Electronic Voice Phenomenon - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

The concept of EVP has had an impact on popular culture. It is popular as an entertaining pursuit, as in ghost hunting, and as a means of dealing with grief. It has influenced literature, radio, film, and television.

Investigation of EVP is the subject of hundreds of regional and national groups and Internet message boards. Paranormal investigator John Zaffis claims, "There's been a boom in ghost hunting ever since the Internet took off." Investigators, equipped with electronic gear—like EMF meters, video cameras, and audio recorders—scour reportedly haunted venues, trying to uncover visual and audio evidence of ghosts. Many use portable recording devices in an attempt to capture EVP.

Films involving EVP include The Sixth Sense, White Noise, The Changeling. It has also been featured on television series like Ghost Whisperer, The Omega Factor, A Haunting, Ghost Hunters, MonsterQuest, Ghost Adventures, The Secret Saturdays, Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, Supernatural, Derren Brown Investigates and Ghost Lab.

Coast To Coast AM hosts George Noory and Art Bell have explored the topic of EVP with featured guests such as Brendan Cook and Barbara McBeath of the Ghost Investigators Society, and paranormal investigator and 'demonologist' Lou Gentile. The Spirit of John Lennon, a pay-per-view seance broadcast in 2006, in which TV crew members, a psychic, and an "expert in paranormal activity" claim the spirit of former Beatle John Lennon made contact with them through what was described as "an Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP)."

Legion, a 1983 novel by William Peter Blatty, contains a subplot where Dr. Vincent Amfortas, a terminally ill neurologist, leaves a "to-be-opened-upon-my-death" letter for Lt. Kinderman detailing his accounts of contact with the dead, including the doctor's recently deceased wife, Ann, through EVP recordings. Amfortas' character and the EVP subplot do not appear in the film version of the novel, Exorcist III. In Nyctivoe a 2001 vampire-inspired play by Dimitris Lyacos the male character as well as his deceased companion are speaking from a recording device amidst a static/white noise background. In Pattern Recognition, a 2003 novel by William Gibson, the main character's mother tries to convince her that her father is communicating with her from recordings after his death/disappearance in the September 11, 2001 attacks.