Page 44 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - September 2021

44 The Broken Technology of Ghost Hunting

The Broken Technology of

Ghost Hunting

The best tools for tracking down
spirits have always been the ones

fallible enough to find something.

By Colin Dickey

The small, Syracuse, New York-based company
K-II Enterprises makes a number of handheld
electronic devices—including the Dog Dazer (a
supposedly safe, humane device that deters
aggressive dogs with high-pitched radio
signals)—but it is best known for the Safe
Range EMF. The size of a television remote, the
Safe Range EMF detects electromagnetic fields,
or EMF, measuring them with a bright LED
array that moves from green to red depending on
their strength. Designed to locate potentially
harmful EMF radiation from nearby power lines
or household appliances, the Safe Range has
become popular for another use: detecting effects, hoping to capture random noise and children were watching Ding Dong School one
ghosts. other ephemera. The ghost hunter, in turn, looks afternoon on Long Island when the ghostly face
for patterns, momentary convergences, of an unknown woman appeared on the screen.
ince its appearance in the show Ghost Hunters, serendipity, meaningful coincidence. For the The face would not dissipate, even after the
where the ghost hunter Grant Wilson claimed believer, this is where ghosts live: in static, in television was turned off, and their father was
that it had been “specially calibrated for glitches, and in blurs. forced to face the television to the wall “for
paranormal investigators,” the Safe Range gross misbehavior in frightening little children,”
(usually referred to as a K-II meter) has become Ghost hunting was born out of a love of as The New York Times reported. The television
ubiquitous among those looking for spirits. technological failure. In 1861, William H. died completely a day later, but not before its
Search for it on Amazon, and many listings will Mumler, a jeweler’s engraver, was studying the paranormal nature had made it a minor celebrity.
refer to it as a “ghost meter,” an indispensable new trade of photography when the shadowy
tool in the ghost hunter’s arsenal. It isn’t alone figure of a young girl appeared on a plate he was For Friedrich Jürgenson, it was a cassette
among EMF meters: Of the best-selling EMF developing. As Crista Cloutier describes in The recorder. In the late 1950s, Jürgenson, a painter
meters on Amazon, two out of the top three are Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, and filmmaker, was experimenting with
explicitly marketed as ghost meters. Mumler knew it to be an error, a consequence of recording birds in his garden; when he played
accidentally reusing a plate that hadn’t been them back, he heard voices on the tape that he
Yet it’s precisely because it’s not particularly sufficiently scrubbed of its previous exposure. claimed belonged to his dead father and wife,
good at its primary purpose that makes it a But then he showed the curiosity to a Spiritualist calling his name. After several years refining his
popular device for ghost hunters. Erratic, prone friend of his. “Not at that time being inclined technique, he published his findings in a 1967
to false positives, easily manipulated, its flashy much to the spiritual belief myself, and being of book called Radio Contact With the Dead. A few
LED display will light up any darkened room of a jovial disposition, always ready for a joke,” he years later, a Latvian psychologist named
a haunted hotel or castle. Which is to say, its later admitted, “I concluded to have a little fun, Konstantin Raudive further developed and
popularity as a ghost-hunting tool stems mainly as I thought, at his expense.” elaborated on Jürgenson’s techniques, releasing
from its fallibility. his own book on the science of recording the
He told the Spiritualist that the image was voices of the dead in 1971.
The K-II isn’t the only consumer-electronic item authentic, and that no one else had been around
used by ghost hunters. Often it’s sold in kits that when he’d taken the photograph. His friend took Rudive’s transcriptions included some
contain other devices, such as a Couples Ghost the joke all too seriously, and in short order, disturbing messages from the beyond. One voice
Hunt Kit, with two of everything, so you can Spiritualist publications had reprinted Mumler’s told him: “Here is night brothers, here the birds
build “trust and lasting memories when the two mistake as proof of life after death. Mumler burn.” Another reported: “Secret reports … it is
of you, alone in some spooky stakeout, look to himself soon changed his tune, claiming he’d bad here.” But Raudive confessed that the
each other for confirmation of your findings and discovered a “wonderful phenomenon that really ghosts didn’t always speak so clearly. He
reassurance!” There are devices that have been needed investigation,” and began offering to claimed that spirits would speak in multiple
engineered specifically for ghost hunters, such make spirit photographs in earnest. For 10 languages, sometimes in the same sentence.
as a ghost box, which works by randomly dollars (normal sittings cost about a quarter at Sometimes they would speak backward.
scanning through FM and AM frequencies to the time), he’d take your photo, with the proviso Deciphering EVP became a matter of sifting
pick up spirits’ words in the white noise. But he couldn’t guarantee a ghost’s materialization. through any acoustic anomaly that shows up on
mostly, ghost hunters use pre-existing a tape, however minor or incoherent, and then
technology: not just EMF meters, but also run- Mumler’s inadvertent invention of spirit torturing that noise into some kind of meaning.
of-the-mill digital recorders, used to capture photography cemented a connection between
electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. An ghosts and technology that endures to this day— Electronic voice phenomena have continued to
investigator records her or himself asking and specifically, the ways that mistakes and rank among the most prominent “evidence”
questions in an empty room, with the hope that accidents of technology appear as offered of paranormal activity, it seems,
upon playback ghostly voices will appear. manifestations of the paranormal. Consumer precisely because humans are hardwired to
technologies from photography to telegraphy to dredge meaning out of chaos.
All of this technology—both the custom and the radio to the internet are almost always
repurposed—works along more or less the same immediately seized on by believers as offering
principle: generating a lot of static and random further proof of the paranormal. In 1953, three (Continued on Page 45)