Professor Ernst Senkowski sits hunched over a trailing mass of wires and ageing radios in his laboratory. To the untrained eye it looks like an impossible tangle, but to the professor it's a machine with supernatural properties.
For what he claims to have stumbled upon in the course of his experiments is a device for communicating with the dead.
As the wind howls outside his laboratory, the physics professor tells me about the first message he 'received' on his equipment. 'A voice came through and said quite clearly: "We are the dead. We are still able to think and speak." I was a bit shaken,' he smiles.
Prof Senkowski's ghostly encounter might easily be lampooned as the product of a fevered imagination were he not quite so serious about what he claims then unfolded.
For he says this was just the first of his his 'messages from the dead'. Shortly afterwards, he believes, he received a message from his father, who had died many years previously, sending his greetings to 'Ernst, my little dwarf'.
'He spoke in a little-used Prussian dialect,' the professor recalls, 'and no one but my father used, or even knew, that nickname. I was not a believer. I'm a physicist. But all of the evidence I've seen confirms that the dead are trying to communicate with us.'
Eccentric though he sounds, Emeritus Professor Senkowski is a distinguished physicist from Bingen technical university in Germany, and one of a growing band of academics around the world studying messages that appear to come from the dead.
The communications often take the form ghostly voices picked up by radios and tape recorders, but very occasionally television pictures mysteriously arrive unbidden.
Researchers claim these communications, known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), can be heard loud and clear.
More intriguingly, they say that the ghostly voices often talk of a beautiful afterlife that is filled with happiness, where suffering is unknown and loneliness long forgotten.
Perhaps inevitably, Hollywood has got in on the story ith the recently released movie White Noise. It tells the story of a successful architect who is contacted from beyond the grave by his murdered wife and the shocking events that unfold.
In real life, those who study the cryptic messages from the dead are rarely subjected to such terrifying experiences. Surprisingly, however, they include respected researchers, diplomats and academics.
Around 20 countres now host research groups dedicated to studying the mysterious phenomena. And British researchers have gathered compelling evidence which, they believe, proves the ghostly voices do indeed come from the dead.
So could we be on the verge of being able to communicate with the deceased or is this just another bit of extra-sensory bunkum?
Professor David Fontana, a psychologist at Cardiff University, thinks we might be about to experience an important breakthrough.
He says the evidence that the ghostly voices originate from the dead is now 'very compelling'.
'They are not the result of fraud or stray radio waves being picked up by the equipment,' says Prof Fontana.
'That leaves just two possibilities. The first is a psychokinetic effect, where the human mind somehow imprints a voice directly onto a piece of audio tape or a radio. The second possibility is that it comes from the deceased.'
Now Prof Fontana has reached his own conclusion: 'It seems to me that EVP are most likely to be from the deceased.'
Electronic Voise Phenomena were first detected shortly after the invention of radio. Early radio engineers would often hear ghostly 'voices' sweeping in and out of tune on their newly-built receivers and reording equipment.
Intriguingly, the voices could only ever be heard on taped recordings, not on the broadcasts themselves.
The engineers would often design radios with perfect reception, and yet, when they tried to record broadcasts they would hear unexpected whispering voices in the background - voices that were most definitely not present in the original broadcast.
Even as technology advanced, try as they might, the engineers could never quite eliminate the whispering voices. After a while, such occasional ghosts in the machine were ignored by engineers and written off as 'interference'.
But all that changed in the early 1950s, when the Roman Catholic Church started taking an interest.
Strange as it may seem, the Vatican employs a large number of scientists to ensure that the Church is up to date with technological developments. They are often highly gifted and dedicated researchers who bring to science a refreshingly different perspective.
In 1952, two of these researchers stumbled across ghostly messages while recording some Gregorian chanting.
As they played back the recording, Fathers Gemelli and Ernetti noticed a whispering voice in the background - one that was definitely not there in the original performance. After a while Gemelli realised that it was his own father's voice.
The priests then recorded the chanting once more - and again heard the voice. It said quite clearly: 'But Zucchini, it is clear, don't you know it is I?'
Again it was Gemelli's father's voice, but more significantly, he used the nickname Zucchini, a name known only to the priest's parents.
Those few words convinced Gemelli that he was hearing from his father. The priests took their findings to Pope Pius XII, with surprising results.
Expecting to be chastised for involving themselves in black magic, the two priests were shocked to discover that the Pope was delighted with their research.
The Pope reassured them: 'This experiment may perhaps become the cornerstone for building scientific studies which will strengthen people's faith in a hereafter.'
Yet strangely, the scientific study of EVP was taken no further until 1971, when sound engineers at Pye Records in London decided to investigate the phenomena. To help them, they brought in Konstantin Raudive, an expert on EVP.
Raudive was seated in a studio and asked to speak into a microphone. The studio and microphone were completely shielded from all radio waves and magnetic fields, thus eliminating all possible sources of electronic interference or fraud.
The engineers taped Raudive's voice for 18 minutes, during which none of the experimenters heard any other background sounds. But when the scientists played back the tape, they could hear more than 200 voices on it.
But again, the Pye Records study did little to spark long-term interest among sceptical researchers, who assumed it must be the work of crackpots or conmen and simply ignored the subject.
Equally, those experts who did believe in the phenomena retired from the field, claiming that EVP was now a proven scientific fact.
But here and there, in small research groups around the world, EVP devotees carried on their work.
One of these devotees was the American industrialist George Meek, who had made a fortue in the air conditioning industry before retiring on his 60th birthday to pursue his interest in the untapped powers of the human spirit.
He organised and funded research teams to travel to remote parts of the world to investigate such phenoma as 'energy healing' and the use of acupuncture as a painkiller during surgery.
He also conducted many experiments imself and was especially fascinated by studying how the growth of plants could be affected by the emotions of those tending to them.
But by far the strangest of his inventions was the Spiricom, a radio device that he hoped might establish contact with the afterlife.
For months during 1979, he and his collaborator, an amateur medium called Bill O'Neil, worked on the machine without success until suddenly one day a ghostly voice filled the room.
The 'presence' identified itself as Dr George Jeffries Mueller, a NASA scientist who had died in 1967 and who, so it was claimed, announced that he had come back to help the scientists build a bridge between the spirit world and our own.
Over the subsequent weeks, Meek and O'Neil claimed to have recorded 20 hours of conversations with Mueller, mostly highly technical discussions about how to perfect the Spiricom. And in 1982, the pair revealed their invention to the world.
But despite spending some half a million dollars on researching their machine and releasing its design for others to copy, no one claimed any similar success in contacting the dead.
Believers in EVP were dismayed but suggested its initial success was due to O'Neil's gift as a medium, which could not be replicated in a simple machine.
Established scientists remained scornful - at least until a few years ago when researchers in Spain and France revealed some astonishing findings that cast a whole new perspective on the subject.
They had, so they claimed, started to receive a 'spiritual radio station' filled with voices who all claimed to be deceased and who dubbed themselves Timestream.
And rather than being a fleeting phenomenon easily dismissed by sceptics, the researchers still receive contact from Timestream on a weekly basis and continue to study its 'broadcasts'.
It must rank as one of the most bizarre psychic claims of all time, and yet it has a large number of eminent researchers backing it.
Dr Anabela Cardoso was the first to recive Timestream. She is not regarded as a crank. On the contrary, she is one of Portugal's most senior dilomats, having held such posts as the Portuguese Consul in the U.S. and Consul General in France and Spain.
Many of the messages received by Dr Cardoso - and witnessed by Britain's Prof Fontana - were picked up by surprisingly low-tech equipment.
She uses five radios, all tuned to different blank channels, which consequently pick up only 'white noise'. These white noise channels are recorded using an ordinary tape recorder.
When these recordings are played back, the researchers claim, you can hear the voices of spirits.
Understandably, many remain deeply sceptical. But let us suspend doubt for one moment and pose this question: what if it truly was 'broadcast' from the dead? What could they be trying to tell us about the nature of life - and death?
'I am told that everybody and everything survives death,' says Dr Cardoso. 'All living beings, be they plants or animals, live on after they die.
'Suffering is also very important for spiritual development,' she says. 'They say that we should live happy and contented lives, but that we should also realise that when suffering comes, it will help us in our growth and development.
'Real spiritual awareness consists of accepting what life brings us.'
The messages from Timestream also hint that the afterlife is similar to our world in some ways, except that it is far more beautiful and less constrained by physical laws.
Dr Cardoso has been told that spirits can move effortlessly and with infinite speed.
They can be in two places as once. Time seems to have little, if any, meaning. Equality runs throughout their realm, with humans, plants and animals all having the same spiritual value.
Mystical mumbo-jumbo? Not everybody thinks so. Prof Fontana has studied EVP for three years and worked alongside Dr Cardoso. He believes that her results are genuine.
He says: 'There's now a tremendous amount of evidence for EVP. Dr Cardoso's work is very strong indeed. I've worked with her when she has received information from Timestream under conditions that rule out stray interference or fakery.
'If you ask questions, you get answers. It's very, very compelling.'
In addition, the voices of Timestream have been analysed by the University of Vigo in Spain and by the respected Il Laboratorio in Italy.
One of the voice analysis experts at Il Laboratorio also works for the Italian police and law courts.
The computer-based voice analysis techniques he used were identical to those used by the FBI. All of these experts claim that the voices are not human.
Others remain doubtful. Professor Chris French of Goldsmiths College in London is still highly sceptical of the slaims made by EVP researchers.
He says: 'I've noted that some examples of EVP are the result of receivers picking up stray radio waves and the rest is simply put down to people reading to much into random noise.
'It's similar to the way some people manage to see the face of the Virgin Mary in a burnt piece of toast.
'Another example is the way some people claim they can hear Satanic messages when Led Zeppelin is played backwards. There are clearly to words there but some people are still convinced they can hear them.'
But academics studying the phenomena are convinced they can rule out fraud, radio interference and 'over-interpreting' the results. They want to move on and begin interrogating the dead to see if they will reveal more about the afterlife.
'I'm convinced that something paranormal is occurring and I shall continue studying the phenomena,' says Prof Fontana.
The 'voices in the machine', it seems, cannot be explained away just yet.
