An Alcatraz Listening Experiment

How good are your ears? Are you any good at distinguishing what EVPs are saying? (Whether you’re an actual investigator or a paranormal TV armchair one.)

Bad Ears?

I always think I have the worst ears. I rarely hear what people say they hear in EVPs. It has to be a very distinct “Hi” or “Get out!” –or whatever might’ve been said.

Most of the time I hear the voice, but not necessarily whatever words the TV investigators claim they’ve heard. And I don’t just mean the Travel Channel kind of investigators. Even the ones who post their findings on YouTube.

Why?

Hallucinations?

Are others really hearing what they think they are, or is it a case of auditory pareidolia?

The skeptic in me thinks most of the time it’s wishful thinking, a.k.a auditory pareidolia. People want to hear something and have “proof” so bad that they try to make sense of any sudden blip in the spectrum of white noise as a “distinct” voice saying…whatever they think it’s said.

Most of the time.

There are those times the voices are really distinct, but does that mean it’s a true disembodied voice of a deceased human?

Or could it be voices from somewhere else being carried across the airwaves at just the right moment to be picked up on a recording device? And where is that “somewhere else?” Another city? State? Country? Dimension?

I don’t know. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions.

The Demonstration

On a recent jaunt to Alcatraz Island, I witnessed a “Sounds of the Slammer” demonstration. A volunteer climbed the steps to the second level to demonstrate opening and closing the cells on that level so those of us below could see.

He first asked for people to call out a few numbers between one and ten. Then he opened the individual cells with those numbers.

He shut those, then demonstrated opening all of the cell doors on that second level at the same time.

As he prepared to open them, he yelled a phrase. Before he closed them, he shouted the same phrase again. After he was finished, he explained what the phrase was that he’d said and why he’d used it.

Several of my fellow tour takers expressed out loud what I was thinking, “I’m glad he clarified that. That’s not what I thought he’d said.”

The Experiment

Some people really do have good ears. They even hear the most commonly misconstrued lyrics from popular songs.

But we’re all fallible. We can’t always trust our senses to interpret things correctly. Like during the Sounds of the Slammer Alcatraz demonstration. Just among those near me who admitted, “That’s not what I thought he’d said,” we thought he said three different things!

I thought it’d be fun to create a short video featuring the moment where the volunteer yelled the phrase. I’ve embedded it below.

You’ll see it’s very clear –as far volume. But what do you think he’s saying?

I’m curious to see:

1. How many people hear what he’s actually saying, and
2. How many different interpretations there are.

Give it a listen and let me know what you hear.

Check-In

Have you ever been to Alcatraz? If you have, and if you’ve seen the Sounds of the Slammer demonstration, did your demonstrator yell this phrase too?