By Dr. Joel Ramsey, The Paranormal Professor

First things first. I didn't mean to ghost you.

The last several weeks have been consumed by one of life's bigger transitions. After moving into my new home in Pewaukee and getting everything unpacked, blogging had to take a temporary back seat. I am finally settled in, and I have been thinking about what I wanted to write first.

The answer came to me surprisingly quickly.

Let's talk about a language that every paranormal investigator speaks, but few people ever explain.

After fifteen years of investigating the paranormal, I have noticed something that surprises a lot of people. Our field has developed a vocabulary all its own. Walk into a paranormal investigation and you will hear acronyms, technical terms, and concepts being thrown around with the casual confidence of people who have been using them for years. If you are new to this world, or simply curious about it, that language can feel like a barrier. If you have a PhD in communication like I do, it feels like an invitation.

Here is what fascinates me about that language. It is not just terminology. It is a window into how investigators think, about what makes something a message, what makes something a response, and how we decide what is signal and what is noise. Those are communication questions as much as they are paranormal ones.

This is the first entry in a series I am calling Speaking Paranormal. Each installment will unpack a handful of terms that investigators use regularly, not just defining them but examining what they reveal about how we approach the unexplained. Today I want to start with the terms that matter most when investigators are asking the most fundamental question of all.

Is something trying to communicate?

EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomenon

EVP is probably the term most people encounter first, usually through television programs where an investigator holds up a recorder, plays back a fuzzy audio clip, and confidently identifies a whispered sound as a spirit saying someone's name. Electronic voice phenomena refer to unexplained voices or speech-like sounds captured on audio recording equipment that were not audible at the time of the recording (Cardoso, 2012).

The history of EVP research is longer and more serious than most people realize. Latvian psychologist Konstantīns Raudive spent years systematically recording and analyzing anomalous voices in the 1960s, producing a body of work that brought EVP into cautious academic discussion for the first time. His English-language book, published in 1971 under the title Breakthrough, included endorsements from engineers and phonetics experts who analyzed the linguistic structure of the voices he had recorded and could not explain them through ordinary means (Perfect Circuit, 2025). This was not fringe material. It was an earnest attempt to apply scientific methodology to an unexplained phenomenon.

The honest answer, right now in 2026, is that the research is still contested and inconclusive. Controlled studies have failed to reliably replicate the phenomenon under laboratory conditions (Levin & Roe, 2001). What peer-reviewed research has demonstrated with considerably more consistency is the role of auditory pareidolia, the tendency of the human brain to impose meaningful patterns, particularly speech, onto ambiguous or random auditory input. A 2015 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that when participants were told in advance that a recording contained paranormal voices, they were significantly more likely to report hearing them, even when the content was ambiguous noise (Nees & Phillips, 2015). A 2022 study published in PLOS ONE confirmed that priming, simply framing what someone is about to hear, measurably increases the likelihood they will perceive voices in EVP recordings (Williams & Blagrove, 2022).

This does not mean EVP is definitively explained or dismissed. It means that anyone serious about EVP research has to account for what the listener brings to the recording. That is as much a communication principle as a scientific one. What we hear in a message is never just about the message.

The Spirit Box and the Question of Intelligent Response

If EVP represents one end of the communication spectrum, the spirit box represents the other. Where EVP involves reviewing recordings after the fact, the spirit box is designed for real time exchange, sweeping rapidly through radio frequencies to produce a stream of fragmented audio from which investigators listen for responses to direct questions.

This is where the conversation becomes most interesting to me as a communication researcher, because the concept of an intelligent response is the heart of what paranormal investigators are actually looking for.

In communication theory, a response is not just any sound that follows a question. It is a sound that demonstrates reception, processing, and reply. It shows that the message was received, that it was understood, and that something on the other end chose to engage with it. When a paranormal investigator asks a question in a darkened room and hears what sounds like a direct answer through a spirit box or on a recorded EVP, they are claiming something profound: that a communication loop has closed across whatever boundary separates the living from whatever may lie beyond.

I have been in investigations where something happened that I could not easily dismiss. A question asked. A response that addressed it directly. A specificity that seemed beyond coincidence. I am not going to tell you those moments do not affect you, because they do. I am also not going to tell you I have resolved them to my complete satisfaction, because I have not.

What I will tell you is that an intelligent response, if it is real, is not just a paranormal event. It is a communication event. And that framing changes how we should investigate it, how carefully we should control the conditions, how rigorously we should rule out alternative explanations, and how honestly we should report what we find.

Residual Haunting: The Message Without a Sender

Not everything reported as paranormal activity involves communication at all, and understanding this distinction is one of the most important in the field.

A residual haunting refers to a phenomenon in which events appear to replay themselves repeatedly, often at the same time, in the same location, with the same sequence of sounds or apparitions, without any apparent awareness of or interaction with the people present. The analogy most often used is a recording: an impression left in a location by a highly charged emotional or energetic event that continues to play back long after the original event has passed.

From a communication standpoint, a residual haunting is a message without a sender. Something is being transmitted, or at least perceived, but there is no active intelligence on the other end choosing to transmit it. Understanding whether what you are experiencing is residual or intelligent is one of the first and most important assessments an investigator makes, because the implications are entirely different.

You cannot have a conversation with a recording.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. When a client tells me something is happening in their home, one of my earliest questions is whether whatever they are experiencing appears to notice them. Does it respond to their presence? Does it change when they speak to it? Or does it simply continue regardless of who is in the room? Those questions begin to map where the experience falls on the spectrum between residual and intelligent, and that map shapes everything that follows in an investigation.

Why This Language Matters

The terms I have described today, EVP, intelligent response, residual haunting, are not just shorthand for investigators to use with each other. They reflect something deeper about how we approach the possibility that consciousness continues beyond physical death and that communication across that boundary might be possible.

That is an extraordinary claim, and it deserves to be treated like one. Rigorous thinking. Careful methodology. Honest reporting. The language of paranormal investigation, when used well, is the framework that makes that rigor possible. When used carelessly, it becomes the thing that undermines the credibility of every serious researcher in the field.

In Part Two of Speaking Paranormal, I will unpack the tools and disciplines that form the foundation of responsible investigation: EMF detection, establishing a baseline, and the perceptual phenomenon that every investigator must understand before they can trust what they are seeing and hearing.

Until then, stay curious.

References

Cardoso, A. (2012). A two-year investigation of the allegedly anomalous electronic voices or EVP. NeuroQuantology, 10(3), 492–514.

Levin, J., & Roe, C. A. (2001). Failure to replicate electronic voice phenomenon. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 65(863), 204–207.

Nees, M. A., & Phillips, C. (2015). Auditory pareidolia: Effects of contextual priming on perceptions of purportedly paranormal and ambiguous auditory stimuli. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(1), 129–134. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3068

Perfect Circuit. (2025, October 27). Haunted circuits: The curious case of electronic voice phenomenon. https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/haunted-circuit-evp

Williams, J. M., & Blagrove, M. (2022). Paranormal experiences, sensory-processing sensitivity, and the priming of pareidolia. PLOS ONE, 17(9), Article e0274595. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274595