Deep Dive
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Hey everybody and welcome back to the into the dark podcast with Peyton Moreland. I'm your host and I'm so happy you are here I'm gonna skip my begging this week of begging you to leave a comment Give this video a thumbs up turn on notifications leave a review So now that that's out of the way, let's get into my 10 seconds So I posted on Instagram the other day about how whenever I get into a car. I feel like I start to disassociate um, like
I can't focus. It doesn't matter how hard I try. Like I literally will be looking at the road and be like, focus, focus, focus. And my mind just like starts to drift. It makes me a really bad driver and I hate driving because of it. And a bunch of people messaged me and said they had the same exact issue and something that they do that helps is to blast the music, which almost seems like counterintuitive because if you have a hard time focusing, you would think that blasting music would then make you not focus. But it actually
but it actually worked. I've been doing it and I just blast music that I know really loudly and it almost like keeps my mind centered instead of floating away. I don't know the science behind it, but it's been working. So if you feel like maybe you struggle with that, there's an option for you that worked for me that a lot of people said they also do.
okay now getting into the episode you know that feeling when you're in a noisy room or on a busy street cars are roaring and people are talking and it just sounds like there's a racket all around you but then one word cuts through it all your name
It's like someone is shouting at you from far away trying to get your attention. So you look around to see if there's anyone around you you know or anybody trying to wave you down, but you don't see anything. It's like nobody said a word in spite of what you heard.
Usually when something like this happens, we just shrug it off. We chalk it up to a mental quirk or something we misheard. But there are mystics and supernatural enthusiasts who could argue there's something to those sounds, specifically to white noise. Like if you set a radio to a static station and then you listened long enough, you might hear something unexpected. A word, a
a phrase, a message specifically addressed to you featuring your name. That actually happens a lot. People often hear snippets of conversation in static that shouldn't have voices at all. And some shrug it off, like in that story about hearing your name in the crowd I told you earlier.
but others think that these voices aren't audio tricks or imaginary. They might be a tool we can use to speak to the spirits of the dead. And before you're like, wait, what? This
This is a real thing. I've seen these videos all over TikTok, so stay tuned to learn about this. Now, I do want to note one particular man usually gets the credit for this discovery, but he wasn't actually the first person to use white noise technology to talk to spirits.
However, he did some very thorough research and he published books and released recordings of his findings, which might be why he's the researcher who became famous instead of the person who actually discovered this phenomenon first. So his name was Friedrich Jurgensen. And he was a highly accomplished singer and painter who lived in Sweden in the
mid 20th century. So when he was in his twenties and thirties, he seemed destined for a fantastic career as an opera singer.
But then in 1943, when he was just 40 years old, Friedrich got super sick and actually damaged his vocal cords. And this had to be devastating. After spending a lifetime dedicated to his art, he couldn't sing for a living anymore. But Friedrich was resilient. He fell back on his other passion and became a celebrated visual artist. The Pope himself commissioned four portraits from Friedrich, which was pretty impressive.
It's hard to succeed in one artistic field, but Friedrich had accomplishments in two. And shockingly, he added a third talent to the list when he began dabbling in filmmaking. Truly, it was like Friedrich didn't have any limitations. He even learned how to speak 10 different languages. Now, along the way, he also developed an interest in some...
Fringier topics. One huge example of this happened in 1957 when Friedrich began hearing voices in his head. Plus, when he recorded himself singing, he'd play the tapes back later only to hear background chatter like there was someone else talking through the song.
This happened even when he was alone. For a while, he thought maybe he was just hallucinating. But when he played the tape recordings for other people, they heard the voices too. So this made him think all of the conversations that he was hearing was real, even the ones that were only in his own head. He concluded that he was picking up transmissions from outer space. UFOs full of aliens must have been broadcasting conversations and Friedrich was somehow picking up on them.
Now that may sound a bit hard to believe, but in fairness, this was early in the space race when lots of people were talking about travel between planets. It was in the news and it seemed very possible that before too long, human beings would be exploring the galaxy.
Now that said, eventually Friedrich decided that his alien theory was totally off base. It's not clear why he changed his opinion about those recordings and stopped believing in alien visitors. From the sound of it, once Friedrich realized he was wrong, he was actually pretty embarrassed and he didn't like to talk in detail about his disproven theory. But he did freely and publicly admit that he'd made a mistake and he learned from it.
Friedrich still wanted to make big discoveries that pushed the boundaries of scientific possibility, but he didn't want to be so gullible that he embarrassed himself by falling for a hoax or misinterpreting his data. So beginning in the late 1950s, Friedrich resolved to be careful and methodical each time he studied anything that was potentially controversial or supernatural.
Not long afterward, on Friday, June 12th, 1959, Friedrich and his wife took a trip to the country. They did this every weekend, all spring long. They had a house there which sat near a wooded area and a lake. It was peaceful and full of birds and wild animals. It was the perfect place to get away from it all and unwind. Now that day, Friedrich took his recording equipment outside to capture the sounds of the birds chirping. This
The session went smoothly with no real incidents, but later, when Friedrich played the audio back, there was something odd on the tape. For about five minutes, the bird sounds became muted. Friedrich could still hear them, but they were very distant, almost like he'd captured the sounds from very far away.
And on top of that, for those five minutes, he heard a lot of static over the birdsong. Then, Friedrich heard a music cue, like a trumpet, and a male voice began speaking in Norwegian.
Now, luckily, Norwegian was one of the languages Friedrich spoke, so he understood the man's words. He said, Whatever that means. Then after a little more static, the man faded out and the chirps came back clear as a bell. For the rest of the tape, the nature sounds were crisp and loud without any of that weird distortion that Friedrich had heard earlier.
It was just that brief five-minute segment that sounded off. Now, at first, Friedrich thought that he'd accidentally recorded a Norwegian radio broadcast. His audio equipment was very delicate, and sometimes it did pick up radio signals. But that phrase stuck in his head.
Bird songs at night. What were the odds that a radio announcer would be talking about birds right when Friedrich was trying to record chirping? It almost felt like the message was intended for him, as outlandish as that idea may seem.
But at first, Friedrich didn't think much of the recording. He put it out of his mind and went about his business, which included making more tapes of himself singing or of nature songs or whatever sparked his imagination. Whenever he was at his country house, Friedrich spent more time fiddling with the equipment and capturing more audio. And every now and then, unexplained static and hisses would interrupt the recording. Voices would come through, speaking in other languages.
And the more it happened, the more Friedrich came to second guess his initial assumption that he was just picking up on radio signals. The interruptions were too sudden. They didn't sound like a broadcast fading in and out the way it does when you're right on the edge of one station's range. There were very clean moments when the static sounds and voices started and stopped.
and the voices spoke in countless languages. Friedrich knew there was no way that his country house was situated in a place where they could pick up Norwegian stations and Swedish stations and German and Italian and English and so on. In fact, sometimes the speaker changed languages midway through a sentence. It was still the same person and the phrase still made sense once it was translated.
So it's not like he started picking up, say, a Swedish broadcast and then an Italian one cut in. It was more like one person said a few words in German, then switched to Italian, then Norwegian, but it was all one coherent sentence. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color-treated hair, but Proz does. They have a formula that can address my specific type of hair needs, which makes sense because it's based on me.
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It was enough for him to almost go back to believing in UFOs. Finally, one recording in particular helped him realize what he was actually hearing. This time around, when Friedrich listened to the tape, he heard his own mother's voice. She said, Friedl, can you hear me? It's Mammy.
Now, Friedel was a nickname that Friedrich's mother had used with him. And at this point, he knew he wasn't picking up some distant radio transmission. No broadcaster would send such a personal message. And Friedrich knew his mother would never be a guest on a radio show because she was dead. For the first time, Friedrich considered a wild possibility. What if the voices on his recording were ghosts?
Maybe his audio equipment had the ability to record messages from the dead which weren't audible to the naked ear. Friedrich had been burned once before by jumping to conclusions and he didn't want to make such an embarrassing mistake again. If he was going to understand these recordings, he needed to study them in a scientific way. Specifically, he figured he needed more data.
He began taping everything he could think of: empty rooms, crowded dinner parties, dogs barking, walks along the lake, literally everything. And when he painted, he kept the equipment running in his studio. Sometimes he'd talk to himself out loud as he had flashes of the inspiration, but when he played the tape back, there were multiple voices chattering at once. Even during times when Friedrich knew he had been alone.
It didn't matter where he went or what he did. It seemed there were always invisible speakers around him who could only be heard on tape. One speaker told him, Another time, a voice spoke to him in German. He said the name of a city, then added,
Friedrich didn't know what to make of that confusing message until later when some friends were traveling through Sweden and asked him to come meet up with them. They said they'd be available in that city on the main block at 1212 in the afternoon.
That was when their train was set to arrive. But there was no way the German speaker could have known that in advance. It helped Friedrich come to the conclusion that spirits don't experience time like we do. They might be able to look into the future. Another time, a woman said in Italian, the baby has arrived. Friedrich never did figure out what that message meant, but he thought that the woman sounded relieved when she said it, so he hoped it was good news.
Either way, he was collecting hours upon hours of voices. It was a massive collection of audio tapes, but he still didn't want to jump to conclusions. Friedrich kept worrying that there might be a different explanation for the speakers on his recordings. So he double-checked every tape he used, confirming they were all blank before he ran his tests. Basically, he made certain that he wasn't just hearing old recordings from previous projects.
Next, Friedrich took his audio equipment back to the store where he'd bought it. He told the clerk that he thought it might be malfunctioning. When the clerk asked for more information, Friedrich refused to explain what was wrong. He only said that he wanted the clerk to look over the equipment. Give it a thorough exam, take out each piece, confirm everything was in the correct place. In a week, Friedrich would come back to learn what the clerk had found, and seven days later, he returned and
and the shopkeeper told him, "Nah, everything was working perfectly." There was no reason for Friedrich to have any problems with the recordings. That's when Friedrich played his tapes for the employees and announced that he'd found a way to communicate with ghosts.
Now, I can't imagine what the clerks were thinking at that point, but even with the recorder in front of them, they couldn't come up with any other explanation for what Friedrich had found. They were convinced, and before long, word of Friedrich's discovery had spread. But even then, he wasn't done studying. He wanted more evidence, so his tests continued.
At one point, he found out that there were better ways to capture the voices, specifically a way to have a conversation and get an answer in real time.
At first, if Friedrich wanted to talk to a ghost, he'd have to ask a question, then sit quietly with the recorder running. Later, he'd have to play the tape back to see if anyone had answered. Sometimes he didn't capture anything, but even if he did get a response, he wouldn't hear it for several long minutes because it took so long to record, then rewind and listen. Only after all that could he then ask the next question. So it was a long, slow, frustrating process. Well,
Well, one day in 1960, one of the voices told him, use the radio. So Friedrich connected his audio equipment to a radio that was set between stations. So he'd just pick up static. And that's how Friedrich made his next big discovery.
He could ask a question and hear the answer through the static. The response was immediate and he could hear it with his own ears. He didn't have to stop the recording, rewind it, and play it anymore. It helped the conversations go a lot quicker and Friedrich could speak to the voices more easily. But he still recorded his conversations so he'd have some evidence of what was said.
The more time went on, the more comfortable Friedrich felt around the speakers. Some individuals actually came up again and again. Friedrich came to recognize their voices and even got a sense of their personalities. He began to think of the speakers as his friends, people who were around all the time. But Friedrich also had a hard time communicating with his friends sometimes, even after he started using the radio.
Occasionally, the voices were so faint he couldn't make out what they were saying. He'd have to record their conversation then play it back with the volume cranked. And other times, the spirit spoke way too fast for him to pick out any words. So again, he'd have to go back to the recording. This time, he'd slow the audio way down until the gibberish sounded like words. A few times, he even had to play a recording backward or modify it in some other way for it to make sense.
This only made Friedrich feel even more confident that he was experiencing something genuinely supernatural. A radio broadcast wouldn't have super fast talking or backward conversations. Neither would a warped tape or a broken recorder. The more he heard, the more convinced Friedrich was that he really was talking to ghosts.
and he knew he had to share his great discovery with the world in a more formal way. He didn't just want the news to spread through the word of mouth. He was going to publish his findings in a book. So in 1967, Friedrich released Voice Transmissions with the Deceased. He talked about that first discovery where he heard a man talking on his recording of bird sounds and the later clip with his mother's voice.
He also shared some stories about times he'd connected with the spirits of famous people. According to Friedrich, he had conversation with the ghosts of Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. Friedrich also wrote that the spirits told him the truth about what happened to Anastasia Romanoff.
She was the youngest daughter of a Russian czar, and in 1918, revolutionaries executed the whole family. The news coverage in the immediate aftermath was confusing, and no one was entirely sure what had become of Anastasia once the dust settled.
Some people thought she died with her parents and siblings, but there were rumors that she'd escaped the violence. Well, according to Friedrich, the ghosts he'd befriended knew the story. They told him that two men helped Anastasia get away before the bloody execution, and she'd survived.
His book was full of stories like this, spirits sharing secrets or bringing him messages from the great beyond. And some of the interactions were more personal. Okay, that's actually crazy because I just heard something in my headphones. That was weird. Friedrich wrote about how a good friend of his passed away suddenly. He was grief stricken, but wanted to continue his research.
And to his delight, that friend's voice appeared on one of his recordings right afterward. It was very comforting for Friedrich to know his friend wasn't really gone.
And thanks to his discovery, no one really needed to miss their dead loved ones anymore. In fact, the whole book had a very joyful tone to it. Based on what the spirits told him, Friedrich believed the afterlife was happy and peaceful. Spirits traveled around on a flying ship of the dead. Everyone got along, even people who'd hated one another in life.
And spirits had perfect knowledge of the past, the present, and the future. They could speak any language, even tongues they hadn't learned when they were living. And now, thanks to Friedrich's findings, he could share their experiences with the world. People loved what he had to say about his conversations with the dead. His books flew off the shelves. Eventually, a copy made its way to a psychologist named Konstantin Rodive.
Constantine was a refugee who'd recently fled to Sweden. He was fascinated by Friedrich's discoveries, and since they now lived in the same country, they had the perfect opportunity to collaborate. So beginning in 1965, Constantine and Friedrich began working together.
They were mostly building on what Friedrich had already done, listening to static stations on the radio, asking questions into a recording device, and then writing down whatever answers came through. They kept detailed notes on which voices they'd heard from, when, and what they said. When they published their research, Konstantin called the sounds electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP for short, which is a term ghost hunters still use today.
Now, there is one EVP in particular that I want to spend a little more time discussing. It's very striking. It was recorded during an evening session, but unfortunately, I don't know much more about the circumstances. Friedrich provided a lot of context about his recordings, like what was going on in the house, how he was feeling, and what had changed in his life when he conversed with his friends. Konstantin only wrote what was said and when.
So anyway, one night Constantine claimed that he heard a voice say, quote, Here is night, brothers. Hear the birds burn. Later on that same conversation, another voice added secret reports. It is bad here.
Now, I will say some skeptics have tried to poke holes in these recordings, suggesting there's a more grounded explanation and they're not real messages from the dead. If that's the case, I really hope that's true for these two particular quotes. It's not appealing to think about an afterlife where birds burn and where things are bad. It's a lot nicer to believe Friedrich's stories about all of the spirits getting along and flying around. For his part, Constantine thought these clips were legitimate.
But he also said that ghosts sometimes used very poetic language that can be hard to decipher. And of course, spirits can lie, just like living people do. So you can believe this recording was authentic without needing to accept that the ghost was telling the literal truth.
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Now, while we're on the topic of skeptics, it's worth covering some counter arguments people have made over the years about this entire situation, because quite a few folks have tried to debunk Friedrich and Constantine's work.
One argument is that the two men weren't really recording ghosts, but distant radio transmissions. After all, Friedrich and Constantine didn't just have conversations with ghosts. They heard the spirits singing and sometimes playing instruments. Even in that very first recording, when he was trying to get the bird song, Friedrich heard a trumpet. And it seems odd that dead spirits would have musical accompaniment, but I
But I've already talked about this idea quite a bit. It's actually what Friedrich thought happened the very first time he ever picked up EVP.
He assumed he'd accidentally recorded something from the radio. That was until a voice on the tape addressed him by name. And that's the big problem with this theory. So many of the messages were highly personal in nature. The voices regularly spoke to Friedrich and even gave him nicknames like Fred or Federico. And at least some of the time, the responses felt like direct answers to the questions that were being asked. A random radio broadcast just wouldn't do that.
And like I mentioned before, Friedrich didn't think he'd pick up so many conversations in so many different languages if he was just hearing the radio. In fact, he thought the spirits used a variety of languages on purpose, specifically because it was such an unusual way to communicate, especially when they change languages midway through the sentences and phrases. It was their way of demonstrating that something otherworldly was going on.
So skeptics came up with another theory. Maybe Constantine and Friedrich weren't picking up anything at all. Maybe they were just imagining the EVPs. As it turns out, human beings are really good at examining random data and thinking we see patterns there. It's the reason we can look at clouds or wood grain and see faces in them.
The theory goes that when Constantine and Friedrich listened to recordings of meaningless static, they imagined the words and phrases they heard in it. Their subconscious minds were trying to create order where there just wasn't any. And if that's true, it would explain why some recordings needed to be slowed down in order for anyone to make anything out because Constantine and Friedrich were pushing and prodding the audio until they got the result they wanted and expected, real words and phrases.
This even helped explain why the speakers kept changing languages. If Konstantin and Friedrich heard a sound that resembled a Swedish word and then the next audio pop didn't sound anything like Swedish, if you were really invested in believing you were hearing words, you could pick up a term from any other language that might fit the noise, basically forcing the data to fit your explanations. Except Friedrich had anticipated this exact objection before he published his initial book,
so he'd set up a test. He got a bunch of people together in a room and played his EVP recordings for them. He didn't tell them what they were going to hear or what messages to listen for. Friedrich didn't want to risk skewing the results by prepping the test subjects too much. And if the EVPs really were imaginary, you'd think this test group would all hear something different because they'd all make up different imaginary conversations.
But instead, the results were surprisingly consistent. Everyone agreed on what they'd heard. Now, I will note that in the years since then, some scientists tried to recreate Friedrich's studies. They played recordings for a bunch of people in a room and asked them if they'd heard a voice or what it said. And nobody got results anything like what Friedrich reported. A lot of the time, the people didn't even hear a voice at all.
And when they did, there was wild disagreement about what the speaker said. I'm not sure why Friedrich's findings were so different from everybody else's. Maybe there was a flaw in his experiment or he exaggerated the positive results. Or maybe ghosts just like him better since he had a long, friendly relationship with them. No one knows for sure.
And that's pretty much where the debate ended. Nobody was ever able to prove EVPs were real, but they also couldn't prove they were fake either. So it came down to what people already believed. If someone thought ghosts were real, they could see electronic voice phenomena as a way to communicate with them. If another person wasn't into hauntings and spirits, they could ignore EVP evidence and assume it was false. But so far as real believers went...
Constantine and Friedrich's findings helped revolutionize ghost hunting. If you've ever watched shows where paranormal enthusiasts go through old haunted houses, you've probably seen someone using an EVP detector. The technology hasn't changed much in the past half century. These days, the radios are programmed to automatically jump from one static station to the next until they pick something up. And a lot of people use digital equipment instead of old-fashioned audio tape.
But otherwise, the principles are the same as what Friedrich originally wrote. Sometimes ghost hunters will leave a recording device in an empty room for hours or days to see if it picks up on anything. Other times they'll try to have conversations, just like Friedrich did. Researchers try really hard to make sure their EVP readings are accurate. So if, for example, a ghost hunter is walking through a haunted house and then they sneeze, they'll lean toward the recorder and say, I just sneezed.
That way, they won't come back later and think they'd heard a spirit making a noise. It's similar to how Friedrich was so afraid of mistaking a normal phenomenon for a spiritual one. Ghost hunters know there's a lot of skepticism around their work, so they try to make it as valid and scientific as possible. Interestingly, some grief counselors also use EVPs in their sessions.
If someone is struggling with a loss, it can be comforting to feel like your loved one might still be around communicating with you through the radio.
And as for Constantine, he died pretty soon after he wrapped up his studies with Friedrich. This was on September 2nd, 1974, and he was 65 years old. Friedrich lived for 15 more years before he passed in the fall of 1987 at the age of 84. A few years after his death, a few researchers thought they recorded an EVP from Friedrich's spirit. So he was still studying the field just from the other side.
Friedrich's after-death message was, all your scientific, medical, or biological speculations miss the mark. So maybe there's still more that we need to learn before we'll have the answers.
Regardless, while Friedrich and Konstantin are gone, their words live on. Not necessarily in the form of EVPs, although they did leave behind thousands of hours of recordings, but also because their studies were so revolutionary in the field of paranormal research, they changed the way we think about life after death. And for that, they will be remembered.
Thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. And if you ever hear something and then say, wait, did I imagine that? You might not have been. I'll see you next time as we go further into the dark.