INVESTIGATING GHOSTS: The Scientific Search for Spirits by Radford Benjamin

Author:Radford, Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rhombus Publishing Company
Published: 2017-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Illustration by Celestia Ward of Two Heads Studios

There’s another reason ghost hunters are reluctant to question their evidence: If they admit that at least some (perhaps even a sizeable minority) of their best EVPs are in fact not ghostly voices (but instead mistakes, ambiguous sounds, etc.), that admission implicitly undermines the validity of all of them. Though some people classify the EVP recordings into different (and somewhat arbitrary) categories by quality, the simple fact is that even the best of them aren’t very good. In other words, if at least some of the best EVPs aren’t EVPs at all—and they’re all pretty much identical in terms of quality—then how can we be sure that any of them are real? Without valid independent corroboration, one is as good as the next. (This evidential pitfall, by the way, has plagued Bigfoot research for decades. When some of the best and most widely accepted-as-authentic Bigfoot tracks were later revealed to have been hoaxed, it forced Bigfoot experts to acknowledge that the authenticity and credibility of some of their best evidence was in fact in jeopardy; see Dennett 1994.)

Most damning of all, all these difficulties in collecting and interpreting EVP are true even if EVPs genuinely are the voices of ghosts. To be clear: EVPs almost certainly have nothing to do with ghosts. But even if skeptics, scientists, and psychologists are wrong about this—and the faint murmurs truly are communications from the dead—the irony is that they are still far too ambiguous to be of any use. If EVPs are real, ghosts are providing us with incoherent, fragmentary nonsense.

If a live person communicated with us the way ghosts supposedly do, we’d justifiably conclude he or she was either severely brain damaged, mischievously trying to annoy us with gibberish, or a toddler. Ghost hunters try to explain away this bizarre behavior with myriad theories and excuses about how difficult it must be to pierce the veil into our world, but the fact is that, as “skeptic and entertainment promoter P.T. Barnum put it in 1866, ‘none of the ghosts that haunt houses are of the least possible use. They plague people, but do no good. They act like the spirits of departed monkeys’” (Loxton 2016, 69). As an information gathering tool, EVPs are inherently and fatally flawed, generating nothing but Rorschach audio and red herrings.

Guessing Ghost Dialects

I recall during my first visit to Scotland I was baffled to see all the signs and words in English, yet when a Scotsman behind the counter at a restaurant asked me a question he might as well have been speaking Mandarin Chinese. Though we ostensibly spoke the same language his accent was nearly incomprehensible to me. I later came to realize that many EVPs I’d heard over the years—in all their garbled incomprehensibility and seeming gibberish—could have easily been a Scottish ghost speaking my native language, and I’d never have known it.

There’s also the complicating issue of different words and speech patterns changing over time. Speech and diction

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