YARMOUTHPORT - Three words.
"Did anybody answer?"
And David Sircom ripped off his headphones and backed against the wall.
Just three words.
His disbelief vanished.
"I always believed there was something after death," Sircom said, "but not that you could interact with them."
He'd asked out loud if there were any spirits in his home that wanted to communicate.
The first time he heard nothing.
A few hours later on that fall morning in 2000, he tried again.
Sircom started his tape recorder, asked his question and waited a few moments. Then he transferred the silence he'd recorded onto his computer and played it back.
And there it was.
"Did anybody answer?"
This query represented the first of many voices he's recorded, both in his Yarmouthport home and places like the Dennis Cemetery.
"I believe they're dead people," Sircom said. "But who knows?"
Sircom, a public insurance adjuster, is now a member of the Cape AndIslands Paranormal Research Society, a nonprofit organization that researches the supernatural.
White noise
Proponents of Electronic Voice Phenomena - spotlighted in the 2005 movie "White Noise" - maintain that spirits of the dead can speak through electronic recordings.
The American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena also suggests the voices may be those of extraterrestrials or "entities who might best be described as angelic."
What EVPs are is complex, with even its staunchest supporters sometimes in disagreement over where they come from or what is said.
However, the process by which EVPs are obtained can be relatively simple, Sircom said.
He recommended using any tape recorder - ideally with an external microphone - and a low-noise, high-sensitivity tape. He then announces himself and records any palette of white noise, ranging from a silent room or radio static or water rushing down the drain.
Sircom finally runs the result through a computer program that optimizes any unusual sounds on the recording.
Because you can't hear the phenomenon as it's happening, you never know until you analyze the recording if any voices were captured, Sircom said.
Sometimes it happens, but often there's nothing.
They either want to chat," Sircom said, "or they don't."
That's one of the reasons EVP should not be used as a bereavement tool, he added. The voices are unreliable and their words are oftentimes garbled - after all, the clipped, harsh EVP voice that said "I will see you no more" could have said something less poignant like "I was seeing the war."
Essentially, you can't continue any meaningful relationship with a deceased loved one through a tape recorder and a computer, Sircom said.
"I've asked to speak to my parents," Sircom acknowledged. "But I've never really gotten anything."
CAIPRS role
The Cape And Islands Paranormal Research Society, based in West Barnstable, now uses EVP in its supernatural investigations.
"It's pretty good," said Derek Bartlett, CAIPRS founder and president. "That's evidence, if it's answering specific questions."
CAIPRS did 22 paranormal investigations in homes, cemeteries and businesses across New England last year.
The tight group, Bartlett emphasized, is not Ghostbusters. They painstakingly research reports of hauntings, examining and re-examining data they collect, rather than rid a house of what may be haunting it.
EVP is simply one more tool in their arsenal, he explained.
"My team - I know - will not find absolute, 100 percent evidence of ghosts," Bartlett said. "I hope we are stepping stones for those who will."
Coincidence?
Not everyone is nearly so enamored with EVP.
Indeed, the whole notion of spirits communicating via electronics from beyond the grave elicits a thorny tangle of scientific and religious questions.
"If you look at the world around us, there's a huge amount of background noise," said Craig Christensen, an electrical engineering professor at Suffolk University in Boston.
Christensen said he's extremely skeptical of EVP, both for scientific and religious reasons.
So where, then, do the voices that emerge on such recordings come from?
Christensen, a Mormon, said everything from far-off vacuum cleaners to halogen lights to radio waves - even the agitation of atoms - can produce tiny amounts of noise that could comprise the phenomenon.
Add it all up and mix in some chance, he said.
"The question is whether it's just a random coincidence or if it's intelligible," Christensen said. "It gets into the realm where someone has a potato chip that looks like Jay Leno."
But he added that he couldn't definitively discredit EVP - especially since he views the matter as residing partially within religion.
"I also believe religious experiences don't always fall within scientific method," Christensen said. "When you mix science and religion, I don't necessarily see a conflict."
Selves as critics
Now ask Bartlett who CAIPRS' biggest skeptic is.
Myself," he replied. "We are the biggest skeptics and critics of what we do. We have to have proof and evidence."
Sircom and Bartlett both say they don't rely on psychics or visionaries in their investigations - no crystal balls or seances or ouiji boards.
The tools of their trade are technological.
Sircom uses tape recorders and his computer. Bartlett has a more elaborate collection of items like an electromagnetic field detector and a non-contact thermal scanner.
And if they can explain any possible paranormal event a more conventional way, they do.
"If we can disprove it, that's what we do right away," Sircom said, a tendency he credits in part to working as a licensed public insurance adjuster.
However, Bartlett added ghost-hunting requires a balance of skepticism and curiosity.
"You don't have to have a Ph.D. in parapsychology," he said. "All you need is an open mind."
That one three-word question almost five years ago has evoked countless more for Sircom.
"I thought it was baloney," he said, " 'til I got that response."
Who exactly answered? Or what? And why?
"Where are you?" Sircom once asked.
"Closer than you think," came the recording cryptic reply
In the netherworld between science and the supernatural, little is definitive.
"Did anybody answer?"
It depends who's listening.
