Reality Checking
Still hearing voices!
By Brent Raynes
John Keel
Who Knew Shirley Fickett
Fathers Day Confirmation
You Can See The Sunlight
(Please allow up to 10 seconds for the audio to start)
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When I mentioned to my wife the title of this article, she laughed and said, “They’ve got medication for things like that.” Of course, there is no medication for something quite like this, and Joan certainly knows that on a firsthand basis. She’s attended about as many of these “ghost box” sessions as I have.
Others can hear these same “voices,” you can record them, and others can and have successfully duplicated these experiments. Thus the general criteria of scientific methodology has been met. These are not simply subjective, delusional “mental” phenomena.
I didn’t know what I was getting into last March (2010) when I attended my first “ghost box” session in the basement of a century old building (formerly a church) in Fayetteville, Tennessee. But gradually, over the ensuing months, I became increasingly aware of “electronic voices” that said things they shouldn’t have (like reading words I had written down on an index card or a sheet of paper) and using language that the FCC bans from the airwaves (like “f--- you”), and coming up with accurate names and answers to our questions.
The “voices” have become practically common place. We have contacts on the “other side” (I don’t know any other way to put it) who identity themselves by name and work with us, and whether we’re at home in Tennessee or a couple of hundred miles away down in Alabama, we interact with them again and again. Recently we’ve even turned things up a couple or so notches on the weirdness scale and can now even include what we feel were successful results with mind reading experimentation!
While on a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. ghost hunt/lock down at the legendary Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, during the Super Moon of March 19/20, and with a couple dozen other “ghost hunters” from Kansas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Alabama, our “ghost box” actually provided a convincing demonstration to the leader of my particular group of five by correctly answering her question of what holiday both her grandfather and his father had passed away on. The response came within two seconds of her question. A male voice clearly said “Father’s Day.” Also when I asked where we were, within six seconds a voice clearly said “Sloss.” I also pointed at the label on my “ghost box,” and within seconds we correctly heard the words “ghost box” come through the speaker. “I really enjoyed meeting you and thank you for exposing me to the ‘ghost box,” this group leader emailed me a week later. “It is very interesting to say the least. I can only say that from what I experienced, it does work.”
On March 13th, during a “ghost box” session here at my house in Waynesboro, Tenn., with my wife Joan present, “Bishop” (Bret and Gina Oldham’s “technician,” or spirit guide if you will, who frequently seems to assist us as well) came through saying “Call Bishop.” After listening to that audio, Bret wrote me, “Wonder what that meant?” He obviously hadn’t heard anything quite like it before. In the meantime, while doing a “ghost box” session at Sloss a week later I got “Bishop calls.” Oddly, at one point when asking for help to confirm to the team I was with that this phenomenon was real, it was during the attempt to get the words “ghost box” to come through the speaker when, just a couple seconds before we got what sounded like the correct answer again, there was briefly a sound just like a phone ringing!
At Sloss, I asked the spirits what we could do for them, and repeatedly voices came through with “pray’ several times, as well as “pray for me” twice, “repent” twice, as well as “rebuke”, “occult,” and a number of voices saying “help me.” We were also told to “get out.” At one point, in an underground tunnel, all of us heard a voice yell something aloud. It certainly startled us. I picked it up on my digital recorder, which was running at the time, and could make out the words “help me”! The voice sounded like that of a woman. Doing a “ghost box” session in that area as well, I tried to strike up a conversation with the spirit residents there. “Is it nice where you’re at?” I asked at one point, realizing immediately that with the history of tragic deaths and being haunted that probably wasn’t the best way to have worded such a question, but it was a little after 4 a.m. and I wasn’t at my sharpest. At any rate, a voice came right back with “you can see the sunlight.” I felt like the meaning of that was pretty clear. How could anything be nice in this dark, cold place…especially if you were a spirit who was trapped there! Obviously I had the option of being able to enjoy the world topside and to feel the warmth of the sun in my face; an option I discerned that this presence didn’t possess.
Our team leader had placed some peppermint candy on the floor of the tunnel as there had been reports of spirit children. I said, “We brought you some candy,” and within one second a male voice came through the spirit box with “F--- you.” Definitely not normal AM radio traffic. Again, it seemed that as far as the spirits were concerned I had stuck my foot in my mouth again.
We asked through the “ghost box” how many spirit children resided in the tunnel, and three different “voices” (two that sounded adult, sounding like a female and a male, and one that sounded like a child) all said “six,” and all within about a three second time frame.
At Sloss, at the abandoned hospital in Fayetteville, here at home and elsewhere, Bishop and Dr. Berthold Schwarz (as described in my previous columns) have frequently come through. During a session at home on Saturday, March 26th, the name “John Keel” popped up again (as he has in many of these sessions) and within some 15 seconds a voice resembling to me that of Dr. Schwarz shouted “you’re a bastard!”
For whatever reason, this “John Keel” seems to get things stirred up during these sessions, or at least often manages to end up in close proximity to angry sounding words. Bret has felt that maybe he was having a difficult transition in the after life, and in a recent email from a former good friend of Keel’s I learned that in his last days his personality was undergoing some disturbing changes. “He was getting really weird in the head towards the end, but the frustrating thing was he was still really sharp!” this friend wrote me. “Just paranoid.”
This person last spoke to Keel towards the end of 2007. “I was in Connecticut on my way to New York,” this friend wrote. “On the phone for two hours with him, and I still couldn’t convince him to let me come over and bring him dinner. I was so sad.” John Keel popped up in a recent “ghost box” session with Joan and I on March 13th, and again it was while Joan was trying to talk with a late relative. As some of my regular readers will recall, during my first “ghost box” experience over a year ago in March 2010, “Keel” came through right when and where we were asking for her deceased brother Jessie to say his name. Afterwards a male voice, sounding to both of us just like Jessie’s voice, shouted “F--- you!” We speculated that her brother was upset with this “Keel” for using the location that we had designated for him to say his name. (We get a pretty good number of these F--- words!)
At any rate, during this recent session Joan asked Keel why he did this, interrupting while she was trying to speak with family who had passed on, and a male voice seemed to respond, within two second, “This damned place.” Joan said, “I think you should apologize,” and immediately you hear on the recording what sounds like “maybe.” As to one relative, I heard what I thought was his name at one point, followed by the words “he’s a cousin” and “shoot him,” which is interesting since this particular relative was a cousin and was shot to death.
I asked about my father, who passed on back in 1984, and whether he still played the accordian, which I added, “It was a passion in this life.” Two seconds later a male voice replied, “This is still his passion here.”
As stated a few paragraphs back, these possible spirit “voices” seem at times helpful and provide rather accurate and useful information about future events and problems that may be about to unfold in someone’s life. Back during a February 19th session attended by my wife, daughter, and our friends and colleagues Sandy Nichols, and Bret and Gina Oldham, when asked if the spirits had a message for me, we repeatedly got something about “brakes.” Even “bleed again.” As I drive two vehicles, I asked which one they were talking about, the car or the truck. “It’s that truck” a male voice said. A few seconds later a voice (the same one?) said, “I repeat, it’s your truck.”
The next month I wrote my friends, “I did have troubles, but not the brakes, but leaking brake fluid from the clutch. Been driving over a year with this problem. I’d get the air bled from the line periodically and drive it some more, but this last time that didn’t work. The leak was too bad. They replaced the master clutch and the clutch slave cylinder last week, and I’ve got the $244.55 bill to prove it! Interestingly, the owner/mechanic is known in these parts by his nickname as “Possum,” a word that also popped up in this part of the session too!”
No one outside of my family knew of the trouble I had been having with my truck’s clutch losing brake fluid.
Can they read our minds? Our entire team experimented with that question during the February 19th session. My wife had a word in mind. It was shoe. At first “foot”, then “right foot,” and then “right shoe” came though the speaker (all within about six seconds). I later asked Joan why did she think “right foot” and then “right shoe” came through instead of just “shoe” and she admitted that at the time she was concentrating on the word “shoe” she was looking down at her right foot!
Next it was Gina’s turn and her unspoken word was sleep, and within seconds you can hear the word several times!
In my case a trickster may have been lurking nearby as I was concentrating on “Doctor Who” and within a short time I announced that I thought I had heard it. But on playing it back I heard something else.
I had said, “I’m thinking of a word in my head. It hasn’t gone on paper yet. Can you say the word that I’m thinking right now?” Within the next second the word “Jadoo” came through the box. Please note how similar that word is to Doctor Who. But then at another point close by, within about 4 seconds, I could clearly hear “Doctor Who,” while there was one point where a male voice was saying what sounds like “let’s fool him” shortly after that (Hmmm. Interesting choice of words). Actually I got a clear “Jadoo” when I was trying to communicate with John Keel back during a session last July 3rd. Jadoo happens to be a word for black magic in the orient and the title of a book that Keel wrote back in 1957.
That night there seemed to be a spirit or two that were not so nice. At one point, as I was reviewing the audio, I came upon a section where a voice (female?) says “somebody help me.” A male voice replied, “Nothing can help you.” Then Bret, having heard something, but not sure what, politely responded, “Okay, well thank you. I will try to listen later.” Then a voice says something like, “Yeah, listen for the help.” Kind of creepy!
Since Sloss, I’ve kind of gotten use to creepy. The week after, during a March 26th session here at home, it was just my wife and I when I got an adult female voice, that sounded British, saying “help me.” Then four seconds later, a male voice said, “Would you trust Brent…lunatic.” In the past, Bret had sent me an audio file where the spirits had told him “trust Brent.” Reviewing this recent audio again (along with several others) just prior to finalizing this article, I discovered a male sounding voice saying “Trust Brent” just two seconds before the “Would you trust Brent” segment
I had reason to believe that my old friend from Maine, Shirley Fickett, who also used to correspond with Dr. Schwarz, was present this evening. Only some 20 seconds into my recording of the “ghost box” session, I heard “Schwarz” and then “Schwarzee” twice (which was Shirley’s affectionate nickname for Dr. Schwarz years ago) and then only some three minutes into the session (and I hadn’t mentioned Shirley during this session) a male voice said, “Who knows Shirley Fickett?” A second later, another male voice says “I do.”
There was more, including some of those notorious F words banned by the FCC, and when I mentioned the voices at Sloss that asked for prayers and what could we do for them, I heard “tits” and “boobs.” This let me know that these “voices” knew what had happened at Sloss, as there had been an amateur woman ghost hunter who had offered to show her “tits” to the ghosts if they could give her proof of their presence. In fact, Sloss was even mentioned by name during this session.
There’s really a lot more to this ongoing, ever evolving situation, but it’s quite difficult to present everything here and now. The best you can hope for in something of this nature and that is of this magnitude is to present your readers with the details and events that seem to most stand out and best illustrate the experiences you have had to date in such investigations.
Perhaps eventually some real clarity and breakthrough will enter the picture. There are a great many questions to be asked and answered, and a phenomenon like this, where repeated radio frequency anomalies are manifesting over and over again begs for serious, scientific attention. The mystery of the EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) may prove to make our best case yet for something that survives beyond physical death.
On A Sad Note…
It is with genuine regret that we announce the passing of Doris Van Auken, 62, wife of John Van Auken, noted leading spiritual and historical expert and lecturer with the A.R.E. (Association for Research and Enlightenment) at Virginia Beach, Virginia. Doris, who passed away on Saturday, April 2, 2011, also left behind two sons, James and Evan, and daughter Jacqueline. Doris was an editor for Eagle Wing Books, 4th Dimension Books, and the ARE Press, and back when we were a print publication actually wrote several articles for this magazine, and has through the years been mentioned a number of times in our online magazine. One article she wrote can still be viewed online at: http://www.creativespirit.net/learners/counseling/docu30.htm. She was a world traveler who also participated in explorations in Mexico, Isla Cerritos in the Yucatan, Bimini and Andros in the Bahamas, and elsewhere.
My wife Joan and I always enjoyed our warm and friendly encounters with Doris at various ARE functions, like the 2001 Ohio Mounds Tour, the 2005 ARE UFO Conference, and at various ARE conferences held at Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park over the years. Doris never seemed to meet a stranger, and was widely known for her kind, witty, loving and very caring personality. She had many, many friends who are going to greatly miss her.