Evps are sounds and voices caught on electronic devices such as digital recorders that cannot be traced to naturally occurring sounds such as a person talking or an mouse jumping across the device that is recording.
Many can be explained. One such example are the "whispering walls" of Ash Cave at Hocking Hills State Park. The echoes from the waterfall, clatter of leaves on the trees and people talking bounce off the walls of the cave and sound just like you have walked into a crowded room of people jabbering. If you stand about 3/4 away from the entrance and about 5-10 steps from the back wall, you are sure to hear this eerie sound. It is especially prevalent on a digital recorder. Listen here:
Other times, digital recorders catch sounds we cannot pin down to anything naturally occurring. We try to debunk the sounds first, searching for environmental factors such as tree limbs grinding together or a screech owl trilling out their human-sounding shriek far away in the forest. Coyotes sound like a band of banshees, and a deer bumbling around on a hillside one night at Ash Cave tripped and fell. She bounced off several trees before stopping just short of the walkway. Although the deer walked away with a few bumps and bruises, it made some startling bleating sounds for about 30 feet resembling what could have been ten hikers being murdered on the trail.
Sometimes, we can't trace the sound. That's when it becomes fun. After we deduce the obvious, we look for other things that occurred the same time the sound is found on the device. Did someone hear anything at the same time the phenomenon was heard on the recorder? Did we catch anything on the EMF, the camera or the movie camera?
Here are a few EVPs we got recently:
Ash Cave - Lady interrupting Naturalist while he talked to group. You can hear what sounds like "hey, what's going on?" after some inaudible talk. We had placed the digital recorder along the wall of the cave about a 1000 feet from where the group was listening to the naturalist talk about Ash Cave.
Ash Cave Haunted Hocking - Hello - A friendly spirit perhaps looking for someone to chat with?
Another Friendly Spirit at Ash Cave -Hello
