Part II - How to Run a Ghost Hunting Group: Interview with P.R.G. Founder & Director Jennifer Lauer

By Robin M. Strom-Mackey

“The only two people that should know what is going on are the people that were on that pre-investigation; any of the weird things. The investigators that are going in are going in blind. Yes. We feel that’s the best way to go, because then there are no pre-conceived notions…”

 Jennifer Lauer is the Founder  and Director of the Paranormal Research Group, (P.R.G.) [formerly the Southern Wisconsin Paranormal Research Group.] The organization recently expanded to include Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin. In this interview Lauer shares some very thoughtful information about how she founded and continues to run this very successful paranormal investigation group. If you’re thinking about starting a paranormal group or revising group protocols, this is a must read article. Lauer has also co-written two books and is a frequent public speaker on the topic of paranormal investigation.

Robin: Can you tell me about how your group does an investigation from the screening of possible clients to the actual investigation?

Jennifer:  When someone is interested in having us come out and check out their place they’ll either call or send an email and they’ll say I’ve got some stuff going on and I’m really interested in talking about it or having someone come out and do something.

The first thing we do is send out a question set.  It’s an extremely long questionnaire.  It’s something like 150 to 200 questions and it has a variety of different questions that will help us to get a better understanding of what they are experiencing. It also has a couple of different areas in it that allows for some psychological testing, just so we know that we’re not sending our people into an unstable environment.  They’re actual tests that are taken out of psychological texts. And we can score them. It’s really more for our protection than anything else. I don’t want to send anyone into a dangerous environment. So this allows us to screen an applicant and make sure that it is a safe environment in which to send our investigators.

After they send us back the questionnaire, we look at it to kind of get a feel for what they might have going on, what they might be experiencing. And then we set up a pre-investigation which is just two of our investigators going out to the location, sitting down with the people, talking to them and getting a feel for the area where things are happening. We’ll have them take us on a tour of the location, show us where things were happening, tell us who was experiencing them and who was involved.

We also videotape the whole session.  That way we can take it back to the group when we have a meeting, and we can say, “This was happening here, and they can see it.” We also do background readings with either our D.E.A.D. system or with just hand-held equipment just to see if there is a natural reason for that experience in that location at that time.

We also look at, which a lot of groups don’t, if the homeowner says that when they lie in bed they see something across the hall walking down the stairway. What most groups will do is  go to that stairway and they’ll investigate that. What we do is we go to the bed and try to find out if anything is happening in that area that has a natural explanation as to why that person might have hallucinated something. A lot of times a clock radio sitting next to the headboard can really scramble your brain waves because there’s are a lot of electro-magnetic fields coming out of those things. If you’ve ever checked them, you can get 50 milligaus coming off those things and your brainwaves can actually get scrambled. And if your brain neurons aren’t firing properly you can start to see shadows; a variety of different things can affect the human brain.  Those are the types of things that we want to look at.

What we do after the pre-investigation is we go back to the team. We explain what happened and give an overall concept of what is going on. If we have EVP we will listen to it or we give it to Cindy. If we think there is a good chance that something is going on here we’ll go ahead and set up a full investigation which, depending upon the size of the house will determine how many investigators we will take. We don’t want to take too many because then our equipment will pick up their natural electro-magnetic fields. We want to stay as small a team as possible; I think that’s really key.

Then we’ll talk to the homeowners again. We have them take the entire team on a tour of the house so that everyone knows where the areas are, except we won’t have them explain anything about what is going on. The only two people that should know what is going on are the people that were on that pre-investigation; any of the weird things. The investigators that are going in are going in blind. Yes. We feel that’s the best way to go because then there are no pre-conceived notions or anything like that.

Then we’ll do the investigation. We do them in a variety of ways. We may take a couple of investigators and set them off with a couple of hand-held sweeps of the environment. They’ll sweep for ions, radiation and EMF in different rooms. And then they’ll record them. Then we’ll have somebody else setting up the video equipment. And we’ll have somebody else setting up the D.E.A.D. equipment. Another person will get everything together – whatever else needs to be done at that time. Once everything is set up we’ll all get together and do an EVP session in one of the areas where something is going on. Then we’ll also do controlled sessions  in rooms where there aren’t reported happenings. That way we have a control.

We pretty much do investigations in layers. First we do sweeps, then an EVP session and then throughout the night we’ll maybe do a lights-out quiet time, an observation time depending on what’s been going on.  We’ll do another set of sweeps later on. We’ll run the D.E.A.D. system in different areas to see what we can pick up.  We may have several EVP sessions throughout the night.

And then, when we’re done, I have every one of the investigators fill out a little report sheet that they have.  Actually they’re supposed to be filling that out throughout the night, any experiences, anything they noticed that was odd or strange. And they turn in that with any readings they have for the ions. For example if they’re doing an ion sweep in the bathroom they have to record that, and they have to turn that in at the end of the night with the investigation notes. That way the Lead Investigator can write the report. 

Then we take all of the equipment back and the data is analyzed through the D.E.A.D. system to look for any correlations with any EVP that might be caught. So Dave will do the analysis of the D.E.A.D. system, Cindy will do the analysis of the EVP, someone else may watch the video.

Actually I just stopped that because I’ve had people watch hundreds of hours of video and seeing nothing. So what we’ve decided to do now, is  if we notice anything on any of the recorders or the data, we will go back to that time, because everything is date-time stamped. We can go back to the video at that time, just to make sure that anything natural happened that might be caught on video – like a child ran by at the time. We could understand that, because everything is date-time stamped.  Dave or Cindy may say, “Well, I noticed something at this date and at this time.” Then they can compare notes and we’ll look at the equipment readings at that time, the hand-held sweep information, we can see if everything jives or looks strange. Then we can create the report from that.

And we’ve got all the sheets from all the investigators so that we can look at that and correlate that time with everything.  And everything is put into a full report. If EVP is collected we put that on a CD. We go to the owner and we do the reveal. We’ll sit down at the table and we’ll go over the whole report with them. We’ll explain what we found, what we experienced.   If we caught any EVP we will play the disk and have them listen to it. They’ll keep that as well as the report. And there’s always a conclusion at the end of the report of what we believe may be happening.

We always tell them that client care is one of our biggest concerns. If things continue and you’re worried about it, please get back in touch with us – especially if we didn’t find anything. Because they spend 24 hours a day there, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And we’re there for one brief four to six hour session.  A lot of times we don’t collect everything. You can’t be at the right place at the right time all the time. So we make sure they know that, “Unfortunately we didn’t catch anything at this time. But we don’t think you’re crazy.”

The people who have had these experiences, there has to be something that’s creating these experiences, whether that be a ghost or whether that be something natural in the field that you are seeing. Client care is really important, and we want them to know that we’re here for them…So often they say, “Oh, I’m not crazy. That’s all I wanted to know! I knew I wasn’t crazy and now I have proof.” A lot of times that alone makes everything better for them.

We don’t have a lot of clients that say, “I have to leave my house.” More often we have people that just want to be assured that they’re not crazy. They say, “You’ve collected that evidence. You’ve shown me that I’m not crazy. That makes them happy.”

Robin: So you’re saying that the majority of people you deal with just want assurance that they now know what is going on and they’re not insane?

I would say that 80% of the people that call us just want to make sure that they’re not seeing something and that they’re not crazy.

Robin:  There is a contingent out there, however, that’s scared to death. You’ve met the client group out there that’s scared to death? How do you deal with the scared ones?

Jennifer: Sure. There was one [client] in particular that had called us. They called us at night time and we had to drop everything and get a team and go out there. It was a case of RSPK which is Recurrent, Spontaneous Psycho-kinesis (the current term for poltergeist activity). The popular theory behind poltergeist activity being that there is a human agent that is affecting the environment with their minds.

It had to do with a young female. And after we did an investigation and told her that’s what we felt that the case was,  we explained that the activity was probably coming from her. We explained how the brain works and how the brain functions and how that can happen, and that it’s a natural cause. We explained that it’s been studied under lab conditions and how it has been reproduced and that it’s not a “crazy-person” thing but that it happens more frequently than people understand or recognize. She didn’t want to believe it; she wanted to believe something else. However, after we brought that from her sub-conscious into her conscious by making her aware of it, it stopped.

So a lot of times making someone aware of the fact that it could be them, if it’s P.K. [psycho-kinesis] it will definitely stop it. That happens a lot. A lot of times we’ll hear, “well, I don’t know what you did but it’s gone now.”  Well, we didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything. Just the fact that we were there and you thought that we were doing something, brought the issue that you were facing in your subconscious to your conscious…It’s the, “O.K., someone is here now and they’re going to take care of me. I’m going to be safe and everything is going to be O.K.” And then in fact, everything is O.K., because the issue is resolved in their  mind. Especially if it’s P.K.; because P.K. is done in their mind. So just by making them aware of it, it solves a lot of them.

Robin: Well, we always wonder if we’re going to come across the truly dangerous investigation. Has your group ever experienced anything…I hate to use the word demonic, but have you ever experienced anything of a questionable nature? Or that was a little frightening for you, perhaps?

Jennifer: Not really. I think there was one time in Milwaukee that I got scratched and that Heather got scratched too. But, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it had to do with anything. There was a huge pulse in the electro-magnetic field of the home. I was sitting on the floor and where I got scratched was very level to an outlet.  And I think it could have been ball lightning coming out of that outlet, and it burned my arm coming down. I think that’s pretty much what it was.

I couldn’t tell you for sure, but the area and the circumstance that I was in, watching it on the D.E.A.D. system; we could tell that it was really erratic. So, I’m going to go with the natural explanation because there was no other possible rational explanation for that. But, other than that, when we go into an investigation, it’s a job and we don’t let our emotions get the better of us. And when something happens we’re more likely to say, “All right! Come on let’s do this [laughs].”

I think we use our minds a little more for…patterns. We’re always looking for patterns. Our mindset is a little bit different, we don’t go based off of emotions, or based off our perception, because we have so much equipment.  We can ask, “Oh, hey, did something happen? I felt something.” And you can see in the environment [using our sensors] whether something did change. So if something did change, and I felt something, then I can say wow [laughs] I’m pretty good! I’m able to detect the changes in the electromagnetic field. So that’s the way we look at things. We’re more fascinated than scared. Fear comes from the unknown. Because of what we know about the field we’re less involved and less scared. We bring more research and science into it.

Robin: Are there any specialized pieces of equipment that your group uses that maybe others don’t?

Jennifer: Yeah, we have a Fluxgate  Magnetometer. It is about $15,000 if you’re going to buy it.  It’s very expensive, but it’s very detailed. It’s an electromagnetic field detector, but it collects 400 samples a second. So it gives us a great range of what is going on. I mean you can walk around with those Dr. Gauss and if you happen to get a really big signal you might pick it up.  This thing can detect changes within the whole house. It’s just so sensitive that if anything happens it’s going to detect it.  You can vary the bit rate if you desire. You can set it for one sample per second if you want or up to 400, which is just amazing.

It takes a lot of space on your computer to do it [laughs] but it gives you a really great look at the environment, especially the electromagnetic in the room, because that can just cause havoc.  It can create mood swings in people. What it does is it interrupts your natural brain flow or pattern, the electricity in your brain.  And when that happens you experience things.

Robin: I imagine a lot of groups would love to have a $15,000 detector but...

Jennifer: Well, we’ve been doing this for so long that we just collect as we go.

Robin: So do you charge dues from your members?

Jennifer: We do.

Robin: Do you charge fees for your services?

Jennifer: No. We charge membership one time, and one time only. We’ve got people who have been here for six or seven years that have never paid but once. The website does say we charge a yearly membership. But I tell people if you stay active in the group I’ll never charge you again.  However, if you don’t stay active for over half a year, even if you’re an Associate member, we will drop you out.

 If you stay active in the group you can stay a member for life. However, if you don’t stay active then step aside and let someone else take your spot and be active. I don’t want 600 members who aren’t active.  It just doesn’t make sense.  So they lose their membership. If they want to rejoin again they can. But if you just remain active you would never have to pay again.  It’s an incentive for the people to just stay active.

Robin: How do you screen potential members?

Jennifer: I really don’t. I think everyone has great in them…bad in them. But that’s one of the reasons I charge people to join; because people put more into something that they’re putting their money into.  If they’re a complete nutcase [laughs] we’ll eventually find out. But we’ve got a lot of nutcases in the group that are really good people.  We’ve had a couple of issues where people are just out of their mind, weird, strange, kind of scary…I refund money. I just say, “I don’t think this is the right place for you.”  But I don’t deny anybody. I don’t want it to be like they feel they have to perform in order to be in this group.  I don’t want that. If you want to be in active in this group then we want you.

Robin: So for you it’s more about willingness than credentials.

Jennifer: Yes, but right now we don’t have open membership for onsite members. We’re at our limit for investigators. But it’s still a great opportunity to get involved as an Associate member.  And it’s a great opportunity for us too, to get to know them before we put them in a situation that could be dangerous – for us too.  Before we take someone into an investigation we want to know how they’ll act. So it gives us an opportunity to get to know them before they become an investigator, before we move them up to that place.

We also do full training sessions. We have a manual, not the actual book that you saw, but an actual manual. It’s a members’ manual that is about this thick. And we sit down for a whole day and we train them on every piece of equipment, every theory, everything that we have. So that they’re well informed before we go out on any investigation.

Robin: So we all have our favorite stories, our favorite paranormal experience. So what is yours? What really set your heart racing?

Jennifer: I did have one. It was before I got into the paranormal field. I was 21. I was living with my mom. I was trying to save my money because I was getting married.  My fiancé lived in the house with us.  We lived in the house where my grandparents had lived their entire married life. My grandfather had died in the front room of a heart attack as my brother watched.  It was back in 1977.

My fiancé and I were staying in the room where my grandparents had [lived].  It was in the front of the house. It was the most beautiful room, all the light from outside would come in at night. It was just a very warm and inviting room.

At the time I was working a second-shift job and I wouldn’t get home until around 11 o’clock at night. When I got home my fiancé was already sleeping in bed and my mom in bed too. She was in a bedroom that was way down the hall. 

When you get home late you can’t always go to bed right away.  So I sat up and watched TV for maybe an hour or two.  It was maybe around 1 o’clock when I decided to go to bed. So, I went in and got ready for bed, my fiancé at the other side of the bed. I laid down, and within 2 seconds I felt this breath on my ear. I could hear it. It was whispering so quick and so wispy that I could hear it, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. \ I could feel it, its hot breath on my ear. And, of course I froze. I thought, “what the… what the heck was that?” But the really weird part was that I could feel the breath on my ear. So I panicked. I pulled the pillow up over my head. I was 21 at the time [laughs], but I was panicked!  And all of a sudden it happened again. It was like the pillow wasn’t even there. I could feel the breath on my ear and I could hear the whispering. And I passed out. I don’t know if it was from fear or what it was. But I don’t remember anything after that.

Of course I never told anyone about it. It was freaking me out.  And three months later, I was talking to my mom about something, and she said I have something to tell you. You’re into that paranormal stuff, and I’ve got to tell you this. I had this really weird thing happen to me last night.”  She was in her bedroom and had the same, exact thing happen with the whispering in the ear. And she described it exactly as I did. I had not told her. But then I did - that I had had the same experience.  It’s never happened since and I can’t explain it. It really got me wondering what it could have been.

Resources

Auerbach, Loyd (2005) A Paranormal Casebook: Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium. Atriad Press LLC. Dallas, TX.

Auerbach, Loyd (1986) ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook. Warner Books. NY, NY.

Fluxgate Magnetometer http://beta.globalspec.com/search/products?query_2=flux-gate%20magnetometer&comp=4934&pg=0&pageSize=10&show=undefined measures the strength and direction of magnetic fields.

Lauer, J., Schumacher D. (2007) Investigating the Haunted: Ghost Hunting Taken to the Next Level. Xlibris Corporation. Additional Copies of the Book can be ordered at Orders@Xlibris.com

PRG.’s website (2012) www.http://paranormalresearchgroup.com/

EVP with PRG: An Interview with Cindy Heinen, EVP Specialist

By Robin Strom-Mackey

 “There are a lot of ideas that haven’t been put to the test. A lot of things are put out as common knowledge just because they’ve been repeated so many times. But I want to do the testing for it, and I want to put them through the paces. And that’s kind of what we do.”

 Cindy Heinen is the Electronic Voice Phenomenon (E.V.P.) Specialist for the Paranormal Research Group (P.R.G.), formerly the Southern Wisconsin Paranormal Research Group (S.W.P.R.G.). The group recently expanded to include Wisconsin and Pennsylvania..  Heinen granted me an interview when I was in Wisconsin and is a wealth of information on E.V.P. She and Jennifer Lauer (P.R.G. Director) are members of the AA-EVP and have been guest speakers at the organization’s yearly conference.  Heinen also wrote the chapter on E.V.P. for the book co-authored by Lauer and Schumacher entitled Investigating the Haunted: Ghost Hunting Taken to the Next Level (see the Resources section).  In this interview, Heinen discusses the rigid protocols that her group uses for investigating E.V.P.’s

Robin: First of all, how does one become an EVP specialist?

Cindy: I came into the group five years ago already having four years experience doing EVP. When I came into the group, they didn’t really have anyone specializing in EVP. I was in the group for a year, and what I did was try to keep advancing it. Basically it was Jenn [Director of P.R.G.] who said, “Hey, we need an EVP specialist.” And I said, “Oh….ok!”

Robin: So I’m guessing you had some experience or…interest in the area EVP?

Cindy: I did.  I had read a book called “True Hauntings” It was written by Dennings, a psychologist out of California. It was her psychological approach to ghost hauntings. So, I read her book, and in the foreword of her book was a little paragraph about Constantine Raudive who had done EVP back in the 60’s and 70’s, and that intrigued me. And so from that little paragraph I started researching. I actually didn’t record any EVP for the first year; I just studied it, sort of the theory of it.

Then after that I went to Gettysburg to record my first EVP. Where else would anyone go? I went there. I took a little class there. And then I went out in the field, and I got nothing. Or I thought I got nothing. I’m sitting in the airport in Pittsburgh listening and listening to these recordings and finally…I was at Devil’s Den. So I’m there in the middle of the night, my team is way ahead at the rocks. So it’s me standing by this water and you hear a little voice on the recorder asking for somebody. And that was the first EVP that I got. It was just a little, ity bity recorder, and not the kind I would use nowadays, but it was enough to make me say, “Hmm, I think I want to study this some more.” That was my beginning.

Robin: Yes, well the first one you get is like a heart attack. Its like, “Oh my God, how did that get there?”

Cindy: Yeah, you can’t believe it. Its like, “How did that happen?”

Robin: So, you said you were there. You took a class on it. What is it about EVP that most people don’t know?

Cindy: Well, what I study today and what I studied at the beginning is totally different. It was very rudimentary, although I didn’t know that at the beginning. Listening to people and what sort of recorders they use, what sort of audio editors they would use. It’s the same thing that any EVP 101 course would teach you. Back then, nine years ago, there weren’t as many people doing it. I mean the AA-EVP, the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomenon wasn’t even as developed as it is now. But I still got a lot of information from them as to how to record.

 So, I read that and listened to people’s thoughts about things. That was still when people were thinking that EVP’s were imprinted on audio – on analog cassette tape – different theories and ideas were floating around out there. And so I just took that all in. But as I got involved in this group so many years later, especially in my association with Dave [Schumacher, Director of Anomalous Studies] I started researching other things, like what makes sound. What about acoustics? What do we know about digital recorders? There’s the quantization of the recording process, and about psychology and how we perceive things.

 The study of EVP can entail much about acoustics and much about equipment, but also does go into psychology, and how we perceive sound. So there are lots of avenues you can actually study to make good judgments…to understanding hearing and how it works....

 Robin: Well, you’ve intrigued me know. The psychology of how we perceive sounds, meaning what?

Cindy: Well, one of the things we did in the P.R.G., I’d say it was two years ago now, we started to upgrade the equipment. But we still had the old equipment. We still had the integrated circuit hand-held recorders everyone else is using. But we started using an analog backup.  So every time I would do a digital recording we would have an analog recorder right by it. If I thought I got an EVP on the digital recorder I would compare it to the analog.  And I have to tell you that 99% of the time the sound was so distorted because of the poor recording quality that I thought it was an EVP. If I hadn’t had the analog I would have said it was an EVP, the analog was a superior piece of equipment and it would reveal things.

 Someone could hear this vague sound and they would perceive it as an EVP if they don’t have the backup. We’re also looking for confirmation. When we’re in an investigation we have to think past that and figure out what the sound is, and where it came from, and whether we can validate it in any number of ways.

 Another thing we do, besides doing backup recordings is to look at what is happening on the D.E.A.D. system (Direct Environmental Acquisition Data-Logging System developed and used by P.R.G.).   Does something happen at the time when this supposed EVP happen? And sometimes it’s yes and sometimes no.

Considerations for EVP Recordings - Acoustics of a Room

Robin: You were talking earlier about determining where the sounds came from.  What do you mean by that?

 Cindy: Well, when you’re in a building –and I learned this when I was learning how to build a soundproof room for doing experiments in…I actually learn more these days, not in the paranormal community, but more from stepping outside of it. If I say I want to learn about acoustics I’m not necessarily going to go to the paranormal community, but look into the regular science of it. And that’s what happened.

 I wanted to soundproof a lab.  I found out how sound travels in a building. They call it structural borne sound. Sometimes it can be a low vibration, say a truck going by. That sound can travel as a low frequency through a building.  It can travel through the walls, it can travel through the joists, and it can travel through the floors and then come as a sound that you can hear. In apartment buildings we find that a lot. Certainly we’ve had experiences with it in duplexes. There are also impact sounds which are just people dropping things. And there are normal airborne sounds like talking, like we’re doing right now. Looking at all those different [types of] sounds, we started going into buildings and saying, “Ok, what are the acoustics of this room that we’re going to do this recording in?  One of the things we do now is to take a base line audio reading. So, with no one in the room, I will take a baseline audio reading of that room.  And I can go back to that and find out what are the normal acoustics of that room, what are the normal sounds of that room really like. And it’s been really interesting.

 We did one restaurant in particular, where I could hear sounds in the room from two floors down, of somebody in the basement.  They were doing something with the pipes, whether there was water running or whatever. But I could hear that throughout that building, and I could hear investigators from several rooms away.  So that is all really important when you’re going to claim that that sound is paranormal. Have you checked all your bases? EVP is not simply a matter for us of listening to a recording and saying, “Ah, I got something.” It’s a much more laborious process actually, to go through all these checks that we have to prove whether an EVP is actually that or just a false positive.

 Backup Necessary to Determine an EVP

 Robin: So, I’m an investigator, let’s say [laugh] for the P.R.G.  And say, I’m sitting with one other investigator in a room.  And I record an EVP session, and I’m going over my tape, and I find something, and I bring it to you. And I say, “Listen to this Cindy, this is rockin!” And you say?

Cindy: And I say, “Did you have your backup?

 Robin: So, in other words you have to have two recorders at least?

Cindy: Yes. And this has happened more than once, because, let’s admit it, everyone loves it, everyone loves to have a recorder and go out and do stuff. So this happens to me a lot. And they say, “Listen to what I got!” And I have to say, “Listen, what were you doing?”

Robin: So, for your group if there’s one EVP and there’s no backup you throw it out?

Cindy: Yes.  I know that’s harsh, but we do.  Unless…let’s say something happens and the data logging system goes wacky at the same time.  I actually look at that, because now I have the data logging system that says that your radiation dropped and your EMF spiked at that precise moment.

Robin: So, I go into this same investigation with one other person and we both have voice recorders on us and we’re in different parts of the room. He’s [hypothetically speaking] over by the window and I’m by the back wall. Ok?  I pick up an EVP and he does not. And I come to you and say, “Cindy, this is rockin, you’ve got to hear this, and you say?”

 Cindy: Well that’s pretty interesting. Because, I would have to say – well, when we set up our microphones you’d have to see them, they’re in a grouping together….

Robin: So, you put all your microphones together?

Cindy: Pretty much, because we’re trying to find out a lot of different things when we’re trying to do experiments. But in your case I’d want to know where he was, what sort of microphone he had, was it uni-directional or omni-directional. You know, there are a lot of different factors. I’d want to know where was he pointing [the microphone] and where were you pointing? But it wasn’t a true backup recording, because backup recordings should be right by the other recorder.

 But, there’s been times that - and a lot of people claim that - it is not a true EVP if you hear it on two or more recorders.  An EVP should only be on the one recorder because it’s the manipulation of that one particular recorder.  That means it’s not an audio but an electrical effect.  It’s a theory, a hypothesis; I’m not even going to say it’s a theory.

 Robin: Ok, have you found that to be true?

Cindy: [sigh]

 Robin: I mean you’ve got all your equipment set up right there in the room. You’ve got two or three recorders and all the microphones set up.  I don’t know what kinds of microphones you’re using, but I’m guessing you’re never going to use a recorder without a [external] microphone and probably a sensitive one.  I know that we all have budgetary concerns [regarding cost of microphones].

 Cindy: Right.

 Robin: So, you set them up and you’re doing your EVP and you get something. Is it likely to be on all of them or is it likely just to get picked up on one?  And, if it only got picked up on one, why wouldn’t you throw it out?

 Cindy: I have to be completely honest with you, since we started the backup regiment and also were using higher end professional equipment; we get almost no EVP’s. [chuckles] Because when we get them we realize that they were false positives.  Now, I have had in the past where I have had the incidence where we have gotten only a voice on one recorder and not on the other recorder. So I’m thinking, well that wasn’t an acoustical effect and but an electrical effect – that’s all I can figure. Do you understand what I’m saying?

 Using White Noise

Robin: Yes, I understand what you’re saying now, yes.  You’re saying that it was an EVP, because it was on only one recorder, because if both recorders picked it up then it would be something in the room [or building].

 Cindy: Then it would be an acoustical effect.  It would be a sound wave that we could hear.  Now there are a lot of ideas on how that would work. We won’t go into all of them here [laughs] it would be long.  But that’s an idea that some people have put forward, that that is an electrical effect. Now, you’re going to have people on the other end saying, “No, that’s an acoustical effect, but it’s so faint signal that it needs a boost through another sound source.”  That’s why people use these little IC recorders, they are, or they used to be very internally noisy.  Some people will say that that’s why you’re getting so few EVP’s now, because you’re using extremely clean equipment – because you’ve no longer got that sound source [white noise] anymore to work with. That’s actually an experiment we’re working with at the moment.

 Robin: So this is a white noise theory, in other words?

 Cindy: Yes, it provides resonance. You have your weak signal here, and you’ve got your sound source and that actually amplifies that sound into the microphone, for example.

 Robin: What are your thoughts on white noise?

 Cindy: I don’t know. That’s one we’re actually working on with this higher-end equipment. We’re actually set up to do some experiments with a stereo system so that we can have one mic that does have that background sound source and another mic doesn’t have it.

 They’re recording at exactly the same time on different tracks. That should be interesting. Let’s see which one gets more EVP’s, if we get any EVP’s. There are a lot of ideas that haven’t been put to the test.  A lot of things are put out as common knowledge just because they’ve been repeated so many times. But I want to do the testing for it, and I want to put them through the paces. And that’s kind of what we do.

 Robin: So you buy all this expensive equipment.

 Cindy: [laughs] When I have the money!

 Robin: And you buy expensive microphones for a pristine, clean sound, and then you’ll have to go buy a white noise generator to create noise.

 Cindy: [laughing] On just the one mic though.

 Robin: And I bet you don’t want me to go and explain that to your husband! [both laughing]

 Cindy: Actually I run all my experiments past my husband. He’s a PhD, a Physicist. And that’s part of the deal. I am in crazy land, in the paranormal, but I have a very smart Doctor of Physics in my house. So I was asking him, if I was going to set up this experiment, what you would think of this experiment and its flaws? And he looked at the experiment and said, “Yeah, this one will be ok.” And that’s really important to me. We try, as best as we can to use the scientific method, to use critical thinking, to use very clean experiments. Because that’s the only way we are going to get the particular answers that our group is looking for.

 Debate over Analog versus Digital

 Robin: OK. I was working with a investigator not too long ago. Now, he’s old school, but he says that digital is crap and that analog is better. Especially tape, because it has in particular a magnetic tape that is controlled by the entity. Or that because of its magnetic tape it is more easily imprinted. Thoughts on that, is analog better?

 Cindy: We use both.  We use a high-end Marantz set recorder – it’s another field recorder. I’ve got some interesting things on it, by itself. The only thing I don’t like about cassette is the hiss of it.  There are also some questions about tape type and bulk erasing your tapes so that you can get your original artifacts off. There’s a whole other world about cassette tapes you can get into the pros and cons of that.

I have a new digital system. I wanted the new digital system because it was going to eliminate the tape hiss that I found very annoying, and that is such a high quality system that it will be very clean – it is better than CD quality. It will actually reproduce a sound that is top quality. With the frequency and the bit rate it should be pretty good and that’s what we’re going to look at.

 Robin: So your theory is that analog isn’t better simply because it’s analog, because of the tape?

Cindy: I don’t think that’s ever been proven out.

Robin: So is digital better? Or do you not know?

 Cindy: I’ve seen no one do an experiment with magnetic tape.

Robin: So you’re going to take both of them to an investigation?

Cindy: We take both of them, yes we do. Why I went to analog first it was for monetary [reasons]. We all get things [equipment], as we can get them. I could afford the analog first, and I kept upgrading that until I got the one that I wanted. Basically that was better quality; the analog was better quality – even with the hiss – than any of the 24 little recorders I have. Because I wanted to try…all of them. I wanted to try the old-school, first-generations ones, the second generation ones. I wanted to try the new ones.  I want to try them in slow play, fast play; I wanted to do a lot with them.

And I finally concluded, they’re just not very good for voice reproduction.  I wanted fidelity. I wanted a good sound.  Yeah, I’m not getting my white noise, crackly sort of thing that the voices are in. But what I did find out from the cassette was that they are probably not paranormal voices anyhow.  It’s just that – a bad recording. What can I say? So, I did like the analog for that. But now I’ve decided I wanted to look some more, and so this particular recorder, it’s a Fostex FR-2 Field Recorder, it just seemed to have everything I wanted at a price I could afford. So, we’ll see. It’s brand new for me, it’s my new toy. [chuckles] I’ll let you know in a year what I think about it. Either that or you may find it on EBay in a year [laughs].

And I do have several cassette decks that we’ve used in home experiments, and those are fine.  But I’m looking for something different even in cassette now.  I’m looking for a stereo system in cassette, because I just have a mono system right now. So I’m even looking to upgrade that a little bit.

 How does a Ghost make an EVP?

 Robin: You’ve been at this for a while now, so do you have a theory? Do you have a theory because ghosts don’t have voice boxes?  So how can there possibly be a sound coming off onto your [recording equipment]?

 Cindy: That’s why it may be more…I don’t know. It’s so difficult. Is it an electrical effect or is it an acoustical effect from a weak signal? My money is riding on that one right now. But until I get through a whole series of experiments I can’t say to put my money on that for sure. But that’s just it; you have to pick one thing. If you’re going to do a long term experiment you have to pick one thing and say, “This is what I’m going to look at.” So that is what I am going to look at now within the Anomalous Research Department. So maybe within a year, maybe within two years, I will have more data to tell you for sure that, “Yeah, I’m getting more EVP’s when I’m using this sound source, and that I think the weak signal is getting boosted within  the microphone.”  Well, that’s what I’m going to try [laughs].

Microphones

Robin: Microphones, what types of microphones do you recommend?

Cindy: Well, I was using electrical condenser microphones, and I started using those because back in 2000 that was what I read to use. I never questioned it, because I had never read much on microphones back then. So I started with them, and I liked them because I felt they had a nice, clean, high-end sound. I liked them, but then I started reading that people liked these dynamic microphones because they have the magnet with the coil and the coil is attached to the diaphragm, and we’re working with a magnet here and a magnetic-electrical effect. That’s really intriguing, because more and more groups are saying that EVP is EMF related.  

 I figured the only way I’d know is if I tried it. So I have actually been comparing the two for a couple of years now and I haven’t seen a lot of difference. But now I’m going to go strictly with the stereo and the dynamic mics, and the computer system is going to use with electro-condenser mics. My background isn’t audio and technology, but I’ve been forced into audio and technology. You do what you have to.

Protocols for Running an EVP Session

Robin: Yes, it can be quite an education. So, what are the proper procedures for running an EVP session?

Cindy: Let me see, the protocol is like two pages long [laughs] when we teach sessions.  Right now we’re starting with a sound-scape of the room.

Robin: How long do you run it?

Cindy: Well I’ve run it for up to a half hour, sometimes as little as 10 minutes. I’m just trying to get a taste of the [natural sound] room. I want to know what it is like right before I do a session. I will have the people come into the session. We videotape all of our sessions. We have multiple recorders plus the D.E.A.D. system set up. So you can imagine we’ve got a lot of equipment. It’s not intimidating at all [chuckles].

 Robin: Do you also have the tinfoil hats [both laugh]?

Cindy: But then those who want to come into the session are allowed in. I don’t like my session to be too big because people move. And you’re listening for an EVP and it could be just someone shuffling their feet.  But then people come in. I have everyone introduce themselves because I want to get a voice print of everyone who is in the room. And then the session is timed to the DEAD system. So we start.

We usually do a question and answer sort of thing. Sometimes I know what’s going on, but sometimes I don’t know what is going on in the place because, especially when you’re going back to review you don’t want to be biased.  It’s much better if I don’t know what is going on, and say on review I pick up on the word Mary. Maybe that’s relevant to the homeowner, that holds a little more credence than me trying to make the sound into something like that. Anyway, I will go through with my spiel. I will ask those in the room if they have something to say.

If anything happens during the session, say we start hearing something off to the side, as has happened before we will direct the EVP session to what is happening at that time. I ask people to be still and do voice marking for every little thing like if a car goes by, or a dog barks, if you sneeze, whatever. That’s really important to us. Sometimes we’ll take notes.

The new thing we’re going to do, which I talked about in the protocol, we are going to be hooking someone up to headphones so they can be monitoring what is being said in the headphones as we’re running the sessions.  And that’s pretty much it. That’s, I think, the easy part of EVP.  And they last for 10 to 15 minutes, and we may do, depending on the location, three to four sessions a night. That’s enough to keep me busy for a couple of weeks.

Evidence Review

 Robin: Do you do all of the review of the tapes.

Cindy: I am one of the persons that do the review. We’re splitting up the reviews now, so that there are two people reviewing the same things. The new idea is that hopefully the second person will not have been at the investigation, because we want to see, if two people hear something do they hear the same thing. So there’s paperwork that we do with the review.  We don’t do any sound editing until we can confirm that a suspected EVP is not a false positive from another recorder. And so I will mark that.  If I heard something on one of the digitals then I have to go back to all the other recorders and check those recorders and also check it on the video so it’s quite time consuming. But I can get rid of probably 99% of my stuff that way.  I think EVP is actually a very rare phenomenon.  I don’t think it is as prevalent as people think it is. That’s just from my experience.

Robin: So most of the time when someone picks up an EVP what do you think it is?

Cindy: Well it depends. I have to ask a lot of questions. What sort of a recorder did you use, where was the recorder? I very rarely hear very clear voices on a recorder. Sometimes when I do it might sound like the person in the room. People forget what they do all the time.  They don’t realize they whisper, they don’t realize they’re talking to themselves. We’re forgetful creatures; we don’t remember these simple things. So it’s hard for me to say without a backup what it is.

Robin: So for an EVP to actually make it into your…hall of fame [chuckles] what are the filters?

Cindy: It would pass the backup recording test. We’d make sure on the better recorder that we can’t identify that voice.  Chances are that it’s on only one recorder.  That would be a plus.

Robin: I’ve noticed that that happens a lot in investigations. The sound will only be on one recorder when there were three or four recorders in the room.

Cindy: Which suggests that it was just that one recorder affected?  And then we’ll look at the DEAD system data at the same time.  That may or may not tell me much.  Sometimes we do get interesting data at the same time as we get an EVP. So we’re kind of looking at all that. It’s a lot to look at actually. What else do I do? Well just that takes forever.

 If I do get a voice and it has passed the backup recorder test then we have to decide are we going to filter it or not.  Are we going to do any cleanup on it or not? We do very little, because I really don’t want to mess around with the frequencies we have there. I want to be able to tell where this was and what it was originally and keep that data on hand too.  What was the top frequency, what was the amplitude of that particular sound and just try to keep track of all that over time.  Maybe it will tell me something some day.

Robin: Well, and I’ve always been worried about taking what I think is an EVP and putting it into an editing system and tweaking it and then trying to present it to the paranormal community. I can only imagine what the skeptics would say about that.

Cindy: Well, exactly because you can give me any sound and I could make it sound like an EVP with enough tweaking. And I’m hoping, honestly, with this new recording system that I’m not going to have that much trouble anymore because I’m hoping not to have to deal with bad recorders.  We’ll see what happens.  And if I do use a sound source [white noise generator] that it will be a very controlled sound source and I’ll have a record of that sound source and I’ll be able to take that out. That will still mess with my frequencies, but just for my own knowledge it would be interesting to see what happens when I take that out. I’m speculating here.

Asking Questions at an EVP Session

Robin: More on the emotional side of EVP work here, I’ve heard people say that they look into the history of the place and try to find something to say, even going to the point of scripting up questions.  You’ve already said that you don’t believe that…

Cindy: Well let’s say I went to West Virginia State Penitentiary and I knew all the history of that. So when I did do an EVP session there I would probably direct my questions to who I thought I might be speaking to. And interestingly enough, some of the better responses and activity we’ve generated has been when I’ve started asking about family members.

Robin: Yes, I’ve found that to be true too.

 Cindy: “So, tell me about your mother,” or “is there a loved one…” And you get an emotional response and you wonder was I projecting it or is that the entity out there projecting it back to me. And I don’t know. But sometimes we have had some interesting things happen, not EVP’s but interesting activity happen around those questions. I’ve been in this long enough where I’ve done it all, scripted things out to the nth degree. I feel like I’m a little more stifled when I do it that way, it’s not so free flowing. I’ve also done round robin with people. I’ve done all sorts of different ways. Right now I’m a little more laid back on it, just as long as I can control my environment.

 What I’m actually doing now is stepping back as the session leader and letting other people do the sessions. I’m doing more monitoring because we had a huge drop off of EVP. Now is it me? Let’s see what happens when other people control the session, and I’ll just monitor the equipment – so there’s another question to look at here. So let them run the session as they see fit, just as long as I can monitor the environmental control, and my sound is controlled, I’m a happy camper.

 Robin: Well, I’ve found too that after a strenuous EVP session that I’m kind of empty emotionally inside. I’ve had some very emotional EVP sessions.

Cindy: Hmm, I can’t say that’s ever happened to me. I think I’m probably too analytical in my thinking and how I approach that. And, who knows, that’s why I’m trying to get other people involved in the sessions, because maybe that is an important element. And maybe I’m too analytical about it, too skeptical about it, whatever, but too distanced. And maybe you do need that person that does have that glimmer.

Robin: Yes, because don’t you think if there is an entity out there and you’re trying to entice it to speak with you, don’t you think you’d have to make an emotional connection with them in order for them to respond?

Cindy: Well, and that is what I try to do, especially when I get into the more psychological questions. I try to draw emotions that are triggers for me, personally, or for someone who had a troubled background. But that’s why I’d like to see more people in our group step forward in the process just to see what happens.  But no, I can’t say I’ve experienced what you’ve experienced because I don’t know what happens really, unless we start to have activity start to happen during an EVP session, I don’t know what it is until I get home. Because we won’t and don’t at this time analyze onsite.

Thoughts on Provoking an Entity

Robin: How about provoking?

Cindy: I don’t. We do have some people in the group that do. On the cases I’ve been on, I can’t say that I’ve seen anything happen with it. I have heard from other investigations before I was in the group where they’ve done provoking and it’s not that they got EVP’s but they did get activity. And we had instances where we’ve had audible voices but they don’t show up on the recorder. I don’t know what that’s about!  Now that seems like more of a mind connection, but that’s a whole other topic.  And they got that through acts of provoking.  I’m just not personally comfortable with it; it’s just not my personality. But I generally don’t stop somebody if they want to.

Favorite EVP’s

Robin: So, favorite EVP?

Cindy:  Oh, yeah, but I can’t back it up. It was in the early days. I was doing a session for a gentleman who – well, I used to go to people’s houses in the early days and do sessions – so I went to a house for a gentleman whose wife had died. I was using one of the first, early edition recorders from Radio Shack. It literally looks like a Bic lighter! I still have it [laughs].

Robin: Let me guess it’s in the box with the other hundred recorders you bought.

Cindy, Yes, but it’s still my favorite because it was my first one. I used no external mic, just the one that is in there. But very, very clearly, you hear…sometimes you get interesting things when you’re just having conversations with people and you’re not careful about it and you get that third voice.  And we got that third voice, and it’s in a lull between when I’m speaking and he’s speaking – you hear a whispery voice that is extremely clear that seems to say, “Do you want this person?”

And yes, he does want that person; he’s looking for that person.  Other people have heard it, and as you know you’re best loved EVP’s nobody else can hear what you hear! [Laughs] They don’t necessarily hear what I hear. But that was pre-group, and that one has always stuck with me. I have no data to back it up, it was one little recorder. But it was one of those little things that has kept me going, especially when I was doing this pretty much by myself.

Within the group, some of the interesting ones…

Robin: I really love the one of the ghostly PA system.

Cindy: Yes, that one’s cool. But that’s not so much an EVP as a Direct Voice Phenomenon, because they could hear it. So it wasn’t an Electronic Voice Phenomenon because it was through a PA – but the PA system wasn’t plugged in!  It was wild. But it’s things like that that keep us going, because once you shift through all the data there’s not a lot out there that we can validate.  We’re looking for that 1% that’s showing something. If we come up with nothing maybe that’s showing us something too.  What we need is for other groups to step up and buy this similar equipment, and to have some really stringent protocol, not just waving recorders around because that doesn’t prove anything. That just gives us a lot of questionable sounds. We need other groups to step up so that we can get some answers.

Resources mentioned in this Article:

AA-EVP The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena
www.AA-EVP.com/index.htm

Dr. Dennings, Hazel M. (1966) True Hauntings: Spirits with a Purpose

Llewellyn Publications.

Fostex FR-2LE Compact Flash Field Recorder B&H Photo, Video, Pro Audio Catalog Summer 2011 Catalog.  www.BandH.com

Lauer, J., Schumacher D. (2007) Investigating the Haunted: Ghost Hunting Taken to the Next Level. Xlibris Corporation. Additional Copies of the Book can be ordered at Orders@Xlibris.com

 Marantz  2-Channel Portable Recorder. B&H Photo, Video, Pro Audio Catalog Summer 2011 Catalog.  www.BandH.com

Paranormal Research Group (P.R.G.) incorporates Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and was formerly known as the Southern Wisconsin Paranormal Research Group (S.W.P.R.G.)

http://www.paranormalresearchgroup.com/

Strom-Mackey, R. (2012) “Interview with Dave Schumacher of the P.R.G..” www.delawareparanormal.blogspot.com  January 23, 2012