Thread: Opinions on ghost boxes and evps?

The best video I've ever seen woah ;o

It's just a psychological effect called pareidolia.

What actually is the device? It looks to me like it just generates random radio static, which will of course have snippets of human tones in.

You're engaged in a type of confirmation bias. The words are entirely imagined by the people in the video, projecting their own thoughts onto the meaningless data. That's why they never actually have a cogent conversation; despite the fact they've no doubt spent hours playing with these things, they only have a few isolated snippets, when the static sounded like a word vaguely related to the question.

You're not hearing those answers yourself; you're being told in advance what you should listen out for, and when the static is a decent enough match, your brain, which is specifically anticipating those words, recognises some of the sounds in them, and confuses that with a confirmation that the word is clearly audible in the static. But in fact it isn't. It's very easy to confirm this; just listen to the video without looking at the subtitles, and try to hear for yourself what the answers are. Note that this will only work on a video you haven't been "told the answers to" yet. I did this on a couple of your vids for a few minutes, and I literally didn't hear a single word that the host said he heard. And I also heard loads of other random words in the static which the host ignores until he gets a good answer.

This effect can be made to occur in any random voice-like data. A famous example of this is the alleged "backtracking" in A Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin, which apparently has satanic lyrics if played backwards. But if you try to make out these supposed lyrics before being told what they supposedly are, I guarantee you will not make out more than one or two of the "correct" words. Yet when the lyrics are put in front of you, you hear whole sentences. Here, I found a nice video for you; the goodies start around 9:25.

Michael Shermer: Why people believe weird things - YouTube

I did two ghost "hunts" in college part of a non-credit class. It was put on by a local ghost hunting group who claimed a lot of "evidence."

The first hunt was about 3 hours at my college campus after hours. I carried around a tape player, and we sat in dark rooms. I never heard anything in the first building we were in for the full hour or so. The second building was a bit better. While walking through a dark hallway, a mother and her daughter started talking saying "What, baby?" and the daughter said "I didn't say anything." The mom retorted "I heard you say momma." On my recording, I raised the levels, a few seconds before it happened I hear on the tape "Momma, Momma, Momma" then the conversation starts between the two women. I didn't hear it when that happened nor after on the recording, but it was pretty clear at that moment. I believe it was a sound from the large AC, but that room was alleged to be haunted by a small girl.

The next cool thing was we had set up a deck, shuffled, with powder surrounding it. The admin of the group ran up to us saying "LOOK LOOK" and the deck was back in order. I immediately asked "Did you put a camera on the deck?" And she said no, but the powder was undisturbed. Considering the area was isolated, I suggested someone probably reorganized the cards, but she wasn't having it.

About a month later, I was invited to join the group, and I went on a hunt at a house where a guy had some fucked up experiences. We were in the dark with cameras, the guy was in the room, trying to sleep, and I was sent in to talk to him to see if we could hear anything. The women in the group claimed they heard the bed vibrating out of nowhere, which I didn't believe at all. We sat in the room for a while, and the guy REALLY believed he experienced shit. He also said "Maybe I need a drink." I questioned that and he said "I always have a few drinks before bed." I figured that solved his issues.

I raised a BUNCH of questions with how they investigated the house. They didn't seem to try to debunk anything, so much as pander to the homeowners. The female half even met with a spiritual medium after her sister died, claiming she spoke to her. I didn't feel the need to debunk that, but it was there. Another girl in the group explained how her brother, who went into a coma or something, was told by God that the Saints would go to the Superbowl. This was in the Fall of 2009. The group seemed just like a social club that liked to pretend ghosts were real and give people false hope, which bothers me a lot.

I don't believe in them. Those devices have automatic volume adjustment so you'll hear brief feedback whenever you stop talking. Some of them end up sounding like they could be construed as words but honestly whenever I've been shown EVPs I don't hear anything but static.