Alternate Perceptions Magazine, April 2025
Things that Go Bump in the Night
By Dennis Stamey
Lately we’ve become fascinated with so-called spirit boxes, those devices that supposedly can pick up voices of the dead otherwise known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). We haven’t bought one ourselves though because we’re not convinced if it’s a wise investment or not. Anyway, what is a spirit box? Well, it’s nothing more than a radio except it has a slight modification which allows it to quickly scan multiple stations at once, not stopping at any specific frequency. It’s like a scanner. A standard radio will play only at a single station at a time be it AM or FM, a ghost box will search repeatedly for a signal. You can also use it to record voice phenomena and save it.
Ghost hunters will go into a haunted locale, say a house or a graveyard, ask questions, and hope to get a reply. Most of the replies will be on a channel known as white noise. That’s what the spirit world seems to prefer. White noise is basically where many frequencies jumbled together. Turn the dial on the radio, away from a clear channel and in the middle before you can find another station is a weird din, a hubbub made up of many channels. But spooks have been known to talk over radio stations.
Who invented this device? A man from Colorado named Frank Sumption. That was in 2002. But he didn’t get much profit from his invention since his family had to establish a GoFundMe campaign when he died in 2014.
There have been earlier experiments in trying to capture voices from the dead. There’s American photographer Attila von Szalay who recorded EVPs on reel-to-reel recorders, Latvian parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive who recorded thousands of voices via tape recorders and sometimes using the white noise on radios, and William O'Neil who constructed an electronic audio device called "The Spiritcom" which he claimed was built to specifications through messages sent by George Mueller, a scientist who had died six years before.
We’ve listened to dozens upon dozens of EVPs. Some are unquestionably hoaxes, some are probably garbled voices picked up from radio stations, and some are downright inexplicable. One of the most interesting was a Facebook video where a couple of ghost hunters were in an abandoned graveyard somewhere in Kentucky and picked up voices. Some of the voices had an Irish brogue. What’s interesting is that there was an influx of Irish immigrants into America who were fleeing their country after the Potato Famine in the 1840s, many settling in Kentucky.
Do EVPs prove life after death? Not really. There have been interesting results but it’s not empirical proof. The same with ghost photos and videos except in this instance we feel that the majority are fake (that goes for cryptids and UFOs as well). Photoshopping nowadays is relatively easy. A lot of Bigfoot videos show nothing more than dark spots in the thickets which could be rotting stumps. In one footage on a Bigfoot Facebook group, we watched, the cameraman kept saying that the creature was moving. We didn’t notice any movement. Of course, everyone else, tried-and-true believers did see it moving. When we told the person who took the film that we couldn’t make out a Bigfoot, he had little to say. We also asked why he didn’t approach this creature to get real proof. This time, he wouldn’t answer. Chances are, we could go into the woods and capture our own monsters hiding behind foliage, but these shapes would be nothing more than shadows.
Throughout our writings we’ve talked incessantly about haunted zones, locations such as cemeteries or graveyards, abandoned homes, hospitals or asylums, where there is paranormal activity. Is it because people have died there, and their souls are trapped? Not in our opinion. We’re convinced that it’s because people believe that these locations are haunted. If any of us explored a creepy dilapidated building, especially at night, even the most skeptical might hear or see something strange. If belief is a vibration that can create images including ghosts, strange lights, or hobgoblins, maybe it could create weird noses on tape recorders or spirit boxes. Those who venture into haunted zones to capture voices from the spirit world might unwittingly be picking up noises that their belief has manufactured.
Some of the EVPs we’ve heard use modern colloquial expressions even though the place they were recorded in, be it a house or a boneyard, is over a century old. Others allude to Satanism. Satanism is a relatively new term and was mostly unknown in the 1800s or throughout the 1900s for that matter. Today it is part of our vernacular. Also, when American ghost hunters are in a foreign country, the EVPs will usually speak in English. We’re not sure about the experiences of foreign ghost hunters in America but we’re curious to find out. We’ve asked EVP experts about this incongruity, and they have no real answer except to say that the spirits are evolving and learning as we do. A shallow answer.
We’ve had a few ghostly experiences ourselves, but none has convinced us of life after death. In 1987, two weeks before Halloween, we were among the first on the scene of a fatal car crash. The car had skidded off the road, which was rain-slick, and smashed into a telephone pole. The driver, a young female, was the only occupant and must have been going at high speed. She died instantly; her neck broken. On Halloween night we were driving home from work after sunset and We have encountered some unexplained phenomena, but none has provided evidence of life after death.as we passed the same telephone pole, we happened to notice the flimsy shape of a woman in a long white gown standing beside it. Or did we? We can't help but wonder if our subconscious might have been playing us for a fool that evening.
In our writings, we’ve discussed how paranormal events often occur on Halloween which is hardly surprising. There have also been mysterious disappearances. Last year, my wife was taking our daughter out Trick-or-Treating. She stopped to look at some decorations and felt someone tapping her on the shoulder. When she turned around, nobody was there.
Once we were sleeping downstairs on a muggy July night in our townhouse apartment. Our father passed away that morning from esophageal cancer. Close to midnight, we heard someone walk onto the porch. We had two doors, a screen door and a wooden door. The wooden door was open to let the cool night air in since we rarely ran the AC. We were too afraid to get up and lay there listening for more sounds. But there was nothing but silence, no more footfalls. Was it my father’s ghost? We doubt it. It was either someone who thought he might break in (there was a bar up the street and often we’d see drunks stumbling around) or it was my subconscious tricking me once again.
We’ve also seen and heard weird stuff while in a half-awake state. These are known as hypnopompic hallucinations and are relatively common. Late one night we got up from bed to piss, peeked out the bathroom, and saw our youngest son, then eight years old, walking across the yard. Another time we woke up and saw our oldest son pressing his face against ours and yelling “Boo!” The revenant quickly disappeared. And then we once kept hearing a child saying “Dad, dad.” We first heard it in a dream, then we woke up and heard it. We woke up our wife and asked if she heard it and she replied that she hadn’t. Then we heard it a third time, but our wife still couldn't hear anything.
A Reddit user (we hate consulting social media, but it has become a forum for modern folklore) wrote that she awoke one night to see someone standing over their bed and saying “shush” over and over. We’ve other people tell similar stories, sometimes it was a dead relative, other times a stranger. A friend of ours told us that he was taking a nap on the bed when he felt someone sit down on his bed. He thought it was his girlfriend, so he didn’t bother getting up. But when his girlfriend did come into his room, he asked her if she had sat on his bed earlier and she said no. Oddly, that was on the anniversary of his mom’s death.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung once wrote about waking up one night and hearing a bunch of people chattering inside his house. When he fully came to, he realized no one was there. After that experience, Jung was convinced that hallucinations whether visual or auditory in the semi-awakened state were the cause for many ghost reports.
But what about people seeing ghosts of their loved ones? Our theory is that these types of specters stem from the age-old belief in ancestral spirits. Possibly in hunter/gatherer societies, people saw their dead kinfolk appearing to them in their dreams or their imagination. Thus, apparitions were born. We should consider them archetypal images.
However, we haven’t heard of any cases where someone came face-to-face with the shade of a dead family member while wide awake. Maybe it has happened but we’re unaware of it. If the departed do visit the living, it’s usually in a dream. My wife often has vivid dreams about dead relatives, but that's all they are, dreams. Others appear in those hypnopompic hallucinations standing at the foot of the bed (as do aliens and monsters). We’ve had dreams about our dead parents, but never have they imparted any messages.
People often claim that their dead pets come back to them. One Reddit user said in a post that every night she can sense her deceased cat climbing onto her bed and lay on top of her, something he would do when he was alive. Not long after one of our cats died, I was drifting off to sleep and thought I heard a faint meowing. Again, it’s a matter of the mind playing tricks, especially when our consciousness is starting to shut down. But the brain is not deliberately trying to deceive us, rather it’s distorting our perception of reality or better still it’s recreating an old reality as we are losing cognition. The girl was used to her cat sleeping on top of her and in her sleepy state, her mind was recreating this familiar sensation. We were used to hearing our cat meowing and in our sleepy state, heard her.
The same goes with simulacra or seeing faces and shapes on the wall or ceiling or even in photographs. When your brain sees a jumble of patterns, it creates a recognizable shape to compensate. We’ve seen gargoyle faces staring back at us, but they’re optical illusions. The brain receives information and if there are gaps, it fills them in. But why? Blame it on evolution. Survival depends on fast reactions and the brain has to figure out a situation with the fragments it has to work with.
The brain can fool us in other ways. Take the urban legend of Bloody Mary. Supposedly, if you stare into a mirror and keep repeating the words “Bloody Mary,” eventually you will see a scary face looking back at you. In reality, it’s a phenomenon called the Troxler effect. When you stare at the same object for a long period of time, your brain soon adapts to the unchanging stimuli, the neurons cancelling out the information making the image often blurry, faded, or distorted until you blink or look around.
Then there are the poltergeists where an unseen entity creates havoc by creating loud noises or moving objects around. In the October 2024 issue of Alternate Perceptions Magazine, Susan Demeter discusses a poltergeist case that took place in Rochester, New York, during the early 1990s. The individual who related the story to her said that was around 25 at the time and “was experiencing a great amount of emotional turmoil because of a recent arrest and lengthy court appearances.” Because of the arrest, was estranged from his wife. While staying at his parent’s home, he “would on occasion hear loud explosions, sometimes so violently loud that they would shake the house.”
Years ago, we were in a movie theater with a teenage nephew, somebody we didn’t like very much because of their unsavory behavior (he was later arrested for buying and selling drugs). While watching the movie, we were startled by a loud bang, almost like a gunshot, coming from one of the empty seats not far from us. Did our tension also produce a blast of psychic energy or was it produced by someone else’s tension?
Not all ghosts involve haunted zones, EVPs, or someone’s deceased relative. We found this strange story on Reddit posted not long ago by a user named Useful_Cowboyw8575 (we’ll try and clean up the grammar, but we won’t correct the syntax):
“Last weekend my wife and I took our two sons camping along with my oldest son's girlfriend. There was a figure of a heavy person standing over me and constantly going "shush". I tried to ignore them, but they constantly kept doing it. So, I open my eyes and it's just the silence of the night. I'm wondering if it was a dream or a ghost in the woods. We were camping for the full weekend. It was a fun time but last night, I woke up with an urge to go check out our surroundings, I felt uneasy. I woke up and noticed my sons weren’t in their tents. I started walking, calling their names and they were on a trail ahead. They also said they had an urge to come out. My wife and my son's girlfriend were in the tents still, we were a little way down the trail and the water was probably half a mile ahead. We kept walking just talking now that we were up. As we got closer to the water, I heard someone talking, very faintly. My sons heard it as well. As we got closer, there was a young woman, maybe late teens, early 20s, very dirty looking and she was crying. Sitting on the ground next to the water. I asked her if she was okay. She whispered something in a language I didn't understand, and then she vanished as if I blinked. My sons witness the whole thing as well. I was shaken up along with my sons, unable to explain what we witnessed. To be honest I’m a skeptic and I wasn’t even sure what I had witnessed was paranormal even though there was no other way to explain it.
“We left early the next morning and there were no signs of anyone else out there with us. I had been dreaming of this girl since I saw her. Two nights after we got back the house felt freezing even though the temp was at 75, everyone felt it. Our dog was acting really weird, jumpy, and less friendly. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn't even think that it could be paranormal. A few nights after we got back to my wife, and I started hearing footsteps in the hallway. Assuming it was the kids we didn’t check at first, then when they didn’t stop, and it sounded like it was only going up and down the hallway I checked it out and no one was there. The footsteps didn’t happen for a few more nights but then later in the week they happened again. Then Saturday night my son's girlfriend woke up and was screaming bc [we don’t know what these initials mean] she said she was a young girl staring at my son (her boyfriend) next to his side of the bed then was gone within seconds. Her description matched what we had seen. I’ve been googling the area we camped at and finding nothing that matches what we had seen.”
We can’t vouch for the story’s authenticity, but it does contain a lot of detail adding some credibility. A young woman sitting by a stream or maybe a river (the author never specified), mumbles something unintelligible, and then vanishes. Did a girl drown in the water and the family saw her ghost? Or were they seeing another archetypal image, the water sprite?
The mythology concerning water sprites or water deities is quite extensive and is universal. Most appear to humans, mostly men (note that in the account the father and the two sons were the only ones who saw the phantasm), in the guise of young girls and have a nasty habit of luring victims into the water and drowning them. The water horses of Gaelic lore (who later became lake and sea monsters) could sometimes turn themselves into attractive young women. All of these myths of water spirits probably originate from our early fears of drowning in the currents.
Now, according to Greek tradition, those who encountered the nymphs or nereids sometimes suffered terrible maladies. Again, note how the family was bedeviled by weird footsteps and the appearance of a ghostly young girl in their home following their experience.
We could roughly categorize ghosts into EVPs, deceased relatives (appearing mostly in dreams), doppelgangers, poltergeists, random spooks seen fluttering about in cemeteries or old buildings, archetypal images, and specters created from fear and belief (fear creating belief). Archetypal spooks include not only water spirits but the lady in white (or any monochromatic color) and the ghostly hitchhiker. Sometimes the two overlap.
Pennsylvania for some reason has many women in white. One of the most famous is The White Lady of Wopsy Mountain in Blair County. There are several stories about her origin, One says she is searching for her baby who was thrown from a carriage while rounding a dangerous curve known as the Devil’s Elbow. Another version said that the woman died in a wreck on that same road. Many people have claimed that they have stopped and gave her a ride. When she climbs into the back seat, she doesn’t cast a reflection in the rear-view and disappears just before the vehicle reaches Devil’s Elbow.
There is also the Lady in White of Summit Cut Bridge in Beaver County who reportedly appears around midnight to anyone traveling on the bridge. Legend tells us that back in the 1940s or 1950s a woman who took the bend too fast and went over the rails, dropping a hundred feet to her death. A variation of the story says that she killed herself by jumping from the bridge.
Note that these women in white stories involve a sharp turn in the road. There are similar stories from Britain where women in white and ghostly hitchhikers are a dime-a-dozen. In my hometown of Katy, Texas, there's a woman in white seen at Greenhouse and Clay Road. According to local lore, the woman can be seen when drivers turn off their headlights and take the sharp turn near the bayou. Clay Road is your average four-lane road until it gets further east and becomes two-lane. Here the thoroughfare gets dark and eerie even during daylight hours. A group of local ghost hunters investigated this spot at the turn "did see a woman in white.” The sighting was brief but one of the groups was able to discern that the apparition “looked like she was dressed from Little House on the Prairie.”
Going back to the subject of water spirits, there are many stories about ghosts haunting lakes, rivers, and streams, some of them involving our ubiquitous lady in white. There’s the Devil’s Pool, a dangerous stretch of the Babinda Creek near Babinda, Queensland, Australia. Since 1959, ove 20 people have drowned in the pool, most of them young males. Curiously, there’s an aboriginal legend about a girl named who wanted to marry a young warrior but her tribe forbade her. In despair, she threw herself into the Devil's Pools. Since then, Oolana's spirit haunts the Devil's Pools, dragging young men to their deaths.
The Saco River near Saco Island, Maine, is likewise cursed. Tradition says that some drunk colonists threw the child of Chief Squando into the water. The chief put a curse on the river saying that three white men would drown there every year. There have been drownings in the Saco River but there’s no evidence they were the result of a curse
Another water spirit, this time a woman with long black hair and stinking of rotting flesh, drags down swimmers in Florida’s Blackwater River. But by far the most notorious is theLady of the Lake who haunts Georgia’s Lake Lanier. The local fable tells us that in 1958, two friends, Delia May Parker Young and Susie Roberts, left a dance, got some gas without paying for it, then skidded off a bridge while crossing the lake and disappeared. The next year, a fisherman found a decomposed, unidentifiable body floating near a bridge. It wasn’t until 1990 that officials discovered a 1950s Ford sedan with remains belonging to Roberts, meaning that the body found earlier belonged to Parker Young. People have since reported seeing a young woman in a blue dress, believed to be Parker's apparition from when she died on the bridge. Stories even tell of her snatching swimmers and dragging them to the bottom.
And then there’s the shade of a young woman wearing a soaking-wet evening dress who walks the shores of White Rock Lake near Dallas, Texas. Some legends assert that she approaches people and explains she was in a boating accident and needs to get to her home on Gaston Avenue, a wealthy section of North Dallas. However, when she gets into the car’s back seat, she vanishes. Fortunately, this ghost isn’t malicious.
But if anything creates ghosts, it’s belief. Here’s one of just thousands of examples across the world. In Baguio City, Philippines, sits the Diplomat Hotel. It was built as a seminary but was later converted into a hotel by the government. When the Japanese conquered Baguio, many Filipinos, including soldiers, priests, and nuns, were killed and decapitated. Over the years, many residents and visitors at the hotel swore they have heard screams and seen priests and nuns without heads. Remiel Acosta, a paranormal investigator from the Philippines, told us: “The entire city is reported to be haunted, up to this day there are countless eyewitness accounts of apparitions, hauntings, and possible visions from warps in time.”
Trauma, death, destruction in a particular area can make people believe over time that this same area is infested with ghosts, with the spirits of those who died in this catastrophe (of course, it could involve the death of a single person). Their superstitious fears generate energy, energy that if strong enough can produce more manifestations, be it monsters, UFOs, or time warps (what we call simulated reality). The bigger the tragedy, such as the Japanese army’s atrocities in Baguio or the three days of relentless fighting at Gettysburg, the more the energy.
Here’s another instance of belief creating bugaboos. During the 1920s in the primarily Black neighborhood of North Mobile, Alabama, a menacing figure "clad in white" with a “high hat coming to a point” stalked the streets at night terrifying residents. Whoever the so-called Gown Man was, he was never caught. Notice the similarity between the Gown Man and a Ku Klux Klan member.
Did the locals fear of the Klan, that the Klan might come after them one day, manufacture a specter in the likeness of one of these characters?
