A Word on "Spirit Box"

A “Spirit Box” (also commonly referred to as Ghost Boxes) is the catchall term for a machine that is meant to pick up the verbal communications of spirits. Most of these are created from handheld AM/FM radios by disabling the part of the radio that stops when you hit a particular frequency. As a result, the radio will continually jump from one station to another, often bouncing through three or four frequencies in under a second. Spirit Boxes are most commonly paired with an Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) Recorder, so that researchers can replay and piece together the responses from spirits after having asked them questions.

Humans have been attempting to contact the dead for hundreds – if not thousands – of years, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that it was even feasible for people to record the voices of spirits. In the 1950s, American photographer Attila von Szalay believed that he captured the voices of spirits on a reel of tape by setting up a microphone in an empty cabinet and seeing what sounds he was able to pick up. Szalay claimed that the recording picked up small noises that were unattainable through the human ear alone and believed these to be the voices of discarnate spirits. Szalay’s partner, Raymond Bayless, would later go on to write a book about their experiments, titled Phone Calls From the Dead.

The most common versions of Spirit Boxes that are used to this day, however, stem from a creation made by Frank Sumption in 2002. Sumption was an amateur Paranormal Researcher and EVP enthusiast and was the first to hypothesize that spirits could be contacted in real-time with the assistance of a modified AM Radio receiver. The resulting device is fondly referred to as “Frank’s Box,” with other paranormal researchers calling it akin to a “modern-day Ouiji board.”
One of the biggest criticisms facing the modern-day Spirit Box is the fact that humans are creatures of habit that like to look for patterns or commonalities in anything we do. We also like to make sense of abstract things and convert them into things that we recognize.

This is the case for the phenomena known as Pareidolia. Have you ever looked up at the clouds and thought that they looked an awful lot like zoo animals? Have you ever seen a potato chip that looked like a human face? Both are strong examples of Pareidolia, which is the human tendency to take vague shapes and objects and turn them into something that is easily recognizable.

You can probably see how this would be an issue when listening to EVP recordings. Our brains don’t want to hear sounds that are just crackles of static or white noise; we want to hear something that we understand! Many Paranormal Researchers say that the most difficult part of using a Spirit Box isn’t figuring out what questions to ask or what setting to be in – it’s being able to interpret the spiritual messages without falling prey to Pareidolia....<<<Read More>>>...