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It is that time of year again, when our minds—pinged by cultural stimuli—collectively tune to the eerie, the mysterious, the spooky, and the uncanny. Whether you consider yourself a believer or a hard-line skeptic—whether the stories are myths, hoaxes, urban legends, or deeply private mystical experiences—one would be remiss not to acknowledge that, as a phenomenon, our obsession with the paranormal is fascinating. At the very least, it outlines aspects of our psychology like little else. Whatever culture you come from, it's a safe bet that from childhood onward you've encountered countless tales of ghosts, demons, and monsters. This is the domain of the supernatural—the otherworldly—and while many of us fence these things behind the veil of fantasy, many others go through life with anything from a mild sense to a full conviction that at least some of it is true.
Ghost stories tend to re-emerge with new media: the telegraph era begot table-rapping séances; early photography presented “spirit” portraits via double exposures and retouching; the phonograph and telephone were certainly cast as conduits; and radio…c’mon…it’s signals traveling invisibly through the air—what did you expect to happen?! From the 20th century onward, rapid technological change created unusually fertile ground for a suite of paranormal phenomena. Recording technology, in particular, was a vital step, since it seemingly presented means to detect and capture typically fleeting and personal mystical encounters. With the arrival of tape, many researchers and enthusiasts claimed to capture voices from beyond—amassing a body of often grating yet alluring recordings, whose controversial nature sparks fierce debates regarding the afterlife, the nature of consciousness, and the quirks of our perceptual apparatus in its attempts to strip signal from noise. These recordings became known as the electronic voice phenomenon, and in this seasonal article, I would like to revisit its early history and muse over this bizarre point of intersection between audio technology and metaphysics.
Technology and Metaphysics
The striving to establish a connection between the worlds of the living and those on the other side is, perhaps, as old as humanity itself. And while the ancients dealt with this exclusively through rituals and ceremonies, physical exhaustion, and/or psychoactive substances, the 20th-century technological shift opened up new portals into the unknown. What once belonged to religion and spirituality began, in the new era, to take on a scientific flair—or at least the look of one.
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Anecdotal accounts—hardly verifiable—sometimes claim that Alexander Graham Bell, the founder of telephony, pondered a device to commune with the deceased. Thomas Edison, by contrast, in 1920 interviews with Forbes and Scientific American, did publicly muse about building an ultra-sensitive apparatus to detect or communicate with “the other side,” the so-called spirit phone, although no working machine ever surfaced. And, reportedly, the radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi also believed that such a device was in the realm of possibility. Nikola Tesla’s affair with the unknown was more experiential: while experimenting with high-frequency radio in Colorado Springs, he reported picking up anomalous repeating signals—speculating an extraterrestrial origin, rather than spirit.
However, one of the most significant catalysts for the coalescence of the scientific and paranormal was the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, along with its American sister organization, the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), formed in 1885. Organized as nonprofits, the groups emerged from proposals by physicist William F. Barrett and a Cambridge circle led by Henry Sidgwick (with F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney), aiming to pull together serious minds from science and spiritualism—a 19th/early-20th-century movement rooted in the belief that awareness survives death and can sometimes communicate through mediums. Among scholars involved over the years were William James (psychologist/philosopher), William Crookes (chemist/physicist), Sir Oliver Lodge (physicist and wireless pioneer), and Mary Everest Boole (mathematician and educator).
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William Crookes, best known for the Crookes tube (a proto–vacuum tube pivotal to early electron studies), was deeply committed to psychical research. He spent a good portion of the 1870s investigating prominent mediums—including Kate Fox (one of the founding Spiritualist sisters), Florence Cook, and Daniel Dunglas Home—and, unlike many who later grew skeptical, Crookes remained convinced for the rest of his life that psychic forces could, in fact, act on matter. His reports describe spring balances that deflected, electrical circuits that faltered, and photographic plates exposed without touch—which he, and many believers later, took as evidence that electrical and mechanical devices are peculiarly prone to being “haunted.”
The SPR’s fellow member Sir Oliver Lodge, a scientist who helped formalize tuned circuits in radio, had a similarly deep affinity for spiritualism as Crookes, albeit his conviction was hardened after personal tragedy: the death of his son Raymond in WWI in 1915. In Raymond, or Life and Death (1916), Lodge describes his own sittings with the renowned medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, where he believed he unmistakably received messages from his son. Many others who analyzed his writings remained skeptical; however, Lodge continued to believe, and liked to resort to wireless language, like tuning and resonance, as a metaphor for communication across the proverbial bridge. Although his own use of communication technology to commune with the dead didn’t actualize, his thinking certainly planted the idea that these tools could be used to cross the threshold of communication.
The boundary between science and metaphysics remained quite porous until the 1930s, when, not satisfied with the quality of the acquired results, the mainstream scientific community started drifting away. However, this did little to curb the public appetite for mystery, and as communication technology reached the public, the topic naturally resumed outside the academic fence of reason and rationale.
Voices From The Ether
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Born in 1903 in Odessa (now Ukraine), Friedrich Jürgenson (1903-1987) spent the better half of his life moving, quite often escaping from places engulfed in violent conflicts and political upheavals. Over the years, he passed through Estonia, Germany, Palestine, and Italy before settling in Sweden, where he married and became a citizen. Trained as a musician and painter, his career took several peculiar turns—opera singer, broadcaster, and even a documentary artist commissioned for the archaeological excavation of Pompeii. He was exactly the sort of multifariously curious, sensitive, and creative individual who would not only get early access to tape recorders but also be attuned to the novel experiences they might present.
Such a thing—in fact, a pivotal moment in his life, and by extension for generations of paranormal enthusiasts to follow—occurred on a sunny afternoon in June, 1959. That day he and his wife drove to their countryside house, located around 40 miles away from Stockholm. Secluded, it offered an excellent location to experiment with a new tape recorder he had purchased recently, which was supposed to deliver great sound fidelity. The plan was to record birdsong, and once Jürgenson set up the equipment in the attic studio of the house, he turned his ear toward a finch warbling close outside the window. He positioned the mic toward the bird, pressed "record," and rolled the tape for a few minutes.
To his surprise, upon the playback of the recording, the finch's voice appeared muffled and distant, overlaid by a thick layer of shower-like noise. Confused, Jürgenson first attributed this to mundane technical issues—perhaps, a tube malfunction. He took another pass at recording, but again found the tape filled with roaring static. Then, unexpectedly, a trumpet-like flourish emerged as if preceding an announcement, followed by a quiet male voice talking in Norwegian about "bird songs at night," layered with a choir of chirping and chattering birds. A moment later, the recording switched to normal, with the finch's song at the forefront. This left Jürgenson totally surprised. He still leaned toward logical explanations—a Norwegian radio broadcast must've somehow bled into his recording—yet he couldn't help but feel conflicted about how fitting this mysterious voice was to his particular context.
…Friedrich, You Are Being Observed
Intrigued and fascinated, Jürgenson continued to observantly record. However, it wasn't until a month had passed that he was able to capture another mysterious signal. On the night of July 12th, he was sitting alone in the room with the recorder in front of his desk. He wasn't able to procure a pair of headphones for real-time monitoring of the sounds, so he had to rely on watching a small flickering control lamp, which moved from orange to red when the microphone was picking up a sound. He was almost falling asleep when suddenly the light started to flash actively. He pressed record and waited impatiently until the flickering stopped. Listening back at night, Jürgenson struggled to hear beyond the now-familiar static; however, the next morning, he revisited the tape and got shivers from what seemed to be a rather personal message.
First, a German male voice ungrammatically uttered: "Tsar-region we must springtime speak about…" followed by the eerily directed "Friedrich, you're being observed…" and "Friedrich, when you translate and interpret into German during the day, try to solve the truth every evening with the ship…with the ship in the dark!," then a single word in English followed: "Churchill!"
To Jürgenson, this didn't seem entirely like nonsense as, at the time, he was actively researching Tsarist Russia for a book he was writing. Then things started to get increasingly more bizarre. One morning, shortly after Jürgenson purchased headphones, he was sitting in his studio trying to listen, now in real-time, to the voices that were reaching towards him through the static. A ring of the telephone pulled him downstairs. He went unwillingly, leaving the recorder rolling. As he was speaking on the phone, he took a mental note of his poodle Carino hastily heading into his studio and making some noise there. Rushing to the studio after the call, Jürgenson was welcomed by Carino sitting on his chair in front of the recording setup, wagging his tail. As Friedrich started to listen back to the tape, flabbergasted, he discovered how out of the static a voice of an Italian man called out to his dog: "Ah, Carino…Carino, t'annunzio?...Carino, here is the apparatus…Carino, do you know me?"
Guided By A Voice
This convinced Jürgenson to retire from painting entirely, and fully shift his attention toward these interdimensional transmissions, whatever they were. For a while, like Tesla, he considered the origin of these voices to be extraterrestrial, but as the characters behind them continued to reveal themselves to be deceased people, his understanding changed.
Encounters included tyrants such as Stalin and Hitler, as well as other political figures of the war era such as Churchill; there were warm and loving messages from Jürgenson's mother too; but perhaps the most prominent voice was that of a principal helper/guide, whom he identified as Lena. What was particularly surprising about Lena is that her voice reached Friedrich beyond the recording equipment, in his daily life. He described it as if the sound was coming from around him in moments where he would be sitting in his studio listening to the rain. Words, partially or in full sentences, would manifest out of the drizzle of falling raindrops. Lena's voice would say something along the lines of "Contact!" or "Make Contact!" as if urging him to keep listening. Lena would also navigate Jürgenson's recording sessions, speedily responding to his inquiries, identifying other speakers, and clearing up arising questions.
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Guided by Lena, he continued to hone his approach, and eventually, discovered that radio, when carefully tuned to a specific frequency range—1445 to 1500kHz—was particularly conducive to paranormal transmissions. So his setup now evolved into a microphone positioned dead close to a radio speaker emanating the base noise from which voices were to emerge. Later in the century, the particularly active channel at 1485.0kHz even prompted new generations of paranormal investigators to name it in his honor as the Jürgenson Frequency.
Fascinating as this period was, Jürgenson also wrote of the strain it caused—brooding over what he was hearing and wrestling with doubt—before deciding that the fact the voices could be replayed from tape meant the phenomenon was at least testable. To steady himself, he pushed the work into the open. In mid-June 1963 he held a press conference at his home in Mölnbo; Swedish Radio’s chief engineer Kjell Stensson even examined the gear beforehand, and the event drew attention from national and international media. A year later, he staged a second “international press conference” (June 1964), after which he described his “hardest ordeal in Nordheim [Northeim]” during demonstrations for skeptics. At these public sessions and later playbacks, attendees reported hearing brief phrases on the tapes—accounts often summarized with lines like “Listen to the dead at the press conference… we are contacting Mölnbo” and “Listen… contact!”—which helped propel further attempts at replication. Soon after, Jürgenson recorded for Swedish broadcasting figures and started a deep collaboration with Latvian-German parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive (1909-1974), who, like no one else, propelled the research forward.
The Breakthrough
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Aside from hours of tape, Jürgenson also set down his experience in print—first Voices from Space (1964), then a fuller, updated Voice Transmissions with the Deceased (1967). The first book found its way to Konstantīns Raudive (1909–1974), a Latvian-born psychology scholar and zealous parapsychologist, who read it twice, by his own account, and wrote in April 1965 asking for a private demonstration. A small group assembled at Jürgenson’s country place. He played a few examples, and Raudive noted that although the voices seemingly were present in the recordings, the untrained ears of the attendees simply were not attuned to make sense of them. The sounds were short, noisy, rhythmic, and abrupt, which required an ear to get accustomed to them through repeated playback.
Later, Jürgenson made a recording in real time, which seemed to have reached everyone present. He then made a demonstration of the radio-based method, tuning to the noise between the stations and recording it. In one of these sessions, recorded on a June evening in 1965, Raudive discovered a personally addressed message: “Do you know Margaret, Konstantin?” in German, followed by “We are far away! Speak!” in Latvian, then “Go to sleep! Margarete!” in French. This seemed significant to him because he was deeply impressed by the recent passing of his friend Margaret. At this point, he was totally in, and if Jürgenson’s brush with the ethereal voices was professedly incidental, Raudive wanted to set his research toward a systematized pursuit of facts.
Upon his return to his home in Bad Krozingen, Germany, Raudive threw himself into methodical experimentation. Over the next several years, he accumulated a staggering archive of EVPs that he meticulously cataloged, transcribed, and analyzed—over 100,000 examples by his own account. Unlike Jürgenson’s more intuitive, artistic approach, Raudive brought the rigor of an academic, however unconventional the subject matter. Building on earlier work, he established three primary recording methods: the microphone method (recording in silence with no apparent sound source); the radio method (capturing from the white noise between stations); and the diode method—a technique he developed with physicist Alex Schneider that would become his signature contribution to the field.
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In essence, the diode receiver comprised an unamplified crystal radio circuit, designed to pick up only the weakest radio frequencies. The idea was that the faint nature of the signal would prevent conventional broadcasts from being audible. The device connected directly to the tape recorder, which, as Raudive believed, stripped away the interference of normal broadcasts while maintaining an electromagnetic field that the voices could somehow modulate. He described this method as the “cleanest” channel for spirit communication. Sessions typically ran for precise intervals—often ten minutes—and were conducted in controlled environments where temperature, time, and atmospheric conditions were logged. He insisted on witnesses, often inviting skeptical engineers, physicists, and journalists to observe the process, and he welcomed technical scrutiny of his equipment.
What emerged from Raudive’s tapes bore the same peculiar characteristics Jürgenson had documented, and Raudive identified distinct traits of the purported paranormal voices: brief, staccato utterances, rarely longer than a few seconds; a strange polyglot quality where voices would switch languages mid-sentence or blend multiple tongues in a single phrase; and a compressed, rapid-fire cadence that often felt unnatural and required slowing down playback to decipher. Raudive firmly believed the linguistic jumbling was not a quirk but a fundamental property of how the deceased communicated—freed from the constraints of earthly grammar and speaking in an Esperanto-like universal language. He noted that messages were frequently personal, addressing living listeners by name or referencing private matters, and that certain voices would return across multiple sessions, developing what he termed “voice personalities” with recognizable timbres and speech patterns.
His findings culminated in Unhörbares wird hörbar/What Is Inaudible Becomes Audible (1968); the English edition, Breakthrough (1971), presented transcripts, analysis, and testimonials from scientists who had participated in controlled experiments. The book included endorsements from engineers who verified that no radio signals were present during diode recordings, and phonetics experts who analyzed the linguistic structure of the voices. Raudive’s work brought EVP out of the fringe and into cautious academic discussion. This was not acceptance per se, but acknowledgment that something was being recorded, even if explanations remained fiercely contested.
Critics commonly pointed to pareidolia—the brain’s pattern-seeking phenomenon that creates meaning from random noise—as well as psychoacoustic artifacts inherent in magnetic tape, and a host of other inconsistencies within the research. Believers saw validation of survival after death. Raudive himself remained carefully neutral in print, presenting the data and inviting others to investigate, though privately he was convinced the door to the other side was now open.
Believe It Or Not
The electronic voice phenomenon never really won over mainstream science—largely because there are plenty of non-mystical explanations (RF interference, intermodulation, quirks of the mediums like tape, auditory pareidolia, selection bias) that can account for it without invoking an afterlife. Most of us—folks working with audio—are no strangers to how different audio processes like compression and distortion, EQing, ring modulation, frequency shifting, and what else can create weird artifacts and strange experiences, or how repeated playback of sounds makes them seem patterned and musical. This can be further amplified by priming—letting one know what to listen to before one listens to the sound. A combination of audio freakouts and tricks of the strange thing that is our perception system, seem like a perfect blend for something like an EVP to manifest. Yet that never stopped the events and the people involved from accruing a particular cultural weight.
For future ghost hunters, parapsychologists, and paranormal aficionados, Jürgenson, and Raudive became pioneers who courageously plowed a new foundation of technological investigation of the supernatural. For some believers, the two never really even left the discussion, as several later EVP explorers reported contact with both, with Raudive in particular continuing to play an active role in the development of the stable communication channel, and perfecting EVP technology from beyond the grave. An American EVP pioneer from Maryland, Sarah Estep, was among the first to claim a contact, via a recorded telephone message from Konstantin: “I’m as fine as a ‘dead one’ can be… We tried and succeeded in building this bridge to the States… You are one of the first who are contacted by this means… This is Konstantin Raudive speaking.”
Although our world becomes increasingly technologized, for some, the quest for paranormal continues. These days, one can readily find a variety of commercially available recorders, Raudive diode boxes, and other devices, specifically designed and tuned for hunting ghosts. On top of that, our world, increasingly populated by artificial intelligences, offers yet different means to commune with the dead, as we see subscription services emerging that offer to convert a lifetime of your recorded messages, journaling, memories, and images into a chatbot posthumously—a reliably digital ghost with whom one's future generations will be able to converse.
Whatever it was that Jürgenson stumbled upon, and Raudive extended into a rigorous inquest, their story gives us something invaluable. How is it, that whether we believe in the supernatural or not, we still find such stories fascinating? Something draws us to the mysterious, and we honor this pull in countless myths and stories that have accumulated through the ages. When I read how visitors of these séance transmissions, often coming from scientific or academic backgrounds, eagerly accepted the heard sounds as voices of the dead, I am reminded of how sensitive and vulnerable we are when it comes to the questions that remain resolutely impenetrable. And with all of the benefits of reason, in some cases, it is strangely not enough.
Epilogue
In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), Jessica—a Scottish botanist living in Colombia (portrayed by Tilda Swinton)—is abruptly awoken by a loud boom. As she starts looking for the sound’s origin, which now persistently repeats in her daily life, it becomes apparent that, mysteriously, no one else hears it. Attempting to understand, Jessica hires a sound engineer to help her reconstruct it. During the meeting, she describes the sound as if “an enormous concrete ball has been dropped into a metal well surrounded by seawater.” The engineer layers thuds, adjusts reverb and other settings, tuning it to her guided responses. He never quite gets there and eventually disappears—like the sound itself—with no one able to confirm he ever existed. This opens a space for more unusual events and encounters on Jessica’s journey through the liminal: dreams that are not really dreams, memories that are not one's own, but someone else’s; and those she was convinced were dead re-emerge alive as ever.
As the film flows, the origin of the sound is never revealed. Later, an old solitary man she meets in a remote village suggests that the sound is less a physical phenomenon and more a memory resonance—a point of contact between one’s own and collective histories, receivable by a listener who is sensitive enough to catch it. In this sense, both Memoria and EVP offer a particular ethic of attention: sometimes one doesn’t need to unravel the mystery, but stay with it. It is the listener that is most clearly documented in both, and the listener is who defines the experience. Whether the ghosts are memories and natural inclinations unmasked by parallel streams of consciousness and external noise, or actual entities reaching from elsewhere, the event is shaped in the listener who—in our case—remains a primate on a perpetual quest for meaning.
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