Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely,

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos.  Predictably, like the person who sent me the links, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak."

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there.

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

****************************************

The ghost of Robert Schumann

Yesterday, I was driving home from work, and was listening to Symphony Hall, the classical music station on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio, and the announcer said that we'd be hearing the Violin Concerto in D Minor of the brilliant and tragic composer Robert Schumann.

"And there's quite a story to go with it," he said, and proceeded to tell us how the composer had written the piece in 1853, three years before his death, for his friend and fellow musician Joseph Joachim.  Joachim, however, thought the piece too dark to have any chance at popularity, and after Schumann attempted suicide in 1854 the sheet music was deposited at the Prussian State Library in Berlin, and everyone forgot about it.

In 1933, eighty years later, two women conducting a séance in London were alarmed to hear a "spirit voice" that claimed to be Schumann, and that said they were to go to the Prussian State Library to recover an "unpublished work" and see to it that it got performed.  So the women went over to Berlin, and found the music -- right where the "spirit" said it would be.

Four years later, in 1937, a copy was sent anonymously to the great conductor Yehudi Menuhin.  Impressed, and delighted to have the opportunity to stage a first performance of a piece from a composer who had been dead for 84 years, he premiered it in San Francisco in October of that year.  But the performance was interrupted by one of the two women who had "talked to Schumann," who claimed that she had a right to first performance, since she'd been in touch with the spirit world about the piece and had received that right from the dead composer himself!

We then got to hear the piece, which is indeed dark and haunting and beautiful, and you should all give it a listen.

Having been an aficionado of stories of the paranormal since I was a teen -- which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a long time ago -- it's not often that I get to hear one that I didn't know about before.  Especially, given my love for music, one involving a famous composer.  So I thought this was an intriguing tale, and when I got home I decided to look into it, and see if there was more known about the mysterious piece and its scary connection to séances and ghosts.

And -- sorry to disappoint you if you bought the whole spirit-voice thing -- there is, indeed, a lot more to the story.

Turns out that the announcer was correct that violinist Joachim, when he received the concerto, didn't like it much.  He commented in a letter that the piece showed "a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy, though certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist."  And he not only tucked it away at the Prussian State Library, he included a provision in his will (1907) that the piece should not be performed until 1956, a hundred years after Schumann's death.  So while it was forgotten, it wasn't perhaps as unknown as the radio announcer wanted us to think.

Which brings us up to the séance, and the spirit voice, and the finding of the manuscript -- conveniently leaving out the fact that the two woman who were at the séance, Jelly d'Arányi and Adila Fachiri, were sisters -- who were the grand-nieces of none other than Joseph Joachim himself!

Funny how leaving out one little detail like that makes a story seem like it admits of no other explanation than the supernatural, isn't it?  Then you find out that detail, and... well, not so much, any more.

It's hard to imagine that d'Arányi and Fachiri, who were fourteen and nineteen years old, respectively, when their great-uncle died, wouldn't have known about his will and its mysterious clause forbidding the performance of Schumann's last major work.  d'Arányi and Fachiri themselves were both violinists of some repute, so this adds to their motivation for revealing the piece, with the séance adding an extra frisson to the story, especially in the superstitious and spirit-happy 1930s.  And the forwarding of the piece to Menuhin, followed by d'Arányi's melodramatic crashing of the premiere, has all of the hallmarks of a well-crafted publicity stunt.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to discover how easy this one was to debunk.  Of course, I don't know that my explanation is correct; maybe the two sisters were visited by the ghost of Robert Schumann, who had been wandering around in the afterlife, pissed off that his last masterwork wasn't being performed.  But if you cut the story up using Ockham's Razor, you have to admit that the spirit-voices-and-séance theory doesn't make nearly as much sense as the two-sisters-pulling-a-clever-hoax theory.

A pity, really, because a good spooky story always adds something to a dark, melancholy piece of music.  I may have to go listen to Danse Macabre, The Drowned Cathedral, and Night on Bald Mountain, just to get myself back into the mood.

******************************************

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Simon Singh's The Code Book, prompted a reader to respond, "Yes, but have you read his book on Fermat's Last Theorem?"

In this book, Singh turns his considerable writing skill toward the fascinating story of Pierre de Fermat, the seventeenth-century French mathematician who -- amongst many other contributions -- touched off over three hundred years of controversy by writing that there were no integer solutions for the equation  aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2, then adding, "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain," and proceeding to die before elaborating on what this "marvelous proof" might be.

The attempts to recreate Fermat's proof -- or at least find an equivalent one -- began with Fermat's contemporaries, Evariste de Gaulois, Marin Mersenne, Blaise Pascal, and John Wallis, and continued for the next three centuries to stump the greatest minds in mathematics.  It was finally proven that Fermat's conjecture was correct by Andrew Wiles in 1994.

Singh's book Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 350 Years describes the hunt for a solution and the tapestry of personalities that took on the search -- ending with a tour-de-force paper by soft-spoken British mathematician Andrew Wiles.  It's a fascinating journey, as enjoyable for a curious layperson as it is for the mathematically inclined -- and in Singh's hands, makes for a story you will thoroughly enjoy.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Ghost radio

I got an email yesterday with two links and a message.  The message said:

Wondering what you think of this.  I'm not convinced but I think it's interesting.  This guy says he's made a device that can allow two-way communication with the dead.  The messages he picks up do seem to be answering specific questions and comments he's making.  Not just random words or phrases. 

Watch the guy's video and see what you think.  I'm keeping an open mind about it, but I'm curious what you think. 

Sincerely, 

T. K.

The links he provided were to YouTube videos made by a guy named Steve Huff, selling software that is called "The Impossible Box."  He claims that this software is manipulable by the disembodied spirits of the dead, who apparently surround us.  The first link plays audio recordings of messages that Huff has received using the software; in the second, he explains to us how he thinks it works.

Here are a few of the messages he received:

• I am the portal
• Let there be light
• The light will surround you, Mr. Huff
• Blessed art thou
• Olee's at your side
• The devil's gonna profit from you

And so forth and so on.  The software is available for download for $49.95 (and can be purchased here).

So I watched both videos, and predictably, I'm unconvinced.

The way it works, which he does get to on the second video (about halfway through), is that the software scans internet radio, and pulls out words and phrases that it then plays for you.  Allegedly, this software only turns on when the ghosts have something to say.  "There is no continuous scan of audio," Huff tells us.  "The scan only starts when the spirits want to speak." 

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

When it comes to explaining how the programmer created code that can specifically be manipulated by the dead, he's a little cagier.  The Impossible Box contains "software with all kinds of tech," he says, giving no other real details presumably to protect his proprietary interest, but also preventing any kind of critical analysis of what's really going on in there. 

The real problem here, though, is the same one that plagues attempts to demonstrate that rock musicians have engaged in backmasking -- hiding demonic messages in songs, so that when you play them backwards you hear voices saying things like "Here's to my sweet Satan."  (That one is from one of the most famous claims of backmasking -- in Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven.")  As Michael Shermer points out in his wonderful TED talk "Why People Believe Weird Things," the message only becomes clear when someone tells you what the demons are saying via a caption -- just as Huff does in his video.  Before we're primed by being told what the message is, it more or less sounds like gibberish.  "You can't miss it," Shermer says, "when I tell you what's there."

The other thing that is troubling is the question of why ghosts have to have source audio in order to speak.  If they can manipulate software, you'd think they'd be able to do the same thing without having to rely on picking out words from internet radio.  He tried making a "spirit box" that used white noise instead of scanning radio, Huff says, and it didn't work.  "Spirits have a hard time forming words out of white noise as a source audio," he tells us.  "They need audio with human words to really be able to leave you sentences "

Which I find awfully convenient.  We're given garbled phrases, made up from words pulled from internet radio, and we get to decide what it is we're hearing, and then assign meaning to it.  While it's possible that we're talking with ghosts, what's more likely is that we're seeing some kind of audio version of the ideomotor effect, where our own subconscious decisions and expectations of meaning are creating a message where there really is none.

Now, let me conclude with saying something I've said before; I'm not saying that the afterlife is impossible, nor that spirits (should such exist) might not try to communicate with the living.  All I'm saying is that the evidence I've thus far seen is unconvincing, and I find the perfectly natural explanations for what is going on in The Impossible Box (and other spirit communication devices) sufficient to account for any ghostly messages Huff and others have received.  If anyone does decide to shell out the fifty bucks for the software, however, I'd be really interested to hear what your experience is with it -- and especially, if you got information from Great-Aunt Marjorie that you couldn't have otherwise got, and not just vague messages like "The light will surround you."

Until then, however, I'm afraid that I'm still in the "dubious" camp.

Ghosts of Christmas present

Ouija boards are back in the news again, perhaps because of the recent release of the movie Ouija, which has people stirred up despite getting a 7% rating over at the site Rotten Tomatoes and reviews such as, "... strikingly like High School Musical, only with screaming."

Be that as it may, there is something about Ouija boards that really scares people.  Tales abound of people getting freaked out by messages from demons or evil spirits, even though the stories are usually of the "I heard it from my best friend's uncle's barber's daughter" type.  When you try it yourself, you quickly find that any "messages" that come through are banal at best, and easily explained through the ideomotor effect.  (For a really cool experiment that demonstrates this conclusively, go here.)

Further, there was a test run by none other than James Randi, where people who believed in the powers of Ouija boards were blindfolded and then asked their spirit friends to deliver messages anyhow.  The spirits all of a sudden seemed unable to see, themselves, and what they put out was gibberish, unless there's a language in the spirit world where "GHISKNNDPSBPLG" means something.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But still, the risks from demons and ghosts is ever-present for some people, and there are many warnings to "stay away from those things," even though you'd think Hasbro wouldn't sell many of 'em if every kid who used them ended up possessed.

This fact evidently has escaped some of the devout, who are alarmed by the hype that the movie has caused.  Ouija boards are expected to be a sellout this Christmas, which has freaked out the powers-that-be enough that a priest in Ireland made a public statement -- although under conditions of anonymity.  Maybe he didn't want the demons and evil spirits to find out he's been trash-talking them, assuming the demons and evil spirits read The Independent, which is where the story was covered.

"It's easy to open up evil spirits but it's very hard to get rid of them," the priest said in an interview.  "People, especially young people and teenagers who are likely to experiment with Ouija boards on a whim, can be very naive in thinking that they are only contacting the departed souls of loved-ones when they attempt to communicate with the dead using the boards.  It's like going to some parts of Africa and saying I'm personally immune to Ebola.  But it does leave people open to all kinds of spiritual dangers.  People don't intend any spiritual harm by it, but we live in a spiritual realm and you have no way to control what may impinge on you."

Yes, it's just like saying you're immune to Ebola, except that Ebola actually exists.  

The anonymous priest wasn't the only one to make a public statement.  Church of England vicar Peter Irwin-Clark is equally appalled by the surge in popularity of the toy, and told a reporter for The Daily Mail, "It is absolutely appalling.  I would very strongly advise parents not to buy Ouija boards for children.  It’s like opening a shutter in one’s soul and letting in the supernatural.  There are spiritual realities out there and they can be very negative.  I would hugely recommend people not to have anything to do with the occult.  People find they are having strange dreams, strange things happening to them, even poltergeist activity."

I wonder if that's what's wrong with my wife, who two nights ago dreamed she was participating in a chicken rodeo.

So anyway.  Predictably I'm siding with James Randi et al., who think that the Ouija board is just a silly toy.  I'd invite anyone who is looking for a Christmas present for me, though, to get me one, and it will occupy an honored spot next to my decks of Tarot cards.  I'm assuming that this will be a more economical choice than the other thing I want, which is a "haunted sword" that appeared over at Craigslist a couple of days ago, with a price-tag of $150.  You can get a Ouija board over at Target for around $20, which I think you have to admit is quite a savings.

Playing cards with ghosts

So there's the story of the little kid who starts a snowball rolling at the top of a hill, and as it rolls it accumulates more snow, getting bigger and bigger, until finally it reaches the bottom and crushes a car or something.  Thus the coining of the term snowball effect and a cautionary lesson about getting things started that might eventually get away from you.

I feel a little like that kid this week.  Tuesday I posted about the fact that I loved it when woo-woos conducted hybridization experiments on disparate bizarre claims, and as an example talked about a guy who said he could summon UFOs by telepathy.  This generated an email from a reader, who said that if I liked that one, I'd love the guy who said, basically, that Bigfoot was elusive because quantum.  I ended that piece saying that if anyone had any further weird combos up their sleeve, for example, a recommendation that we choose our homeopathic remedies using Tarot cards, I didn't want to know about it.

This prompted a different loyal reader of Skeptophilia to send me an email that said, "I tried to find one combining Tarot cards and homeopathy, but I found this one instead.  Do I win?"

Despite my feeling of foreboding, I clicked the link.  And found myself reading about "Using Tarot Cards to Communicate With Ghosts."

Like the other two, I kept looking for some sign that this was satire, but sadly, I don't think it was.  "Tarot cards are a great way to communicate with spirits," we're told in the introduction.  "It’s because they open up your intuition, so you become receptive to the ghost’s or spirit’s message."

But then we're immediately told to be cautious.  Ghosts and spirits, apparently, can do bad stuff, so we have to speak to them sternly right from the get-go.  There are four rules one must follow:

1. Never allow the spirit to enter your mind
2. Tell the spirit it may only guide your hand to the right card
3. Tell the spirits that you have the power to end the session when you want
4. Tell it exactly how you want it to communicate or confirm a card

There are even concrete hints on how to accomplish all of this.  These include using "protective charms and stones" such as tiger's eye and hematite to keep those spirits where they belong.

Oh, and we're told that we have to do our research about what the cards mean, and be reasonable about what we ask, because "spirit communication tires out ghosts."  I'm not all that sympathetic about this, because honestly, what else do ghosts have to do?  It's not like they have day jobs, or anything.  They can nap pretty much whenever they want to.  So if I want to talk to a ghost, I'm expecting it to get up off its ectoplasmic ass and talk back.  I don't want to hear any pathetic excuses like "I'm just too sleepy tonight," or to pull out my Ouija board and have it spell out "zzzzzzzzzzzzz."

Then we're told that we should also research what ghosts might be present, and that if (for example) we suspect that there's a female ghost haunting the place, we can expect lots of feminine imagery in the cards we draw.  But then there's the caveat that we might accidentally attract a different spirit, so we might not get the cards we expect.  Which seems about right.  We will either get cards we expect, or not, every time, which certainly sounds like hard evidence of ghostly communication to me.

Then there's a bunch of stuff about thanking the ghost and making sure he's sent back to the ghost realm and cleansing the cards with spiritual detergent or something.  By this time, my eyes had kind of glazed over.  I'm thinking I may need to read a chapter or two of this book, just to recover:

Not that it'll help.  If you're looking for me, I'll be in the corner of my office, sitting on the floor, rocking and quietly sobbing.  So thanks for the cards and letters and all.  I hope you're happy.

Music from beyond the grave

What do you do if you get tired of those nasty old scientists insisting that your woo-woo claims pass the test of hard evidence?

You move your claims into the realm of the untestable.

That, at least, is the tactic employed by one Jennifer Whisper, an 83-year-old musician from San Diego, who says that she gets her music and lyrics from dead songwriters who have provided her with what they would have written, if they were still alive.

Whisper started out channeling music from the dead in the 1970s, and began at the top, with none other than George Gershwin, who introduced himself in a straightforward manner: "I heard a knock on the door and no one was there," Whisper said to a reporter from The Huffington Post.  "Then I heard a voice say, 'Hello Jenny! It's me, George Gershwin.'"

After recovering from her surprise, Gershwin dictated a song, "Love Is All There Is," to Whisper.  He's come back a bunch of times since then, she says, and she now has over a hundred posthumous compositions by Gershwin.

She also has channeled songs by Judy Garland, Johnny Mercer... and Jimi Hendrix.

Oh, and Whisper also says that she found out that Marilyn Monroe adopted JonBenet Ramsay after her death.  So that all ended happily enough.

The problem, of course, is that you can't exactly prove that she's not getting these songs from the dead.  This is a claim that is outside of what is even potentially testable.  If you're curious, though, Whisper has attracted the attention of musicians and musicologists -- and not in a good way.  One, Los Angeles-based studio musician Jim Briggs, has analyzed her alleged Gershwin composition "My Stars Above"and said that he's not buying her story.

It's amazing, Briggs said, that "My Stars Above" is way worse than you'd expect from a composer who's had 78 years to improve beyond where he was when he composed his masterpiece Porgy & Bess.   "If [Gershwin's] communicating musically from beyond the grave," Briggs said, "I can't believe that at no point did he suggest 'My Stars Above' be an instrumental."

It's also opened up some legal challenges for Whisper, but the ramifications of what she is doing are unprecedented -- and unclear.  She could potentially be violating the publicity rights of the people who hold the estates of the deceased composers, but even so, it's hard to know how a court would decide the case.  Joy Butler, an attorney specializing in copyright law, has said, "I've never run across a case like this.  But she'd have a hard time convincing a court."

So that's the latest from the world of the woo-woo, and yet another case of switching your tactics if the heat is on.  It's a shame, though, that Whisper hasn't gotten in touch with some older classical composers, because I'm passionately fond of J. S. Bach, and I'd love to know what he's doing these days.

Other than decomposing, that is.