By Rick E. Hale
Paranormal Underground Magazine Writer/Paranormal Investigator

The investigation is finally over. You and your colleagues have spent several hours in the home of a mystified family who seriously want to know what in the hell is going on their home and why is this happening to them. You’ve spent hours taking a zillion pictures while traipsing around the house asking thin air, “Who are you and what do you want?”

The easy part is over; now comes the hard, and not too tedious, part of going over evidence.

You find yourself sitting at your kitchen table carefully analyzing picture after picture. You get a few unexplained light anomalies and a few orby-looking things that may or not be dust. Chances are neither you nor anyone in your crew captured that most prized of all photos: a full-bodied apparition.

And now it is time to turn to your trusty digital voice recorder, and when you least expect it, you hear it . . . that still, small voice that does not belong to you or anyone else in your crew. You listen time and time again — perhaps a dozen — times trying to make out what message the whispering voice is trying to convey. After all this you still can’t make out what the whisper is saying, and you throw your hands to the sky and let out an agonized shout, “Dammit, why do they have to whisper?”

If you’re anything like me, and I know you are, you have found yourself listening to that insufferable whisper. Why the whisper? Why can’t the apparition just speak loud enough so you can make out what it is saying because, after all, your client came to you seeking answers, and all you have is some mumbling spirit?

In the paranormal community, everyone has a theory why spirit voices are so difficult to understand, and hear for that matter. The most commonly held theory is that spirits, by their very “nature,” are parasitic and require the life force of a living breathing person to manifest. And that is, of course, including their voice.

Without us feeding them, they can’t show themselves or speak. It is the old saying, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” That used to bug the shit out of me in philosophy class and still does to this day. While I accept this theory due to it holding water, I have a different theory that may just be the explanation for that insufferable whisper.

Imagine you and your buddy are standing on two opposing cliffs looking at each other across a vast chasm. Your buddy lets out a shout, and you can barely him. He knows that he is yelling, “After this ridiculous exercise, let’s go grab a beer.” However, what you hear is nothing more than a whisper and maybe, just maybe, you can make out a few words, hopefully the most appropriate ones . . . the grabbing of the beer.

I think this is why when we do EVPs, all we get on our Dictaphones is a small whisper — and maybe a few unintelligible words. The spirit or spirits are speaking across a great chasm of space and time or consciousness. They may be yelling at you to get the “f” out of their house or I’m going to kill you, asshole. As strange as this may sound I actually had a spirit tell me to get out of his house and called me an asshole on a recent investigation. They are yelling it, but we just hear a whisper due to this vast unbridgeable chasm.

For me, EVP is where it’s at. Sure, so many people love to pour over their photos and their video hoping they caught a full-bodied apparition or a zillion orbs swooping through the air. But when I hear that insufferable whisper, I just know that it will get my blood pumping and make my desire that much stronger to listen over and over again, even if I can barely understand it.