Ghost writer

Katherine Ramsland talks about her hair-raising experiences tape-recording the voices of the dead and photographing ectoplasm.

By Suzy Hansen

Oct. 31, 2001 | Friedrich Jurgenson was one of the first people to use EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon, to record the voices of "ghosts." When Jurgenson passed away, he was sure to let his fellow ghost hunters know what he was learning on the other side. The Jurgenson-like voice that experimenters caught on tape said, "All your scientific, medical or biological speculations miss the mark."

What exactly Jurgenson was talking about, whether that was really Jurgenson talking and whether EVP really records the voices of dead people is anyone's guess. But Katherine Ramsland, author of "Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today" and "Prism of the Night," a biography of Anne Rice, believes that Jurgenson might know something that we of the living world do not. Ramsland has met with ghost hunters, psychics and "mediums" during her enthusiastic quest to stare down a specter, traveling from New Orleans to Gettysburg in search of popular spirit hangouts. She's also set out on her own, using her own equipment and her own judgment, to tell the difference between cloudy breath on a cold day and ectoplasm, or to detect whether what appears to be a lens flare in a photograph is actually an orb -- the real thing.

Salon spoke to Ramsland by telephone at her home in Bethlehem, Pa., about her latest book, "Ghost: Investigating the Other Side."

What is a ghost hunter and what do they do?

A ghost hunter is someone who goes out to a reputedly haunted site to see if they can get photographs or see something or have an experience like feel coldness all around or have something push them. Or they try to get EVP -- electronic voice phenomenon. That is where you get voices on tape that you can't hear.

So a person standing in a particular spot can't hear the voices but on the tape the voices come through?

That's right.

And how is that explained?

They claim that tape recorders can pick up things that our ears can't. Engineers have actually explained this -- EVP has quite a long history. It goes back to the first tape recorders, when people inadvertently got these voices and couldn't figure what they were. A few people recognized the voices of dead people who they knew and realized something was going on. There's been quite a lot of research on this, mostly in Europe and Russia. It's not necessarily that the voices answer questions, although I have had that experience, but often they just make a comment about what you're wearing or how you look. They may say, "Help." They may say, "Get out."

You had a ghost answer a question?

There's been a number of times where it seems to be an answer to a question. For example, I went into a cemetery in Lancaster, Pa., at night when no one was around, and asked if anyone wanted to communicate. I got two responses. One sounded like a young male voice that said, "Yes." The other one sounded much older and said, "Why are you doing this to us?"

But you didn't hear this standing there?

No.

You got it on tape though?

Yes. Clearly.

And so you believe ...

I believe that there's something! Sometimes I thought that the ghost hunters had some pretty big gaps in logic; they would get pictures of these balls of light that they call orbs and if they were different colors, they'd say, "That's the ghost's moods." And I would think, "Well, how do they know that?" I knew there was something odd happening, I was getting the results, but I couldn't bring myself to go the whole way and interpret it the way they did.

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