The Skeptic Page #6

and thought her place was haunted.

[laughs]

I thought I heard something

there myself last night.

I'm staying there

until the estate is settled.

- What did you hear?

- Whispering outside my door.

I do not believe in ghosts.

And I got the sense

that you don't either.

- I don't.

I don't believe

in anything supernatural.

- Then we're kindred spirits.

But that still leaves me

short of an answer.

- Mehh.

Sit.

The human voice

is not real complex.

It's a sound that nature

has very little difficulty mimicking.

Now, what I'm going to play for you is real.

It was recorded in a farmhouse

in the Berkshires, 1976.

It was heard by multiple witnesses,

caught on tape,

sworn to in an affidavit.

Okay?

It's the real McCoy.

Please.

[indistinct screeching]

Isn't that amazing?

This is an authentic aural event.

And it's probably what we call

a chi cluster.

It's a build-up of chi field energy,

then released

into the sonic spectrum.

- But it's not words.

- What do you mean?

- How does it come out as words,

you know,

in an intelligent sentence structure?

- Well, it doesn't.

I mean, maybe it does

once in a million,

like those monkeys

typing sonnets, but...

- No, but it did for me.

The voice that I heard spoke.

It did not just say,

"Ooh, aah, aah. "

It said something like

"an old trunk. "

And it kept repeating it

over and over.

"An old trunk" or "in an old trunk"

as if to suggest that I...

- Bryan, is it?

- Yeah.

- How well can you hear

through a door?

- Pretty well, I guess.

Okay, now, what was the volume like?

- Like I'm talking now?

- Maybe a little lower.

- You know,

I'm going to tell you what you did,

and I don't want you to get embarrassed,

because you're not the first.

But you heard whispering sounds.

And presuming that they must be human,

your brain strove

to put speech to them.

So "old trunk," or "in the old trunk"

was the best it could come up with.

It's called psychoacoustics.

Excuse me.

- Really.

I respect the concept.

I really do.

But I don't know.

- What I heard was so...

- What'd I say?

- What?

- Oh, did you catch that?

- Yeah.

You said, "What'd I say?"

- No, I didn't.

I said, "Rudd lie stay. "

[whispers]

Rudd lie stay.

You made it into

"what'd I say. "

- Huh.

Sh*t.

- Your aunt did the same thing.

She took a garden variety

acoustical sub-event

and made it into a haunting.

- [chuckles]

I'll be damned.

- You're surprised, huh?

You thought I'd accept your

hearing voices

as an everyday thing, didn't you?

- No, I thought it was an

everyday thing for you people.

Don't they have nuns

for that kind of work?

- [laughs]

Careful.

You'll get me in trouble.

- I'm late for our meeting, Father.

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