November 8, 2002: Electronic Voice Phenomena - Brendan Cook & Barbara McBeath

Art Bell presents a Friday night program featuring Brendan Cook and Barbara McBeath of the Ghost Investigators Society, who share their most unsettling electronic voice phenomena recordings collected over years of fieldwork. The session opens with Art discussing a caller's wife who believes listening to voices of the dead can psychologically open doors to paranormal contact, and he raises the possibility that the investigators' own minds could be manifesting the recordings through their intent.

The EVP recordings span cemeteries, an old Union Pacific train museum, the Rawlins Wyoming Penitentiary death house, an abandoned movie theater, and a private residence. Among the most striking captures are a voice identifying itself as "Alma Berg" in a cemetery, a child saying "come to Papa" in a train station, an entity commanding "make the pipes do it now" before audible pipe banging, a woman declaring "I'm completely dead," a child whispering "it's dark in here," and a guttural groaning from an abandoned theater that sounds like a slowed recording. At the Rawlins prison, voices demand "get out" and one announces "I appear" near the gas chamber, while a scream is captured in the exact area where a prisoner named Frank Wigfall was lynched by fellow inmates.

Art questions what these recordings suggest about the nature of death, noting the emotional intensity of the voices and the presence of lost children pleading for parents. Cook and McBeath report that their recent adoption of digital recorders has produced even clearer results, and both state that their work has eliminated any personal fear of death.