Wikipedia defines electronic voice phenomena as "speech or speech-like sounds, inaudible during recording but detected on electronic recording media on playback." We just like to refer to them as scary-ass crap.
While no one can prove without a shadow of a doubt that EVP recordings are indeed the disembodied voices of the dead (as is the case with almost everything in this field), it doesn't make them any less of a weird phenomena. One of the best rational explainations to come up is that many recorders are prone to picking up the stray radio signals bouncing around all over the place. That seems to be a pretty decent argument until you start to get seemingly intelligent responses to your questions.
We didn't start getting very into EVP recording until about 2005, and here you'll find examples of some our best so far. These recordings, taken at The Church of the Damned, have primarily been locked away on our hard drives since we've taken them, shown only to select audiences at our presentations until now.
Name : "Demon Scream"
Listen :
Description : One of our favorite recordings. The setup is as follows: The group is standing on the porch at the church preparing to head inside. You can hear the door crack open followed by a shaking sound. This sound is Nick sticking his arm in through the crack in the doorand shaking a container of kosher salt (baddies hate the stuff). At the time, it was just a joke, but judging from the disembodied scream heard after the shake of the salt, something didn't think it was too funny...
Name : "Just the Ghosts are Looking"
Listen :
Description : This one is pretty much just as it sounds.
Name : "Pardon Me"
Listen :
Description : Taken during the filming of our demo pilot, this one is interesting because I was actually holding the recorder at the time. Definitely the most polite EVP so far.
Name : "You Guys are Pissed"
Listen :
Description : Another one taken during the demo pilot, and a great one at that. We were getting pretty frustrated at the lack of activity at the church on this particular evening (go figure that it's slow when we've got a film crew tagging along), and it appears that it was pretty evident. In the original recording, this appears directly after Nick lets out an irritated groan.
Name : "Touch it with my ..."
Listen :
Description : I love this one. Take a listen, and if you hear what we do, you'll laugh.
Name : "Ich Spreche"
Listen :
Description : This particular recording is one that we agonized over for quite some time. We could tell that this was definitely not any one of us, but we had no idea what was being said. After 100+ listenings we came to the conclusion that it sounded like German. Since none of us spoke any German we spent a few hours of trial and error on babel fish and we eventually had our translation : "I speak."
Name : "I don't know what day it is"
Listen :
Description : You can hear one of the guys speaking into the recorder to timestamp the tape. What follows next is a great indication of an intelligent response.
Name : "???"
Listen :
Description : We still can't figure out what's going on in this one. Any ideas?