It’s Hallowe’en and I haven’t posted in a while, so I thought I’d just type up all of the weird knowledge on a particularly strange collection of technology that I’ve been holding in my head for a while. It’s not neat, or particularly pretty, but it’s something that I’m going to unceremoniously call a brain-dump, because that’s almost certainly what it is.
We’ve already seen a lot of talk lately around haunted machines and homes, the ghosts that are summoned from the network, and as Tobias Revell has mentioned in his talk at this year’s Web Directions conference, the point where ‘any sufficiently advanced hacking is indistinguishable from a haunting’. So, to turn slightly away from that, I wanted to look at something a little less serious, where devices are invented and hacked for reasons that are used to reach slightly beyond our measures and limits of perception, and look briefly at where, and why, that innovation happens.
For the past year or so I’ve been slightly obsessed with television shows about Paranormal Investigation (Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, even the worst incarnation Most Haunted), largely because of the array of technological devices that are constantly, conveyor-belt fashion, pulled out of the investigator’s bags, all of which are assumed to provide evidence of contact from The Great Beyond. Using technology that is either appropriated, or made by self-professed inventors, these objects hold enormous power in the community as the science behind the spectre, with various communities and R&D units popping up in the urgency to collect better, and more substantial evidence of their belief.
The first of these technologies, which I’ll quickly mention, is not so much an adaptation of the device itself but rather a specific interpretation of the recordings the device picks up, communication in the static otherwise known as Electronic Voice Phenomena. Audio is recorded using a handheld dictaphone, the gain is driven up and noise cut out, and voices are found in the ether. This is an exercise in the effects of pattern recognition (pareidolia) and apophenia (making connections and finding meaning in random stimuli or messages) essentially, and the results are always nearly presented with subtitles, subjectively translated by the investigator so you don’t have room to make a decision on what you’ve just heard. Investigators often say that learning to recognise EVPs is like learning a new language, with the keening of their ears a skill that takes time, and commitment, to develop. What the noises are are eventually uncovered through scrutiny, and tell us more about our need to make connections, and find hope and meaning to an existence beyond our own perceptible environment. As psychologist James Alcock has written, EVPs are essentially “the products of hope and expectation; the claims wither away under the light of scientific scrutiny.”
There’s a lot on recorded EVPs, so I won’t go much further into it but have a quick look at the other devices that have floated to the surface from the hours I’ve spent watching television shows and online videos. The descriptions of these are largely taken from GhostStop, one the biggest online distributor of paranormal devices in the world, ‘designed and built by investigators’, and the inventors websites.
Ovilus X: Conceived by Bill Chappell of Digital Dowsing, the Ovilus device converts environmental readings into words and phonetic responses to questions asked by an investigator. Theories suggest that spirits and other paranormal entities may be able to alter the environment using such resources available to them as manipulating electromagnet frequencies and temperature. The Ovilus uses these frequencies to choose a response from a preset database of over 2,000 words. Essentially an intelligent entity will be able to alter the environment in such a way that forces the Ovilus to “speak” an appropriate, relevant, response. Video of Ovilus X here.
SB7 Spirit Box: The B-PSB7 Spirit Box is a tool for attempting communication with alleged paranormal entities. It uses radio frequency sweeps (AM/FM) to generate white noise which theories suggest give some entities the energy they need to be heard. When this occurs you will sometimes hear voices or sounds coming through the static in an attempt to communicate. Video example from an investigator, here.
Mel meter: Created by Gary Galka, and named after his deceased daughter, the Mel Meter is an All in One Paranormal Instrument detects EMF, ambient temperature with a helpful attached red flashlight and EMF radiating antenna. In addition to detecting AC/DC EMF & Temperature changes in the environment, a Mel Meter also uses a mini telescopic antenna to radiate its own independent magnetic Field around the instrument. This EM field can be easily influenced by materials and objects that conduct electricity. Video introduction by inventor Gary Galka, here (beware, a bit vomit inducing).
SLS ‘Structured Light Sensor’ Camera System: Another Digital Dowsing invention which currently isn’t for sale anywhere, uses Kinect’s infrared capabilities alongside temperature sensors to interpret environments and pick up figures that aren’t visually perceivable, turning them into stick figures that we can see. Video here of a figure picked up by the device on Travel Channels Ghost Adventures (you only need to watch the first five minutes).
This is a small sample size of the range of products available for paranormal investigation, and all of them survive in a universe which only listens to, and applies to certain rules. To listen to outside evidence, to hear that EVPs are psychological rather than paranormal phenomena, to know that so often, the voices are nothing more than a recorder recording itself, takes on water that will eventually sink the ship that the community works so hard to keep afloat. To be disproven disbands the community, with all of its supporting infrastructure. A friend of mine once mentioned this was a Jungian concept, this adamant ignorance, so if anyone has the reference, I’d be much obliged. There’s a level of debunking within the community, but it happens in a very controlled, very isolated way.
Debunking happens at an extremely narrow focus, with experts and consultants brought in from within the universe this particular science exists within. Of course, this is nothing new, as most fundamentalist religion operates in this way, as do other systems, but this is all under a set of particularly tight, and recognisable, set of investigative, pseudo-scientific criteria. Investigators will have a control, a set of statistical boundaries, procedures to replicate or reverse engineer a result, and a set code of conduct in order to stop contamination of sound from the participants. Some even have an ethical framework prior to, and after, investigation, which requires debriefing and offering support to the owners, or occupiers, of the supposedly haunted space (Ghost Hunters are the only televised example of this that I’ve come across.) There are academic bodies, most famously the Society for Psychical Research, whose tagline on their website is a quote from C.G.Jung, “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
The pseudo-empirical basis that ghosts leave material shadows, or traces, upon the environment, on which so much of this technology is founded, ultimately tells us more about our own relationship to technology, and the misunderstanding of malfunction and glitches, than anything to suggest that these particular, human, ghosts appear. It suggests others, created and maintained by machines, that we don’t often account for when we make things beyond an initial round of debugging and fine-tuning. The things we create will create other worlds that we only see, or realise, when they haunt us, something that, as I mentioned earlier, is coming further into the foreground as we look at these breakages in the technology we invent.
In a post by Janny Li for Sound Ethnography’s blog, she concludes her time with a set of investigators by summing up the emotional investment that this innovation accomodates; ‘But to ask if ghosts are real is to miss the point of how ghosts are made real by paranormal researchers and how their efforts might provide some insight on the ways in which many Americans think about the life and death, belief and evidence, science and the supernatural.’ Finding things to listen to, can be just as powerful as listening to the things we find.
Natalie D Kane 
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