Patrick Burns, a 30-year paranormal investigator, uses an old BlackBerry to capture EVPs in Savannah’s haunted sites like Calhoun Square (a former slave cemetery) and Mercer House, where voices—including "I’m with God" on Arthur Smith Jr.’s death anniversary—emerge from short recordings. Interactive EVPs reveal chilling replies like "every day" to questions about evil, while reversed audio sometimes clarifies messages, such as "save me" from a cemetery. Lingering spirits may stem from violent deaths or unresolved energy, with modern names like "Amy" appearing unexpectedly. Skepticism is urged, yet the phenomenon’s unsettling accuracy lingers, prompting listeners to experiment with tools like Ghost Radar Connect. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, I've got a couple of items for you here at the beginning of the show.
In the conservative United States, citing God, invoking God's authority, a county clerk denied marriage licenses to gay couples again on Tuesday in direct defiance of federal courts.
And he vowed, I'm not going to resign.
I don't care if I get a fine or go to jail.
It's not a light issue for me.
That's probably where he's headed.
He says for him, it is a quoting here, heaven and hell decision, end quote.
So that's a conservative United States.
And now the liberal Vatican, not reported at all, really, on the cable networks.
This one is a headshaker.
Pope Francis is applying his vision of a merciful church to women who have had abortions, easing their path toward forgiveness, saying that he will realizes that some women had no choice or felt they had no choice and made this agonizing and painful decision.
And so he published a letter Tuesday in the Holy See in which he said, the Pope said, he was allowing all rank and file priests to grant absolution during the holy year of mercy he has proclaimed.
And that will run from December 8th, 2015 until November 20th of 2016.
So the liberal Vatican is, when hand we're going one way, the Vatican is going the other, saying that during that time, only during that time, can you be absolved from having had an abortion?
Things really are a changing, huh?
The market changing too, downside, I'm afraid.
Almost 500 points down, same fear, China.
China is slowing a little faster than they thought it was, and that's going to not be good stuff for the market.
Well, coming up in a moment, we are going to talk about ghosts.
We are specifically going to talk to Patrick Burns, who is going to talk about ghosts.
He has a number, quite a number of EVPs for us.
He is a ghost investigator.
It's going to be a pretty wild week, actually.
Tomorrow night, Peter Davenport will be here.
Then we'll have something about werewolves coming up on the following show.
I don't want to give it all away, but it's going to be good.
This little thing from me, Roman senator Pliny, the younger, who died way back just 13 years after the death of Jesus, told a ghost tale so haunting that it survives today.
It seems there was at Athens a large and roomy house which, well, had a bad name, so nobody could live there.
In the dead of night, a noise resembling the clashing of iron was frequently heard.
If you listen more attentively, it actually sounded like the rattling of chains.
Disturbances that led to the appearance of a specter.
The form of an old man of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance with a long beard and disheveled hair rattling the chains on his feet and hands.
Well, needless to say, that house was abandoned quickly and had to be rented out for on the cheap.
Then suddenly a philosopher named Athendorius heard the story.
He reportedly rented the house on the cheap, I assume, and immediately confronted the ghost.
The ghost appeared and rattled around before vanishing.
Athendorius calmly marked the spot where the ghost had vanished.
Smart, huh?
In the morning, he ordered the spot be dug up, and as the story goes, they found the skeleton of a man in chains.
It was found right there.
For the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the chains.
Nevertheless, after being given a proper burial, the ghost departed and the house was haunted no more.
That's from the Harvard Classics, by the way.
All right, coming up in a moment, paranormal investigator Patrick Burns is best known for his starring role on True TV's Formerly court TV's haunting evidence.
He was there for three seasons, actually, able to apply his vast knowledge of electronics and computer systems toward the goal of documenting paranormal activity.
Most recently, he has been seen as a recurring guest on Judge Zach Begin's Paranormal Challenge on the Travel Channel.
Burns is one of the most respected and in-demand paranormal researchers today, conducting investigations, lecturing on many, many topics, and headlining on college campuses literally from coast to coast.
His numerous technical skills include a mastery of advanced audio filtering techniques for enhancing faint, and they are faint, EVP or electronic voice recordings, which, frankly, I consider to be evidence of the presence of the afterlife.
And if there is a more important question in our lives, all of our lives, than whether or not there's anything that comes next, I can't imagine what it would be.
Wouldn't that be the most important question you would want answered?
You know, Art, that goes back almost 30 years ago to the day.
August 7th, 1985.
One of my brothers was killed in a tragic automobile accident in Chicago, where I grew up.
And very much in the beginning, my interest in the paranormal, what pulled me into this world was a spiritual journey.
I was looking for an answer.
I was looking for reassurance, the existence of a spirit world.
You know, we were, of course, surrounded.
My family was surrounded by friends and family that reassured us, just continue to go to church and pray and know that you will be reunited with Billy someday.
And that wasn't enough for me.
I wanted an experience.
I wanted something that would demonstrate to me the existence of a spirit world in the afterlife and would reassure me that I might be reunited not only with Billy, but my other loved ones at some point.
So when I got into this 30 years ago, it was very much a spiritual journey.
And it is indeed the oldest question, you know, of mankind.
What happens after we pass on?
So that was my initial brush with it, was a spiritual journey.
And as I tell people today, I said, you know, my gears have shifted a little bit, and now I've demonstrated to myself, I think, the existence of a spirit world.
I've convinced myself, and now I try to convince others.
I try to document this activity using scientific methods or as scientific as we can be, because as I'm sure you know, we run into a problem here based on the foundation.
The cornerstone of science is the scientific method.
And according to mainstream science, if you're going to present something scientifically for review, you'd better be able to repeat your results under controlled observations.
And there's paranormal activity doesn't perform on command.
It doesn't repeat under the stringent and strict demands and guidelines that science demands.
Charleston, Savannah, St. Augustine, Key West, New Orleans.
It's like the whole southeastern seaboard seems to be littered with these paranormal active hotspots.
Why?
I've definitely noticed that.
I'm not sure, R. I don't know if it's because people in the South are more open-minded to this sort of thing than they are elsewhere in the United States.
Ghost stories are part of Southern folklore here.
They always have been.
And I think Southerners maybe embrace their haunted heritage a little bit more than other places.
And in Savannah, we lay claim, we call ourselves America's most haunted city.
It's believed to be just the amazing things that have happened here.
There's a lot of history that took place in Savannah over its almost 300 years of existence.
Some good things happened here.
A lot of not so good things happened.
But Savannah in particular is known throughout the paranormal circles as the city built on its dead.
Savannah is, for all intents and purposes, one great big cemetery.
When the city started out, when it was founded in 1733, they would bury their dead out in the forest beyond the boundaries of the city on its south side.
The first cemetery was reserved for white Protestants.
So if you weren't a white Protestant, your coffin was carried out into the woods.
They found a clearing in the trees.
They dug a grave for you.
And then eventually, of course, Savannah's population began to swell.
More settlers began to arrive, and the settlers would push further and further into the forest.
And when they came across these grave sites, if they couldn't find a family to claim them, they just paved over them.
They built on top of these graves.
So when Savannah is referred to as a city built on instead, we mean it in the very literal sense of that word.
And I think that's probably the biggest catalyst for Savannah's haunted reputation, is the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, one great big unexhumed cemetery.
A Teen's Guide to Ghost Hunting in the Paranormal.
My wife wrote a fictional novelization, a series called The Ghost Huntress.
It's sort of a modern twist on Nancy Drew mysteries.
Nancy Drew meets ghost hunters, quite frankly.
And she and her publisher came up with this idea to write a nonfiction companion to her series because of all the programs that were coming out.
You know, you have ghost hunters and ghost adventures.
We wanted to make sure, or rather, Marley and her agent thought it would be a good idea to get the next generation of ghost hunters started on the right foot and sort of show them some do's and don'ts that we've learned over the ways.
And a lot of it is common sense in the book.
You know, don't trespass, don't go out on an investigation while you're intoxicated.
You know, a lot of it is common sense like that.
But a good portion of the book, probably 90, 95% of the book, is some of the techniques that we've learned over the years, how to record EVP, how to secure a location before you begin an investigation.
You know, my journey, my brushing with the paranormal 30 years ago did not mean I started off investigating.
I started studying up on this sort of thing.
I started reading about topics more and more.
And my first real brush with the paranormal happened about 1989.
And my brothers had a tavern down in Chicago that I helped them manage and run.
And it was an old building.
The building dated back, I believe, to at least the 1880s.
And it was one of the few buildings in that area that was not claimed by the Great Chicago Fire.
And I would help them out.
I wasn't old enough to tend bar at that time, but I would help them out by cleaning the bar after it closed.
So I would be alone in the bar.
We lived on the apartment upstairs from it.
I would be downstairs in the bar by myself for several hours cleaning up, and I always felt like somebody was watching me.
I always had this weird feeling that somebody was watching me.
And one night I was sitting at the bar, I was having a Coke, taking a break, and I was turned sideways facing down the bar.
And of course, we had mirrors behind the bar where the top shelf liquor was kept.
And in the mirror, in my peripheral vision, I saw very clearly the apparition of a man looking back at me, a reflection.
And he looked to be Latino, Latino male, long, dark, kind of greasy black hair.
He had a very thin mustache and a goatee.
And I saw, and of course I turned to look and there was nothing there.
And I thought, well, I'm really losing my mind tonight, right?
So I kind of gave it no real thought.
And a couple of weeks later, I had a friend of mine, Gene, was in the bar with me one evening.
He was helping me clean up.
I was in a band at the time, and I think we had some recording studio time, so he was helping me get done with my job early so we could get out of there.
He was sitting in the exact same chair that I had been that night.
Now, I haven't told anybody about this encounter.
And as we're sitting there talking, all of a sudden he stops.
He starts looking behind the bar back and forth.
And I said, what?
And he said, I could have sworn I saw somebody in the mirror there, a reflection of somebody looking at me.
And I said, describe them.
He said, it looked like a Mexican male.
I said, wow, thank you.
Okay, I'm not losing my mind, right?
Now it gets even more interesting is I dated a girl for a short period of time who claimed to be a psychic medium.
And this was before I really knew anything about that.
I don't know if I really believed her or if I thought she was a little loopy, maybe a little bit of both.
But we stepped onto the property one night.
She was coming over to visit me.
And we went in the back gate on the back of the property.
And the second she crossed the threshold of the property, the second she stepped through the gate, she shrieked.
And I said, what?
She said, somebody was murdered here.
I said, what?
She said, I see this clear as day in my eye.
I can see it.
At least one person, maybe even two, at least one person.
She said it was horrible.
I thought, okay, hadn't heard anything about this before?
And I kind of dismissed it.
And then finally, this is where everything, all the dots connect.
We lived next door, two doors down from a convenience store.
And I was in there early in the morning one night.
And the sales clerk, it was an older gentleman named Charles.
And he and I were chatting one night.
He said, boy, you and your brothers, you know, you've really done the number with that bar.
You've really turned it into something really nice and classy and special.
He said, I remember this neighborhood when it was, you know, was predominantly Latino.
He said, it was a rough neighborhood back in the 70s.
And he said, I'll never forget the night that those two guys shot each other in the bar.
Do you think that a ghost is, in fact, definitely something that was at one time human, or is it possible we're dealing with a combination of things that we don't know about?
I think it's absolutely possible that it's a combination of things.
You know, I know some people demons, possibly.
I don't know.
I think the whole demon element in the paranormal is really kind of overplayed.
I know a lot of people go in and they assume that because something bad happens, somebody gets shoved or somebody gets scratched, that they automatically attribute anything that's unpleasant to demonic activity.
Who's to say?
I think we're putting the cart before the horse in this instance.
I think we're trying to run before we can walk.
And before we go assigning titles to stuff, we need to understand exactly what it is we're dealing with here.
We're not even sure that ghosts exist at this point.
So by categorizing it and labeling stuff as saying, well, that's demonic and that's a poltergeist, I think it's very premature.
Until we have a better grasp on what it is that we're dealing with, we simply don't know.
Patrick Burns is my guest, and unless he got angry and left because of the Blackberry left.
So we're about to get down to it, but so that is what you use.
And that's fine.
It's a digital recorder, which is interesting because you get, you know, in the old days, people used reel-to-reel recorders and tape sets and all that stuff.
And, of course, that added so damn much noise to already hard-to-hear things that what you're using is, wait a minute, I'm getting something here.
Patrick, I don't know anything about you, do I?
Except, you know, what was written here from my producer, right?
Ah, ah, well, you know, I do consider myself to be a skeptic in the true sense of the word when it comes to the paranormal.
I've certainly had my experiences and that sort of thing.
And I know that I believe that some people might have a touch of the sixth sense, as it were.
And then I think there are a certain, without mentioning names, a certain contingency of the population in the paranormal community that not so much so.
And some people that will go out there and actively try to deceive and prime themselves with information from the quote-unquote great beyond ahead of time before they go alive in front of an audience.
I got my first digital recorder, I guess, about maybe 10 or 11 years ago.
And back then, I think it had a maximum record time of something like four hours, which back then was unheard of.
And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I can go to an investigation.
I can let the recorder run the whole time.
And then I realized at the end of the investigation, I'm like, holy crud, I've got a four-hour recording to listen to now.
I have to set aside another four hours of my life to go through and listen to this.
And it just was impractical.
And then I started cutting it down to a shorter recording session of maybe 15 minutes.
And even that seemed to be a little bit too much.
And then I noticed other investigators that concentrate on EVP were working in what they call burst sessions for maybe perhaps only two or three minutes.
And I've actually even taken that to the extreme.
I will do, my typical recording session will run 60 seconds to a minute and a half, usually no longer.
Very seldom do I go longer than two minutes on a recording session because I've found that if I'm going to get a response, I'm going to get it within that first minute.
Well, we're about to hear, this is a recording that I made.
This was actually not on my tour, and that is one of the things I think I mentioned that on my walking tour, I actually do demonstrations of EVPs for my audience on a nightly basis here in Savannah.
This was an exception.
I actually arrived for my tour accidentally an hour early.
This was back in December, and I got there an hour early, and I had time to kill.
So what I did is I took a stroll down to one of our historic squares here in Savannah called Calhoun Square.
It's about a block away from where I start my tour.
And Calhoun Square is historically significant in Savannah because it is the location, we actually have evidence to back this up, it is the location of the former slave cemetery back when Savannah was expanding.
And back when this was a slave cemetery, it was literally a mass grave that was out in the forest.
It was not marked.
It was basically as a slave would pass away.
They would carry them out there, no wooden pine box or anything.
They would probably wrap them up in a sheet or burlap, put them in this mass grave.
And by some estimates, there are anywhere from a thousand to as many as 6,000 African slave graves in this area, and they were never moved.
The graves are still there.
They were built on top of.
And people ask, how is that possible?
How do they not find these graves when they're breaking ground and building the foundations?
That's because here in the south, very few buildings, especially in Savannah, have subterranean foundations.
Most of them are, the foundation is stacked on top of the surface.
They don't dig down.
So you could very easily build a structure or a road or a building on top of these graves and never know what's underneath.
This was in front of a spooky, uninhabited house that sits on that square.
And I was there by myself.
But because it was before the tour, I had a chance to experiment a little bit.
And this was actually recorded on my trusty BlackBerry as well.
I remembered that the BlackBerry has a, I guess you could call it a video camera function on it.
It doesn't record very high-quality video, but I thought maybe I might use it to capture visual as well as audio evidence.
So I fired up the video camera, filmed around with a little LED light in front, and on playback I realized that the recording, it was essentially worthless.
The range of the LED light was maybe two feet, and it was all pixelated.
I couldn't make anything out.
So I kind of dismissed it.
Completely forgot about this recording.
And then I stumbled across it about two months later when I was clearing files off of this SD card.
I stumbled across this video file amongst my audio files called test.
I was like, what the heck is this?
And I started playing it, and I'm like, oh yeah, that's right.
That video file I did in front of the house that night before my tour.
Didn't see anything in it.
So I'm about ready to hit delete.
And I'm like, well, wait a second.
I may have reviewed it visually.
I did not review it and listen to it to find out if I couldn't hear something in it.
And I'm glad I did.
I call this one the EVP that nearly got away because the night that I stood in front of this house with a video recording device trying to capture visual evidence, you will hear the sound of a voice that says, see me.
And I agree that that is very disheartening to think that a small child might be left behind, might be lingering around here.
It's, you know, as a parent of two boys, I find that very, very disconcerting to think that children might be left behind.
Very tragic.
This one, so you're asking about children.
This one's the one that I end my tours with each night.
This is the one that really, I tell people this is the EVP that will haunt them, that they will hear echoing in their ears as they lay down to go to sleep at night.
And a little bit of background about this one.
I had a woman with me on my tour who had her daughter with her that night.
And she was very protective of her daughter.
And there are a couple of ghost stories that we tell around town about these children that died these tragic deaths, you know, due to negligence of adults.
And this woman was very irate every time I would tell one of these stories, even though a couple of them are probably urban legend more than factual.
This woman was visually shaken every time I would tell one of these stories.
She was just very, very upset.
And so she was giving off this vibe.
She's like, where was her mother?
Where was her mother to protect her from these people?
She was giving off this very nurturing, protective, motherly vibe.
And on this recording that I did, right after telling one of these stories, you're going to hear the sound, the voice of a little girl that approaches and says, mommy.
Listen to how loud this is in comparison even to my own voice.
unidentified
Final EVP session of the evening, starting at 10.07 p.m.
On October 4th, 2014, we are standing outside 432 Abercorn on Calhoun Square.
I have thoughts, Art, but, you know, as I tell everybody, I got into the paranormal to search for answers.
And the irony is I have more questions today than I did when I started out.
I have more, I find that I know less today than I thought I did when I got started doing paranormal research.
As we go further and further in, I mean, you can speculate on these things, but so much of what we find seems to contradict the other evidence that we find, that comes out.
And we don't want to think of children being left behind.
Some people have said, you're not talking with spirits, you're talking with demons.
They're trying to deceive you.
Well, again, that goes back to what I said earlier.
I think we're putting the cart before the horse there.
We're jumping to conclusions just because we're uncomfortable.
This one was recorded outside of an old antique shop here in Savannah.
And this was an interesting stop on the tour.
It was never really designed to be a tour stop.
It happened to be along the way as we were going from one location to the other.
And I had my wife, Marley, with me that night.
And she suggested, she said, hey, Patrick, let's stop in front of the old antique shop and try to do EVP.
And of course, the reasoning for this, our whole construct with this was some people believe not only can a location be haunted, but maybe a relic of the past, an object, an antique might be haunted.
So if spirit were to be attached to any of these antiques, our thing was let's invite spirit that might be associated with any of these things to come out and speak with us.
And in this recording, in the first recording, I asked, I said, did any of these relics belong to you in life?
And the response that I got back was no, which surprised me.
So I thought, well, that's good.
Let's do a follow-up recording.
And this is the follow-up recording.
You'll hear me ask out loud, you indicated none of these relics belonged to you in life.
So why are you still here?
And you will hear a voice that says, hey, you, come inside.
And I loop it three times for you to hear it again.
So let's give it a list.
unidentified
Okay, our next EAP session at 9.59 p.m., November 30th, 2014.
Standing outside Arthur Smith Antiques.
A voice came through to us just a moment ago.
Thank you for communicating with us.
You indicated nothing in the store belonged to you.
Not going to be loud enough for your listeners to hear, even with amplification.
But I got a follow-up that said, come inside.
After saying, hey, come here, you, come inside.
Seemingly something wants me to go inside the shop.
I was going to go inside the shop, but they had been closed, actually, for some remodeling.
They had some water damage they experienced.
And when I was looking up the phone number for this place, I found the obituary for the man who had passed away, who had owned the shop, had passed away back in 2008.
I went there, actually.
It turns out that the anniversary of his death was coming up in a couple of days after I found the obituary.
I took my tour group there that night, and this is the recording that resulted.
You will hear me say out loud, we're here on a very special night.
We're here on the anniversary of the death of the man who once owned this shop.
And I ask out loud, I say, do you have a message that you would like for me to give to your family?
And after I say message, I pause for a moment to draw breath.
And in that pause, you will hear a voice that says, I'm with God.
I'm with God.
I'm going to loop it three times.
Let's hear it.
unidentified
Our next recording at 9.34 p.m. outside Arthur Smith Antiques on the 18th of April, 2015.
Tonight is a very, very special night.
This is the anniversary of the death of the original owner of this shop, Arthur Smith Jr.
Or as he was known to his friends, Artie.
Do you want me to give a message to your family, the current owners of the shop?
Well, and I think also what we're suffering through here is, you know, the connection, the audio connection, retransmitting it over.
What I do is I make these recordings on the spot, and then I have a pretty high-quality speaker, external speaker that I plug the device into and I play them back.
And I think maybe we're getting some, if it's not coming through.
This is digital radio all the way to the listener's ear.
It's coming through very clearly.
That's not the problem.
I'm just saying that unless you were listening for it, if you listened to a recording, that you were, I don't know, making a recording for whatever reason, your brain would hear that as noise, wouldn't necessarily register it as what it is and what we clearly hear.
Most people would just dismiss that as background noise.
But we're actively listening for it.
We're listening for these lower fidelity, these lower amplitude sounds to come through on us.
So you definitely...
If you're going more than a couple of minutes listening to one of these recordings back, with listening on your ear on edge, it becomes fatiguing after a while to try and maintain your concentration and try to pick out.
I admit it, I have a short attention span.
After a couple of minutes, I'm getting bored.
I'm thinking about what am I going to have for dinner?
My mind starts to wander.
So for those of us who are ADD, I suppose listening to shorter samples like this is easier.
Some people are saying they're having difficulty, and I don't know why, because at my point, it's very, very clear, even though it's sort of a hushed version of, oh my God, it nevertheless is very clear to me.
Well, on that note, I just wanted to tell people, there are, of course, there's a plethora of voice note applications for doing audio recordings on your device.
I tell people you might have to experiment with several apps until you find one that works.
You absolutely do not want anything that has noise reduction.
A lot of these apps will zero out if there's no spoken word going on.
I say you don't want anything that has noise reduction or attenuates or zeroes out when there's no spoken word going because EDP, as we've just demonstrated, is very often at a lower fidelity, lower amplitude.
And if it's not loud enough to exceed that record threshold, you'll miss it.
So you want something where you're always going to hear background noise.
You're always going to hear sounds in the background going on.
You don't want anything that incorporates any sort of noise reduction.
You can employ, incorporate noise reduction later on in your digital audio workstation software.
But you don't want anything recording with noise reduction because a lot of times that noise reduction will filter out the EVPs coming through.
When I've been by myself, you know, I don't, as a general rule of thumb, investigate by myself because I'll be the first to admit it.
This stuff does spook me out.
It does scare me.
But also, I think from an evidence-gathering perspective, you've got to have at least one other person with you.
Because if you're by yourself and you're having, and something happens and you're already amped up, expecting something to happen, that's a ripe environment for your subconscious mind to run away with itself.
Well, for example, would be when I was in the bar, you know, the story I told you back when I was in Chicago, when I had my first real paranormal encounter, and I saw that reflection in the mirror, it wasn't just that.
I always felt like I was being watched there.
And when I had to turn out the lights to go back upstairs, the lights were all the way at one end of the bar, and the door leading up to our stairwell was on the other side of the bar.
So I had to walk through the dark in this bar, and I would always stare straight down at the floor as I walked along, so I didn't have to look around and see anything around me.
I felt like there was something there watching me constantly.
And when I saw the reflection in the mirror, I got the heck out of there as Quickly as I could.
Anthony says, an interesting app for Android is Ghost Radar Connect.
Great for starting off.
And guess what?
Anthony, I checked, and Ghost Radar Connect is also available on, not that I'm doing ads for people's apps because it does cost, boy, it looks interesting, though.
Yeah, I've seen the ghost radar for many years, and it does have a spirit box function in it where it will randomly say words, much like an Ovalis or a PX device will.
It also has a radar sweep.
It looks like a traditional radar screen.
And every couple of minutes, a little blip will appear on the radar.
And of course, I tell people, you know, there's no radar sweep going on on this device.
I don't think there's any capability that it could know where any sort of magnetic disturbance or anomaly is occurring.
Certainly, it wouldn't be able to range how far away that is from.
This was made outside Savannah's Mercer Williams house.
And Mercer House, if any of your listeners are fans of the book and or movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Mercer House is where that story was set.
The house was owned by an antiques dealer and house restorationist named Jim Williams, who killed his gay lover in a quarrel back in 1981.
But this house is one of these serial magnets for tragedy that I refer to.
This is a location where over generations a series of tragic deaths have occurred within the house.
And while the house sat abandoned for many years, some local youth broke in in the late 1960s.
They made their way up to the roof of the house where they were trying to allegedly capture a pigeon, was their official cause of death, reason of being up there.
One of the boys, one of the three boys who was up there, fell to his death from the roof of the house.
And people have suggested that he may have levitated off the roof of the house.
There are all sorts of rumors here in town about what really happened to Tommy Downs that day.
But you'll hear me talk out loud.
And I say out loud to Tommy, I say, Tommy, and you will hear the PX device playing underneath.
It says, high, and then it says fall, which is interesting because Tommy fell from a height of 40 feet, 40 plus feet.
And then I go on, Tommy, do you have a message for us?
And you'll hear a very, very breathy, whispery voice at the end of the recording say, don't drink.
The inventor of it is a gentleman by the name of Bill Chappell.
And it takes environmental variables such as the Earth's magnetic field, temperature fluctuations.
It combines them all together and it turns it into a spoken word, basically.
And the theory of operation is that spirit might somehow be able to manipulate either the environment or possibly the circuitry of the device itself to make it say certain words.
But odd, you know, coming from an 11-year-old boy, so I've kind of speculated that there might have been something else that occurred that day.
The boys who were up there, their official reasoning that they told the police that they were up there was that they were allegedly trying to capture a pigeon.
And I find that odd to be there, you know.
So I've kind of speculated, I wonder if somebody swiped a bottle of booze out of dad's liquor cabinet, rounded up a couple of his buddies, and they hightailed it up to the roof of this abandoned house where they could, you know, tip the bottle without being under the watch fly of mom and dad.
So if you have questions about any of the past ones, you want them repeated, that's fine.
If you have any comments, positive, negative, that's fine.
Here are the phone numbers.
The public line is area code 952-225-5278.
I'm going to put a 1 in front of that.
So it's 1-952-225-5278.
If you're calling otherwise, of course, we are available on Skype.
If you're in North America, M-I-T-D 5-1, M-I-T-D-51.
Outside, rest of the world, M-I-T-D-5-5.
That's midnight in the desert, M-I-T-D55.
Just go to the little plus sign in Skype, add us as a contact, and then you will find us in your contact list and you can call us.
So, all that said, let's take a break right here and we'll come back with Patrick Burns and your questions, your observations, whatever it is you want to say.
Those are, when you're hearing that trickling sound, those are called artifacts.
When you apply noise reduction to an audio file to clean it up, to get rid of some of that background hiss, it's not 100% effective.
And you will have remnants that remain that are called artifacts.
It doesn't remove all the voice, and it can very, very frequently sound like water running, or it'll sound like wind chimes, or, like you said, birds chirping.
I'm just saying I focus in on like you work with your eyes.
Yep, more fine-tuned.
Sure, sure.
I really love to do that.
I love to hear.
And I got one, I got one in my whole life, one of these EVPs.
After I heard your show, and I was just in my room messing around, you know, trying to get sleepy, I was just recording nothing, and I heard, extinguish your device, please.
Yeah, right.
I did.
And it was so, so clear.
So I thought, wow, they were listening to art.
They were listening, and they were realistic and listening good, too, because they thought I should extinguish my device.
Long after I'm gone, all of you better be listening for extinguish your device.
unidentified
Well, it's going to be there forever because somebody's floating around that doesn't want to go.
You know, like, it was hilarious because at first I thought I was imagining it, and then I thought, I put the headphones on, and I thought, no, that can't, that's not.
And you know how they just die one day and you can't bring them back to life and you have to go to the store and get a new one and you lose all your stuff and you didn't upload it anywhere.
But the other thing I wanted to ask him, what I wanted to ask you, what do you think about the possibility that some of the explanations for ghost appearances, not all of them, but some of them, are a form of astral projection from people that are actually somewhere else in the world and someone is actually experiencing, seeing them in an astral projection form?
That will have to be, that's a topic for another show, for another time.
When I got into the paranormal after the death of my brother in 1985, I had an extremely vivid out-of-body experience that occurred to me about 1988 or 1989.
It would take me quite some time to tell the story, but I believe I was pulled out of my body by my brother's spirit.
It was basically a gift that he gave to me to demonstrate to me the existence of the spirit world.
And it's a very long story, but I have heard that as well, Caller.
I have heard people have speculated that we might be actually experiencing the spirit of the living, the living manifesting the out-of-body experience.
And first point is, you thought some guy, you thought you heard him say Chuck E a while back or Chuck something.
I heard Sparky when you asked somebody who his name was, if anybody was there.
So Sparky over and over, like from National Lampin's Vacation or something.
But I have a question for your guest.
What about using an amplified listening device and putting that in your ear and using that separately from your recording device to see if maybe you could pick something up immediately, ask somebody a question?
Yeah, that concept is what they call real-time EVP.
It's not quite real-time.
There are recorders that have been modified, and what they do basically is they inject a, it's like a delay.
It's like a digital delay.
You'll say something and you'll hear it a few seconds later.
So you're hearing the recording, the playback in near real time.
The problem is I haven't had the real-time EVP recorders that I've worked with, I haven't had really good success with.
And it's also very disconcerting and confusing to your brain, if that makes any sense, to listen to this constant delay in your voice as you're trying to talk.
You know, you're trying to keep up with yourself as you're talking.
And it gets to be very, very confusing.
And it's mentally exhausting to listen to one of these devices for any length of time.
You know, another approach to that is that you have one person asking questions, and then you have another person who is monitoring with headphones on.
So they're not listening to both, you know, not listening to the person talk outright, but they're listening to the playback in near real time, and they can say, we got a response here.
Thank you very, very much for the call and call again.
But I'm totally with you.
Even our other group of EVP people get child voices all the time, and it's very disturbing, and it's not easily explained when you consider, you know, the number of people in the world that pass on, right?
Yeah, that was two separate recordings on different occasions.
I'm trying to look at the date here on it.
The one was recorded on the 30th of March this past year, and the other one, I don't have the date on the file because I've actually closed out the original file.
But they were definitely on two different locations.
So we're getting the same name as coming through on different occasions for sure.
unidentified
All right.
And I've got one last comment, I guess.
So you kind of mentioned this before.
With all the people who lived before us, you know, it would seem that if this was like dead people, it would be just overloaded with all these just like random voices and stuff.
But like what's so intriguing is like, well, at least with the guys last week, it seemed like a lot of what they had was like with the context of what they were asking.
But like, I guess more of what we heard this week not necessarily was in the context, but just like, I don't know.
And by the way, go into Skype and configure in Skype for your headset as opposed to what other device it had in there.
But then you have to remember and go down and save it.
If you don't save it, the next time you open Skype, it'll go right back to where it was.
We'll have some kind of Skype training session or something tonight.
It really does work.
You know, people are exasperated when I talk about it.
But the fact of the matter is, we have had incredible luck with getting people to configure properly, and they're sounding better and better and better and better all the time.
I know that it was a plantation house that was one of the few in that area that was not burned by William Tecumseh Sherman on his famed March to the sea during the Civil War.
But when it was discovered in the 1960s, in the early 1960s, I've seen photographs of it.
It was completely dilapidated, run down.
And the individual who owns the restaurant or started the restaurant wanted to have an antebellum plantation house as a restaurant in Atlanta.
Problem was, Sherman ensured that there were no plantation houses existing.
So we found this one and moved it brick by brick, meticulously, from its location in Washington, Georgia.
But where exactly it was in Washington, I'm not sure.
I was wondering if he has ever experimented with taking an EVP field recording and listening to it in reverse to see if there are any EVPs that can be picked up when it's being played backwards instead of forwards.
The reason I asked is some of the EVPs I've heard tonight sound like what's called backwards masking, to where what I hear sounds like it was actually recorded in reverse and then it's being played forwards.