I fancy myself as an open-minded skeptic regarding matters spooky and bizarre. I was a mere child when I dabbled with a Ouija Board with my neighbor, Nancy, and we scared the crap out of ourselves.
If you’ve read any of my other Spooked! Blog posts about my creepy upbringing, my Aunt with the subscription to Fate Magazine and an obsession with UFOs, Jean Dixon, and Padre Pio, you know I am inclined to believe in the paranormal. I specifically believe in ghosts of some sort, especially after having one try to talk in my ear in a dark, abandoned warehouse.
At the same time, I am dubious at best when other people and TV shows make outrageous claims about haunted locations and whatnot. I’m looking at you Zac Bagins. I don’t believe it unless I’ve experienced or tried it myself. That’s why I went to the Pennhurst Paracon outside of Philly back in May.
I didn’t bring my SB7 Spirit Box, but I had my phone and a couple of ITC apps. ITC is an abbreviation for” Instrumental Trans-communication,” which describes communication with non-physical entities through electronic devices. It makes sense to think of spirits as forms of energy that allow them to interact with electronics like phones and radios.
The SB7 Spirit Box is essentially a transistor radio with the tuner short-circuited. The radio rapidly sweeps through all the radio frequencies, allowing the ghost or whatever to communicate by selecting random words from the word soup, which is the broadcast airwaves. Years ago, I made one from a Radio Shack radio that I cracked open and cut the wire that controlled the tuner. You just heard random bands of static, and I never heard it say anything sensible when I tried it, killing my excitement.
The SB7 Spirit Box has controls for switching between AM and FM and changing the rate at which the bands are scanned, making it a little easier to pick out what is being said. The app I used at Pennhurst allegedly works on the same principle—it uses your smartphone’s sensors rather than radio waves.
The one I used was Spirit Talker. Allegedly [I haven’t tried to reverse engineer the app], Spirit Talker and other similar apps have a dictionary of words that the spirits can choose from to form messages.
Here’s a shot of the app and some of the results I got while at Pennhurst [Click to see the full-size images].
Unfortunately, the app doesn’t record what you say in response, so the snippets in the pics don’t include my or any follow-up questions. But you can imagine being in a place as freaking creepy as an abandoned asylum with your phone telling you “It creeps up behind you.” {{{Shivers}}}
But. And there’s always a but. I didn’t pick apart the app, so I don’t know if there’s just some random word-soup generator pumping out phrases like “Death is not the end” at random times. So I am suspicious. I won’t say I didn’t get goosebumps, I did. I won’t say I didn’t get creeped out. I did. The space itself did that. I didn’t need my phone saying things like “She likes you” or “Hear us whisper” to creep me out. And yet.
And Yet.
“We’re not at peace.”
Many of the statements were exactly what you would expect a creepy ghost to say in a creepy space—a little on the nose, as they say—so I don’t trust it. Even the FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY warning on all these ITC apps and their built-in dictionaries makes me suspicious.
That brings me back to the SB7 spirit box. It’s not a programmed device—it’s a radio with a broken tuner, basically—so I am less suspicious right out of the gate. However, I haven’t tried it.
This is the dilemma of the would-be ghost hunter. I don’t want to try it in my house. I’ve already heard a woman’s disembodied weeping in my dining room, and someone whispered my name in my ear when I was home alone and walking up the steps. And let’s not forget the ghost cat that was sighted several times in the basement [never mind the actual mummified cat down there in a box—don’t ask].
Things have been quiet in the house for a while, and I don’t want to stir things up—despite an itch to try the SB7 Spirit Box, and a freshly made scrying mirror that I’ve also wanted to try. I’m afraid to.
One of these days I’ll break down and try them both. Maybe in the house, maybe in the cemetery behind the house. A psychic friend told me I have a portal in my cellar and energy being railroaded through the house from the cemetery out back, to…wherever.
Psychics are a whole other kettle of skeptical fish [despite the fact that I read tarot cards and use other forms of divination]. I’ll have to get back to you on that when I can find a psychic test in person.
When I do tempt superstitious fate, whether with the spirit box, the scrying mirror, or an amenable psychic. I’ll write up the experience here. But don’t hold your breath.
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