Uncanny Atlas
Tool

Electronic voice phenomena (EVP)

Voices that ghost hunters say they pick up on audio recordings and take to be messages from the dead.

What users say it does
Users say voices of the dead turn up on tape and are heard only on playback. Wikipedia reports that Friedrich Jürgenson believed he heard his dead father, and then his late wife calling his name, on a birdsong recording from 1959.
What it measures
An ordinary audio recording of ambient sound. A 2022 study in PLOS ONE treated the voices people report as a possible case of pareidolia, where listeners hear words in ambiguous sound.

Friedrich Jürgenson, a Swedish painter who also produced films, is credited with the first such recordings. Cabinet Magazine dates the first one to 12 June 1959, when Jürgenson and Monica, his wife, travelled to their country house, where he taped wild birds. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology gives July 1959 and a Swedish finch. It says he first suspected a fault in the recorder, then, on later recordings, heard what seemed a message from his dead mother, and that Jürgenson's book impressed Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive. Wikipedia says the 1959 tape carried his late wife's voice; Cabinet Magazine has his wife Monica with him on that trip.

Sources