Snap Taffy

Summer 2002
Location Withheld

A free-verse poem:

I'm not a poet, as you may have noticed, so I'll beg your forgiveness here. As you can see, I didn't have much choice in setting the meter for this piece. A real poet might have done a better job of it.

I'm also going to come out and admit that I'm having a little problem coming up with a plausible explanation for this one.

What actually happened? You decide.

Here's the story:

While working up material for this series, I spent some time checking out how others present ghost stories on the Internet, and I came across an interesting website describing one person's experiences with EVP, also known as "Electronic Voice Phenomena."

EVP, in a nutshell, is the capturing of latent sounds on a recording medium. Typically, those who are carrying out the recording do not hear what appears on the tape at the time of the recording--the sounds are discovered on playback. How this actually works, I do not know.

And what exactly is being recorded? Many claim the sounds are the voices of the dead.

The person who put the website together described how she had come to develop an interest in the topic. It seems that after hearing of this phenomena some years ago she decided to go back and take a closer listen to some home videos she had made over the years; videos that she had no initial reason to suspect might contain anything odd. Lo and behold, upon closer inspection, she did detect voices in the background in some of her videos.

Intriguing, I thought. Did I have any videos that might contain "something" that I hadn't noticed before?

Obviously, I would need a video with few if any other people in it or nearby. There was a short video I had made two years ago while on a trip with another person to a number of remote places in the Northwest. So, following the recommended technique, I popped in the original tape, put on headsets, and listened to the audio with my back to the screen.

At first, I heard nothing unusual, just natural background sounds and our voices. Then I heard a small laugh I hadn't noticed before. I looked at the screen to see my companion walking away with her back to the camera, about 35 or 40 feet away. We were alone in a remote cemetery. Was it her?

I rewound the tape and watched. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had never heard this person laugh that way before. I also noticed I unconsciously responded to the laugh, so I must have heard it while narrating the shot.

Here's the unedited audio clip.

Interesting. Still, I could not say that it wasn't my companion laughing, as she had her back to the camera, so I set that one aside. Had she been facing the camera, it would have been easy to determine if it was her.

I continued to listen. Near the end of the tape I heard a very, very faint sound, almost inaudible. It sounded like a snippet of children chanting a rhyme. I stopped the tape, rewound, turned up the volume and watched.

In this shot, I was trying to get good footage of a ruined building, and I was having a hard time shooting around and through the brush. I had switched off the camera, moved to another spot, turned it on again, and apparently captured the sound just a little after that moment, before I moved into the brush again.

Again, we were in a remote location, all alone, and the person I was with was off camera, but this time there was no question that she was not making the sound.

Here's the unedited audio clip. Listen carefully to the part moments after I say "...can't really get one." This is where I shut the camera off, moved, and started it again. You may need to turn it up a little bit.

There were no radios or other electronic devices around, except for the video camera. No children or other people about. No other sounds except for the birds overhead. I recall hearing nothing unusual when I shot that scene.

This was very interesting, so I ripped the audio into digital format and ran it through a noise filter to try and minimize the tape hiss and the rumble of the camera motors. The filter cuts down the hiss and rumble but adds the weird overtones bubbling in the background.

You've heard the result in the poem above. Here's another version without noise filtering. Lots of hiss and rumble, but no weird tones, just volume.

I've listened to this clip over and over and have given it much thought. It's impossible for me to say with reasonable certainty what this is a recording of, so I'm left with trying to determine what it isn't.

There was no person or thing nearby that could have made this kind of sound. I also doubt the sound could have carried on the wind, given the remote location and the quality of the sound itself, which sounds very near, perhaps 20 feet away or less.

I had a new tape in the camera, so it's not an recording made over earlier material. Defective tape? Doesn't sound like a defect. Recording artifact? Sounds a bit too much like intelligent human speech. What's left?

Sometimes recording equipment can pick up stray radio transmissions. But if this is a radio transmission, why does it start and stop in this way? And if my camera's pulling in a radio transmission, I'd expect it to keep pulling it in. My camera has never done that before, or since.

But let's say that it is a radio transmission, as this is the last reasonable possibility. Then what are the odds that I would randomly pick up this particular kind of sound in this particular place?

You see, the spot where I captured the sound was once a play yard for many children, mostly girls, a long, long time ago.

...you know; skipping rope, circle dances, sing-along clapping games, that kind of thing?

What do you hear?

Pingbacks: