Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural by Peter Bebergal

Author:Peter Bebergal [Bebergal, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143111825
Google: CkBwDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Friedrich Jürgenson in his studio in Höör, Sweden, around 1985

Guided by Voices

The microphone is heavy and plugs into the reel-to-reel recorder with a curious pin arrangement that I have never seen before or since. The recorder is a Uher 4000, part of an assortment of audiovisual equipment my father, Byron, had used when I was a kid in the 1960s and ’70s. The Uher synchronized sound with his French-made Beaulieu Super 8 movie camera, and he edited the results with his Atlas Warner editor and Bolex splicer. My family would watch the completed films on a Bell & Howell projector set up in the den. While the camera and its related equipment were interesting to me, it was the reel-to-reel that I would ask to borrow as a kid. Unlike my cassette recorder, the exposed tape of the Uher was like something from an espionage movie, and threading the tape through the heads made me feel like an audio engineer. The unit had four speeds, so whatever I recorded could be sped up or slowed down to giddy excess. I made tapes filled with stories of orcs and elves with the background music of Rush’s A Farewell to Kings. I sang in broken falsetto to Queen and Alice Cooper. I still have that reel-to-reel player now, one of the few treasures I retrieved from my late father’s house.

This tape recorder was haunting the edges of my time spent talking to Donna Hogan, an independent researcher and practitioner in what is known as electronic voice phenomena or EVP (also called instrumental transcommunication or ITC), a belief that spirits of the dead, or other otherworldly beings, can communicate with the living using various forms of electronic equipment. Donna was born in 1965 in what she described as “badly scarred” Liverpool, England, which was still recovering from World War II, and her childhood was, she recalled, “spent playing on derelict bomb sites.” She is not who I expected, to be honest. Donna is a mother and grandmother, and cares full-time for her youngest daughter, who is autistic. Her upbringing was in a large and chaotic, predominantly Irish Catholic home, but she does not call herself a religious person and doesn’t follow any faith tradition. During our very first video chat, Donna had suggested I use my father’s tape recorder to experiment with EVP. She was excited about the possibilities, but I was hesitant. I wanted to learn more, understand not only the process but the techniques and the intentions behind seeking voices of the dead.

During our talk, Donna explained to me the moment ITC/EVP changed her life. It was portended by what she described as a series of dreamlike premonitions. She was close to her sister’s husband Neil, and in the late summer of 2005, whenever she would see him, the image of a traffic police officer would arise in her mind. Along with the image came a feeling of doom. “In the UK, if a traffic police officer comes to your home, you know that something really bad has happened,” she told me.

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