Inside the Murder Castle by Adam Selzer

Author:Adam Selzer [Selzer, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: true ghost stories, spirits, poltergeist, Paranormal, hauntings, haunted house, haunted, haunt, ghosts and spirits, ghosts, ghost stories, ghost hunter, ghost hunt, ghost hauntings, chicago
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2012-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

[contents]

Chapter 4

Just Press Play

My main job on a ghost hunt—besides just making sure everyone we’re looking for is actually dead—has usually been EVP: “electronic voice phenomena.” That’s where we go around with microphones trying to pick up odd voices; if you watch the TV shows where they really ham it up, these are usually the guys who are saying, “Are there any spirits here who have a message for me?” I keep waiting for an episode where one of the ghosts says, “Yes! Your wife wants you to pick up milk on the way home...”

I became “the EVP guy” not due to any great belief in the technique, but because I had a lot of audio gear already, and it was a job I could do while wandering around and not bothering with equipment—all I had to do was hit “Record” when I arrived and hang on to the recorder. If we were recording a podcast, we could just use the same microphone to record all the talking and wandering around.

Honestly, I very rarely hear any EVP recordings that impress me too much. Most of the time, you have to use too much imagination to hear anything—the voices are quiet and garbled, and require subtitles and a lot of editing before most people would notice anything unusual at all. And it’s difficult to do EVP in the city, anyway; it stands to reason that if you want to pick up the voices of the dead, you should probably use a sensitive microphone, and those can just pick up voices from other buildings. One night we were definitely picking up human voices in the basement of an old theatre, but when we tweaked the audio enough to understand the words, the first word I understood was “McNuggets.” We had been reecording the voices from a nearby McDonald’s.

Furthermore, even more so than most other “ghost evidence,” everyone else who hears your recordings has to take your word for it that you didn’t fake it. Faking an EVP recording would be very, very, very easy. Faking any ghost evidence is easy; when researchers were first investigating ghost photos a century ago, they found dozens of ways that a ghost picture could be faked. Today, the number of ways to fake a ghost picture has been estimated to be about a “million bajillion.”

I wasn’t going into the castle to do a “proper” ghost hunt, the kind where you lock down the area and try to keep everything up to labatory conditions, but I had my audio recorder with me anyway. No one, to my knowledge, had ever done even an informal investigation of the place. There were some accounts of people looking for ghosts in the old castle when it stood, but these would have been 19th-century ghost hunts. People didn’t take audio gear or cameras to haunted houses then—“ghost hunts” of the day usually consisted of a bunch of guys running around with guns and swords. The purpose of a ghost hunt back then was not to document ghosts; it was to beat them up.

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