Ghost hunters tend to use electronic gizmos and gadgets to speak to ghosts. In our case, we use Spirit Boxes and digital voice recorders during our EVP sessions. Let’s look into using these devices to get real-time EVP on your ghost hunts.

How Does ITC work?

First, ITC means instrumental transcommunication. That’s a complicated phrase for talking to ghosts with electronic devices.

This is an oversimplification: Ghost theory suggests that ghosts can alter electromagnetic fields and put their voices on electronic and digital media.

For example, if you use a digital voice recorder to capture EVP, a ghost could manipulate its magnetic energy to imprint its voice on it. The same principles apply to radios, TVs and specialty devices.

Commonly Used ITC Devices

At Ghostly Activities, we usually keep our ITC to digital voice recorders, but we’ve used Spirit Boxes before. I’ve seen the Ovilus III in action, too. These are probably the most commonly used devices, but you can use all sorts of electronic gadgets.

Here’s the list for you with some notes:

Tape recorders

Tape recorders can pick up the background noise from the recorder itself and give false positives. It can also act like a radio receiver and you could record voices from a broadcaster, like NPR. Overall, tape recorders are not as sensitive to background noise as a digital recorder. Using tape is a commitment: It takes hours to play it back and analyze the data.

Digital voice recorders

This is our favorite device. Digital recorders don’t have moving parts like tape recorders, but it’s far more sensitive to background noise. They can pick up someone talking several hundred feet away on a silent night. If you use one, put it down on a table or counter top. It can record itself moving slightly in your hand.

Spirit Boxes

Spirit boxes roam AM/FM radio frequencies looking for ghostly voices. They are loud and staticy: It can get annoying. We covered spirit boxes in a earlier post, so we won’t rehash the info again.

Ovilus

The Ovilus is a portable database of 2,000 or more words. When you contact a spirit, you can ask a question and the ghost will use the database to pick words out to answer your questions. It will display on the device or you can set it to use its speaker. We have one on back order, so we’ll review it when we get it.

TVs & Radios

We haven’t used ITC on TV and radio, but many ghost hunters say they can work well. You set the dial to a channel with static and begin your EVP. For radio, you can get words coming through a spirit. With TV, it works the same, but you could get a ghostly image as well. The movie, White Noise, is based on ITC through TV.

How To Use ITC on a Ghost Hunt

Essentially, you simply run an EVP session with one or more of these devices. We also recommend you have a video recorder going. ITC is for real-time communication (for Spirit Boxes, Ovilus, TVs and radios). I think a Ovilus will store the words for you.

If you don’t capture the messages with another means, you have nothing for a peer review. Without a review, your investigation’s data could be thrown out and disqualified.

Debunking ITC

Like most ghostly evidence, ITC data can be debunked. In most cases, your mind matrixes the audio output into something you understand.

What does this mean? Usually, you’ll hear some random sounds and try to make words out of it. In 90% of the cases, it’s just a random signal or mishmash of words.

When you use the TV, the ghostly image you see is likely a matrix from the snowflakes on the screen. If the image has a clearly human face or shape to it, you may have a spirit. Otherwise, it’s just random pixels moving on the screen.

The digital equipment can be so sensitive, it records someone’s conversation from outside your immediate area. It’s happened to us a few times.

It’s important to have what we call a ‘cool down period’: Walk away from your data and review it the next day. This lets the data sink in and you’ll be much more objective when you analyze it.

In our experience, using a digital voice recorder, and reviewing it later, works best for us. Sure, it’s not real-time EVP, but we get better evidence.

In our next post, Saleen and I will cover runes and ghostly communication.