT EASY. A couple of deceased well-known people have given me messages which may, or may not, be evidential to their families.

A favourite uncle and two of my husbands have spoken to me - in their OWN voices. Helen Duncan manifested on a tape that I made when mentioning a Scottish friend, not knowing that he, at this time, was involved in the process of trying to get her a 'broad pardon'. Someone shouted one day that he was 'from Wilmington'. When an article mentioned this fact, a very good friend from Derbyshire called me up to say that her deceased husband, about whom I knew nothing, had been born there. Now and then I make small sojourns to special places.

These can be spiritual spots, scenes of great turbulence of emotion or haunted buildings where I try to recover a small part of their past history on my recording tape. One such journey was recently when I hiked to the peak of Carreg Goch in the Carmarthen Fans in mid-Wales. I was looking for the wreck of a Wellington bomber that crashed in November 1944- taking with it its six young airmen. On my return home and on playback of the short tape made there I heard the loud, deep male voice shouting JOSEPH along with other voices that spoke in what sounded like RAF jargon. A French name was mentioned, the word FOG was heard (was this the Welsh mist that did for them on that winter night so long ago?) and another voice said ROMMEL IS IN TROUBLE.

A quick glance into an encyclopedia gave us the fact that Rommel had also died in 1944 - coincidence? An emotive voice told us WE DIED ON DUTY. On the stone memorial erected on the site in their honour we noted that two of the names recorded are JOSEPH and three of the others are obviously French. On this occasion, as on others, I made a short prayer for the souls of the deceased and ask that they see God's light surrounding them. So much 'proof', not only for myself, but for others, too, whom I may or may not know, of survival of the human personality.

There are some EVP researchers who use much more sophisticated equipment than just a simple tape recorder. Special microphones and receivers have achieved remarkable results. There's something called a digital signal processor audio filter which does with an audio signal what a multi-million dollar NASA computer does - it's a noise filter that makes stunning improvements with Class A and B voices.

The Japanese have a home computer that has an omni-sensitive receiving device that can pick up faint electrical pulses and patterns that other machines cannot detect. Otto Koenig, in Germany, has long experimented with ultrasonic frequencies, the purpose of which is to get the voices down to within the human hearing level. The voices are generally classified as: Class A - loud and clear, interpreted the same by all Class B - reasonably clear, interpreted differently Class C - requires headphones and open to interpretation. However, for those of you who are just beginning to research EVP the initial outlay is a portable cassette tape recorder, a small microphone and headphones. It is not necessary to be a psychic superstar or gifted medium to communicate with unseen worlds, but a certain amount of time, patience and persistence is necessary.

EQUIPMENT NEEDED FOR RECORDING PARANORMAL VOICES ON MAGNETIC TAPE TAPE RECORDER Time and time again amateur sites have posted evp's that are nothing more then feedback from their recorded voice of whomever is talking near by at the time and or vibrations of sounds and mistaken to be that of giggles or laughs of the spirits and is not so! Paranormal voices have been recorded on all types of tape recorders. I, personally, have outstanding success with a Sony portable, hand-held, stereo cassette recorder with an in-built microphone. It is important that the recorder should have a REVIEW key as well as a digital tape counter.

The REVIEW key enables you to quickly rewind the tape to a suspected EVP utterance so that you can keep repeating the same passage if it is not a Class A sound. The digital counter, of course, enables you to 'log' any EVP utterances so that you can save them for future reference and hearing. MICROPHONE 1 never bother any more with a separate microphone, useful for bypassing the in-built microphone of the recorder, or for dropping into wells and crevices etc. when needed, but if you want to use one then the omni-directional electret condenser microphone is the most sensitive.

The recorder that I use with the built-in microphone, of course, picks up the vibrational noise of the recorder motor, but this does not bother me as I believe that it may help to enhance the voices. HEADPHONES


Headphones should always be used on playback, I always listen with my eyes closed to allow for extreme concentration and I always use the small in-the-ear type headphones.
TAPE
Always buy a good type such as TDK, SONY, MAXELL etc. a high sensitivity tape, not longer than 60 minutes as sometime the longer tapes can tend to ravel.

BACKGROUND SOUND SOURCE

In the beginning it is better for you to have some kind of background noise so that the unseen communicators can more easily manifest themselves onto the tape by making use of the energy of the background sound. I usually have the Radio Wales, Welsh language, on as there is no confusion when I am winkling out the English-speaking EVP utterances answering my questions etc. Just how loud or soft to have the radio is something that you will learn with time - not TOO loud and not TOO soft.

You may want to try 'mush', a jumble of foreign language stations usually at night-time, but it must ALWAYS be a fresh, incoming radio signal, not pre-recorded sound.

RECORDING PROCEDURE

You will not know, of course, until play-back what responses you have captured on your tape so when you are ending the session you might want to thank them for listening and speaking, if they were able to do so, and let them know that you will be returning again at the same time the next day.

PLAYBACK

Listening for EVP is an art that must be learned, extreme concentration is needed as many entities speak in soft, whispery tones, often ON TOP of your own voice and also the background sound source. Not only can the voice entities make themselves heard by modulating noise, they can also wipe out some content of normal radio transmission or the taper's voice and substitute their own messages. They do this with speech, music and Morse code.

Apart from the voices, which can sound young, old, male, female, mechanical and human you may also hear musical segments, singing, knocks, whistles, raps, scratches, sighs, whispers and foreign languages. Also, many sounds, when played at lower or higher speeds turn out to be intelligible words or phrases. Some voices are also to be found on the wrong or
REVERSE side of tapes. That is, in between the 'nonsense' of reversed human voices there are to be found forward-speaking voices.

EVP entities are not without humour. One morning after I had commented on my desire to 'receive messages of an evidential nature' the response was YES MADAME PRESIDENT, and on one occasion when I had spent an inordinately long time going over a planned route up a local hill the question came WHERE ARE WE GOING, TO KATMANDU! Some of the interesting anomalies that are to be found in EVP are: simultaneously-run tapes giving different results, voices can occasionally be heard AT the time of their being manifested onto the tape, voices are captured on tapes being run in an empty room, they sometimes give you glimpses of the future and they can sometimes sound like a deceased person or a living person. EVP entities probably communicate by one of three methods:

1) a spirit speaks directly into the microphone and voices of this kind may be whispery.
2) psychokinetically, that is, electronic impulses are sent out by a mind and registered as speech on tape. These voices may be mostly mechanical.
3) transmitted from a central transmitting agency (communications centre) like a telephone exchange, where the taper functions as a receiving station, an antenna, using the equipment and their unique individual electrical energy. Voices mostly may sound human.

EVP entities may be voices of the dead and also possibly from some other intelligences, spiritual beings or living inhabitants of space. Also, they may come from different levels of planes of existence, multiverses, worlds existing side by side with ours only vibrating at faster, or slower vibrations.

The concept of multiverses is already espoused by many physicists doing solid experiments in particle accelerators. This would explain why, when using my variable speed control tape recorder, 'bangs' turn into intelligible words and fast, high-pitched utterances become understandable words spoken at normal speed when I slow the tape down as far as my recorder will allow. The charge may be levelled at you that you are dealing with lower spirits in lower planes. You immediately know that the accuser has not tried EVP for himself.

The entities that say they want to HELP US and things like YOUR SOUL IS NOT DEFEATED, that they LOVE US, that give us their beautiful singing, single and choral - then if these are lower spirits, then let me be one of them! I also reject the unconscious PK theory which assumes the existence of some Jekyll and Hyde personality without taking into account the enormous stress seen in people demonstrating PK. It would mean that I could impersonate a huge range of voices, male and female, speak in unknown languages etc. Our unconscious may be a link between researchers and the voice entities but I do not believe that EVP originates from the unconscious mind.

Back in 1936 Attila von Szalay, along with others, tried unsuccessfully to record the voices they heard clairaudiently. It is possible that we are dealing with, unknown to us as yet, a new kind of energy that links us for a short time with other dimensions. As the French priest Father Francois Brune said some years ago: "The dead speak to us. That is not new. For centuries Spiritualists have maintained they had contact with the dead. However, scientific disciplines were rarely imposed. But now the dead no longer need a human intermediary. They use tape recorders, or even TV sets. And what is more objective than a machine?"

BACKGROUND EXPLANATION:
The background sound of this page, is my very first evp, I captured on digital recorder while sleeping. When I woke and heard this on my recorder, I got a vision with it. If you turn up your volume, and can stand the wind, sand storm noise, at the end of the recording, of the sounding musical notes, of a frequency, you will hear a man whisper this" Come here Judith, their leaving. I was so, so, very shocked at this evp. This evp used to bother my emotions whenever I listened to it for a good year or so. I used to get teared up, upon listening to it, I don't any longer. I understand it now. The meaning behind it. I was also told way down the road, by my spirit friend (past life husband) that it was him who spoke to me in this evp. My vision was this below as follows, when I first heard the evp. I was in a dirty tent or cave of some sort, I could see nothing but dry desert all around, but barely being able to see for the hight winds, I had a man I could not see his face, but I could see his wrapped (what looked like rags around him) blowing in the wind. I could see his arm and hand reach out to me, and heard him say. " Come here Judith, their leaving" As I reach out to take his hand to help me up. I look to my left and see 10-12 people also wrapped in what looked like rags (beige or tan in colour) blowing in the wind, and them fighting this sand storm, getting smaller and harder to see, as they walk in a single file line, away and further from us. I am so tired and exausted, I don't want to get up, but I know I must, or we will be left behind and lost and the two of us alone. I believe now the reason I used to get teary eyed and emotional when I listend to this evp many times since, was due to it being a past life, and love of a husband I missed so dearly. I did not know at the time, why, but now have been told who it was, after I asked. I have not been able to communicate any further conversation of what year, or location of this past life was, Though I do know I lived 20 previous life time, and one being in Chicago, and that my husbands name was Johnathan Shepard, I have yet to get more details, and get clear louder communication enough to make it out. I gave up temporarily for now. Though I do still have much communication at any given moment, with 4 spirits on a regular bases, when they and I have the time, and other spirits crossing back and forth and between.