Ghost on TV: Image by Ghostly Activities

Dr. Imants Barušs from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, had once embarked on a mission to validate the concept of afterlife in science, and thus launched a two-part research where he employed everything from radio stations to psychics who are well known for their accurate readings, all to show how ghosts often use electronic gadgets around us to communicate. What did he find?

In 2001, he performed his first research to evaluate the concept of phone calls from the dead. There, he recorded the static between two radio stations under controlled circumstances, talking to any spirits that may be around. He recorded several EVPs, but these were mostly open to interpretations.

His next research in 2007 was relatively foolproof, and showed some interesting results. He used three computer programs in all the detect the presence of any spirits around. The first was a random word generator, the second an EVP maker (a device that chopped sound files and reassembles them randomly) and an app which generated random “yes” or “no” answers to user created questions.

The idea was to see if, by urging the spirits around to communicate (under specific environments, of course) he could get the spirits to influence the working of these apps, resulting in the creation of EVPs and words. While results from the first two apps were more or less subtle, 9 out of 11 answers generated by the yes-no answer generator were correct, a statistically rare event, as Barušs puts it.

Another noteworthy event was when they brought in a  psychic for some spiritual insight:

A woman who is considered to be a medium was used in the experiment. The idea was that she might be able to detect any spirits trying to communicate through the devices, and she might thus give the researchers advice on how to tweak the experiments for success.
During one of the sessions, the researchers posed the question, “What do we need to know that we don’t understand about this?” The medium immediately heard the EVPmaker produce the word “opportunity.” The random word generator had been activated at the exact same time and produced the phrase “on sharp opportunity are was yes name.” Barušs and another research assistant present did not hear the word “opportunity” immediately, but they did hear it upon playing back the tape.

Thus, although very strange, I personally believe that firmer evidence is required if such a giant spiritual leap was to be taken, and there’s still a long way to go (as always!). Want more read? Check out my article on All About Occult: New Study on Whether Ghosts Can Communicate through Electronics.