My older brother, whom I will call "Bro" for this article, has always been rather eccentric. Impulsive even. So when he saw that movie "White Noise," about communicating with the dead through recording devices, he just had to try it out. But first, some background.
White noise, if you are in the dark (no pun intended) is the sound of static. Just as white light is a combination of all possible colors, white noise is a combination of many different sounds. Television static, when the channels have all gone off the air, is one example. Wind in the trees, a running stream, rain on the roof, the sound of surf on a sandy beach, all are examples of "white noise." White noise is very soothing and is not a bad thing. Really classy business offices have a running water fountain to provide it. The Japanese, I'm told, love it. It's great, with the possible exception of background noise in recording devices, as that's where ghosts may lurk, waiting for a chance to whisper in your ear [cue: sound of weird and scary organ music].
Quite a few years back someone was listening to background noise on a tape recorder and thought they heard faint voices. He decided it was voices of departed souls. "I hear dead people!" he yelled. (Okay I just made that part up.) But he came to believe that was what he was actually hearing -- the voices of dead people, somehow communicating through the background of static, or white noise. Through the years many people have found and recorded examples of these voices, now called "electronic voice phenomena," or EVP for short. The film "White Noise" introduced the concept to millions of people who had never heard of it. Bro was one of them.
Bro decided to record some spooks for himself, so headed out to the local cemetery with his digital camera. The camera could record sound when it was in video mode, and he took a lot of video. He heard nothing. It seems ghosts don't really hang around cemeteries so much. You can't blame them, the places are just dead.
A few days later Bro was working in a vacant house, making repairs for the owners. Before he went outside for a smoke, he decided to turn on the video camera and left it running on a saw horse. When he returned 20 minutes later he replayed the recorded sound and gave himself quite a fright. He could hear several people in conversation. It sounded like a family around the dinner table, talking and laughing. Then there was a blood-curdling scream, as if someone had just shoved a carving knife into Cousin Ernie.
I asked Bro if the recorder could have picked up voices from, say, the house next door, or perhaps somehow recorded a radio transmission. He didn't think so. He hadn't heard any neighbor voices and the camera was digital. When we were kids and had a garage band, our guitar amplifiers were powered with vacuum tubes and would sometimes pick up Spanish speaking radio stations. It was weird. Digital recording devices don't do that. So what was the source of these recorded voices? Bro was sure of the answer: dead people!
Later Bro downloaded some software that allows you to augment different sections of the sound, and the voices became clearer still. Now I'm not disputing the possibility of dead people. In fact, I came to think that was the number one reason for these voices too. What other explanation could there be?
Bro took some digital photos of the room where this happened, and one of them had an orb of light floating just below the ceiling. I have read that these light orbs are common to places thought to be haunted, and there are many examples of them in the literature of the paranormal. Bro continued making recordings in various places to see what he might find...or what might find him.
For a few days afterwards, Bro would call me up, sometimes waking me in the middle of the night, to play his latest recorded voice. Some sounded like the slurred speech of a ghoul or, at least what I imagined a ghoul with a speech impediment might sound like. One was of a female voice screaming. Other voices were imploring, "Help me! Help me!" This gave me the willies all right.
For the first time in my life, life after death seemed real. It was illuminating in some ways. I felt like someone might feel if Bigfoot knocked on his door or Nessie really did poke her head up out of Loch Ness one day and eat a few fishermen. Omigod,
they do exist! Even more surprising, I was able to accept the existence of ghosts as a fact without going bonkers. I was amazed at my own composure in light of this revelation. "Hey honey, Bro proved today that there really is life after death. What's for dinner?"
Bro eventually came to the conclusion that some of these spirits were malevolent. He had scared himself silly. One day I went over to his house and discovered that he had painted a huge cross on his front door. His neighbors began watching his comings and goings by peeking through windows just before closing the curtains and locking the doors.
Bro eventually erased all the recordings and warned me sternly about experimenting with EVP. He felt he had opened doors that are better left closed. He started reading the Bible and learned that people who contact the dead are called "soothsayers," and such practices are Biblically forbidden.
Bro then became very religious, though he had been a hell-raiser for the greatest part of his life, smoking, drinking and carousing with loose women. Almost overnight he became Elmer Gantry, preaching fire and damnation to all the sinners in his midst. People fled in terror at his approach.
Some good did come of it all, though. Bro gave up smoking after forty years of it, stopped looking at porn on the internet, and began quoting scripture at anyone who pisses him off. All of which goes to prove that strange things can happen when you go poking around in dark, cobwebbed corners that are better left undisturbed. As for me, I have never tried to record EVP phenomena. I don't have a big enough nightlight to take the chance.
The heat of summer is finally disappearing. Technically, fall began on September 22, but it didn't feel like fall until yesterday. I noticed it yesterday afternoon. 
