Electronic Voice Phenomena
The day I moved to Whidbey Island, WA in 1999, on the road back from Sea Tac, two friends and I were in a car accident that might have killed us under slightly different circumstances. That night, one of them left the radio on when he went to sleep. Whidbey is close enough to the Canadian border that one can pick up CBC 2. Between 12:00am and 4:00am, Monday through Friday, they used to air a program called Brave New Waves dedicated to (seriously) alternative music — underground rock, noise, musique concrète, etc. At midnight, without introduction, they launched into a show about Electronic Voice Phenomena, which, as you may already know, is when voices (of the dead, presumably) are detected in the background hiss of recorded audio. A ten-second clip of what sounded like pure static was played; then another, filtered version of the same clip; then another. Eventually, enough of the white noise was stripped out that a human voice became perceptible. It was shocking. You could clearly make out a little girl saying, “Mama, sono freddo.” Then a woman repeated, in a completely flat voice, “Mama, sono freddo.” Finally, in that same neutral tone, she said, “Mama, I’m cold.” And then the process started over again with more static. This went on for hours. I found it utterly terrifying. I actually felt like I was listening to dead people. Mostly, they complained: “It’s dark”, or “I miss you”, or “Where’s my hat?” By the end, I was lying spread-eagle on the carpet in front of the radio, almost in tears, but unable to turn it off. That’s when Patti Schmidt, the host of Brave New Waves, broke in to say, “Thank you for staying up with me all night, even if you couldn’t help it.”