Legion

  I started making these recordings a few months after the death of Ann. There is a patient in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, a schizophrenic named Anton Lang. Please don’t talk to him about this; he has very real problems which will only tend to lessen the phenomenon’s credibility, along with mine, I would have to suppose. Lang had complained of a chronic headache, which caused me to come into contact with him. I, of course, read his history, and found that for years he’d been making tape recordings of what he characterized simply as “the voices.” I asked him about them, and he told me some things that were intriguing and suggested that I read a book on the subject. The title was Breakthrough. It was written by a Latvian, Konstantin Raudieve, and is available in English through a British publisher. I ordered a copy and read it. Are you with me so far?

  Most of the book consisted of Raudieve’s transcriptions of voice recordings that he had made. Their content wasn’t terribly encouraging, I fear. They were trifling and inane. If these were the voices of the dead, as this Latvian professor was convinced that they were, was this really all that they had to tell us? “Kosti is tired today.” “Kosti works.” “Here there are customs at the border.” “We sleep.” It put me in mind of the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead. Do you know it, Father? It’s a curious work, a manual of instructions preparing the dying for what they would face on the other side. The first experience, they believed, was a decisive and immediate confrontation with transcendence, which they called “the Clear Light.” The newly dead spirit could opt to join with it; but few did, because most were not ready, for their earthly lives had not properly prepared them; and so after this initial confrontation, the dead went through stages of deterioration as they dwindled toward eventual rebirth into the world. Such a state, it struck me, might produce the inanities and banalities recorded not only in Raudieve’s book, but also in most of the spiritist literature. It’s pretty sickening, discouraging stuff. And so, to say the least, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by Breakthrough. But it had a preface by another author named Colin Smythe, and this I found to be quite understated and credible. So were various testimonials written by physicists, engineers and even a Catholic archbishop from Germany, who had all made recordings of their own and who seemed not so anxious to proselytize the reader as they were to speculate on the causes of the voices, considering, among other things, the possibility that the voices were imprinted on the tape in some way by the experimenter’s unconscious.

  I decided to try it. Let’s face it, I was crazy with grief over Ann. I own a little Sony portable recorder. It’s small enough to stuff in the pocket of a coat, but you can rapidly reverse and replay with this model, something I was soon to discover was important. One evening—it was summer and still quite light out—I sat down in my living room with the Sony, and invited any voices who could hear me to communicate and manifest themselves on the tape. Then I pushed “Record” and let the blank cassette run from start to end. Then I replayed it. I heard nothing except for some noise in the street, and some loud static and amplifier sounds. I then forgot the whole thing.

  A day or two later I decided to listen to the tape again. Somewhere in the middle I heard something anomalous, a little click and then a faint, odd sound that was barely audible; it seemed embedded in the hissing and the static, if not at some level underneath those sounds. But it struck me as something that was—well—a little curious. So I went back to that spot and kept playing it over and over. With each repetition, the sound grew louder and more distinct until finally I heard—or thought I heard—a clear male voice shouting my name. “Amfortas.” Just that. It was loud and distinct and not a voice that I recognized. I think my heart began to race a little bit. I went through the rest of the tape and heard nothing, then returned to the spot where I’d heard the voice. But now I couldn’t hear it. My hopes fell away like a poor man’s wallet falling over a cliff. I began to replay the section repeatedly again, and then again heard the faint odd sound. About three repetitions after that, I could again hear the voice clearly.

  Was my mind playing tricks? Was I superimposing intelligibility onto scraps of random noise? I played more of the tape, and now where I hadn’t heard a thing before another voice popped out at me. It was a woman. No, not Ann. Just a woman. She was speaking a rather long sentence, the first part of which, even after many repetitions, I was simply unable to understand. The whole thing had a very odd pitch and rhythm, and the accents on the words were not where they belonged. The words also had a very lilting effect; they valleyed, then continuously ascended. The latter was the portion I could understand: “… continue to hear us,” the woman was saying, but because of the lilt, it sounded like a question. I was simply astonished. There wasn’t any doubt that I was hearing it. But why hadn’t I heard it before? I decided that my brain had probably accommodated to the faintness of the voice and its oddities, and had learned how to knife through the veil of static and hiss to the voice just beneath it.

  Now doubts set in again. Had my tape recorder simply picked up voices from the street, or perhaps from next door? There were times when I could hear my neighbors talking. One of them might have mentioned my name. I went into the kitchen, which is a little more removed from the street, and I made a new recording with a fresh cassette. I asked aloud that anyone “communicating” with me repeat the word “Kirios,” which had been my mother’s maiden name. But on playback I heard nothing, just the usual odd sound here and there. One of them resembled the sudden braking of automobile tires. No doubt from the street, I thought. I was tired. Listening had taken intense concentration. I did no more recording that night.

  The following morning, while waiting for the water to boil for coffee, I listened again to both the tapes. “Continue to hear us” and “Amfortas” I heard quite clearly. On the second tape, I focused on the braking sound, replaying it again and again, and suddenly my brain made a strange accommodation, for instead of the noise I heard the words “Anna Kirios” spoken in the high-pitched voice of a woman and with rapid-fire speed. I let the water for the coffee boil over. I was stunned.

  When I went to the hospital that day I brought along the tapes and the tape recorder, and over the lunch break I played the key selections for one of the nurses, Emily Allerton. She didn’t hear anything, she told me. Later I tried it on Amy Keating, one of the charge desk nurses in Neurology. I keyed to a selection from tape number one and she held the speaker pressed close against her ear. After just one playing, she handed me the tape recorder and nodded. “Yes, I hear your name,” she said, and then returned to whatever she’d been doing. I decided to rest the matter at that, at least with the nurses.

  Over the following weeks, I was obsessed. I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a pre-amplifier and earphones, and I began to spend hours each night making tapes. And now it seemed that I never failed to get a result. In fact, the tapes were virtually filled with voices in an almost continuous, even overlapping stream. Some were too faint to even bother deciphering, while others had varying degrees of clarity. Some were at normal speed, while others were intelligible only when I slowed them down to half speed. Some were not even apparent until I’d done this. I kept asking for Ann, but I never heard her. Now and then I’d hear a woman’s voice saying, “I’m here,” or “I’m Ann.” But it wasn’t. It wasn’t her voice.

  One night in October I was listening to a playback of a tape that I’d made the week before. It had an interesting fragment on it, a voice saying “Earth control.” After several repetitions I went a little past it, and then suddenly I caught my breath. I heard a voice saying, “Vincent, this is Ann.” I felt a tingling from the base of my spine up to my neck. It wasn’t just my mind saying this was her voice; it was my body and my blood, my memories, my being, my unconscious mind. I played and replayed it, and each time I felt that same tingling, like a thrilling. I even tried to suppress it, but I couldn’t. It was Ann.

  The next morning my hopes and my doubts were inseparable. Wasn’t this voice a projection of
my wish? Intelligibility superimposed over random noises indigenous to tape? I decided now to settle this matter decisively.

  I consulted Eddie Flanders, an instructor at the Georgetown Institute of Languages, and a friend who had once been my patient. God knows what I told him, but I got him to listen to the voice of Ann. When he took off the earphones, I asked what he’d heard. He said, “Somebody’s talking. But it’s really so faint.” I said, “What are they saying? Can you make it out?” He said, “It sounds like my name.”

  I took the earphones away from Ed and ascertained he was listening to the proper section. Then I had him listen to it again. The result was the same. I was utterly baffled. “But it is a voice,” I asked him, “not just noise?” “No, it’s clearly a voice,” he said. “Isn’t it yours?” “You hear the voice of a man?” I asked. He said, “Yes. It sounds like you.” That more or less ended my research that day. But the week after that I came back. The institute maintained its own recording studio for the making of instructional tapes. They had powerful amplifiers and professional Ampex recorders. They also had a microphone that was installed in a soundproof booth. I prevailed upon Eddie to help me make a recording. I went into the booth and turned away from Eddie’s view while I made my little speech inviting the voices to manifest on tape. I also asked two direct questions, requesting as replies the words “affirmative” or “negative,” as these would be easier to detect on playback than merely a simple “yes” or “no.” Then I left the booth and closed the booth door behind me and signaled Eddie to turn on the tape and begin to record. He said, “What are we recording?” I said, “Molecules of air. It has to do with some studies of the brain that I’m doing.” Eddie seemed satisfied and we recorded at maximum gain and at a speed of 7½ i.p.s. After three minutes or so we stopped and listened to the playback at maximum gain. Something rather odd was on the tape. It wasn’t quite a voice. It was more of a gurgling sound and approximately ten times louder than any of the voices I thought I was hearing on my home recordings. Its approximate duration was seven seconds. We could hear nothing else on the rest of the tape. “Is that a normal sort of noise you get at times when you’re taping?” I asked. I was thinking of sound propagation by something within the equipment itself. Ed said no, that couldn’t be. He seemed genuinely puzzled and he told me that the sound should not be there. I suggested a defect in the tape. He thought possibly this was so. After minutes of replaying the sound, it seemed to have something of the quality of a voice. We couldn’t come close to making out its sense. We called it a day.

  I went on with my experiments at home and continued to hear the soft, fleet voices either answering my questions or taking my cue for topics of discussion, though I never again heard a voice like Ann’s. From all this, I formed the following impressions. I seemed to be in touch with personalities in some place or condition of transition. They were not clairvoyant. They did not know the future, for example, but their knowledge extended past the scope of my own. For instance, they could tell me the name of the duty nurse at any moment on some ward with which I had no contact or familiarity. They often had opinions that were contradictory to one another’s. Sometimes when I asked a factual question, such as the date of my mother’s birth, they gave several answers, none of them correct, and gave me the impression of perhaps not wanting to lose my interest. A few of their statements were flat-out lies of a troublemaking nature, or designed to upset me, I would think. I came to recognize these voices and ignored them, as I did with the occasional speaker of obscenities. Some voices asked for help, but when I asked—and many times—what it was that I could do to help them, the answer was usually something like “Happy. We’re fine.” Some asked me to pray for them, and still others said they prayed for me. I couldn’t help thinking of the Communion of Saints.

  A sense of humor was in evidence. Early on in the experiments I wore an old bathrobe one night as I was taping. It had gaudy-colored stripes and a very large tear around the upper right shoulder. I heard a voice saying, “Horse blanket.” Among the numerous occasions when I asked, “Who created the material universe?”, once a voice answered clearly, “Me.” And one night I’d invited an intern over to join me in an experiment. He’d expressed an interest in psychic phenomena and I felt comfortable discussing this with him. Through the evening, he told me that he couldn’t hear a thing, although, as usual, I did. I heard “What’s the use?” and “Why bother?” and “Go play Pac-Man,” among other things. I learned weeks later that the intern was terribly hard of hearing, but didn’t want it known.

  The voices helped me at times by suggesting other modes of recording. One was the use of a diode, and the other was to find a band of “white noise”—the space between stations—on a radio receiver and connect this to the tape recorder. The latter I never tried as here one would expect to receive and record actual radio voices from ordinary sources. The microphone was best when in a soundproof or extremely quiet room; but I finally opted for the use of the diode, for this ruled out misinterpretation of ordinary sounds from the surrounding environment.

  Sometimes the voices criticized my technical abilities. I would have a wrong button pushed in now and then and I was apt to get a voice saying, “You don’t know what you’re doing.” (That particular one sounded exasperated. I was tired and had been making miscues throughout the session.) Such responses were a part of what gave me the impression that I was dealing with personalities that were highly individual and quite ordinary. Just like people. They often said “Good night” toward the end of the tape, and then I’d find that I was tired and headed for bed. On occasion there were many different voices saying “Thanks” and “Thank you.” One curious thing. Once I asked if it was important that I try to promulgate this phenomenon, and the answer was a very clear “Negative.” That surprised me.

  In mid-1982 I decided to write to Colin Smythe, the man who had written the preface for Breakthrough. He’s the one who seemed so credible. I asked him a number of questions and he answered me immediately, referring me to a book of his own that he has written on the subject. (It’s called Carry On Talking.) In his letter he seemed reticent about the subject, as inevitably, especially in the London press, it had become overblown and somewhat lurid. People were claiming to have talked to John F. Kennedy and Freud and that sort of thing. But he told me something fascinating. A group of neurologists from Edinburgh, while in London for a medical conference, had looked him up and played for him tape recordings of their own. They had made them in the presence of people in coma or with incapacitating injuries which prevented them from speaking, and on the tapes were the voices of these patients.

  Not long after that, I took my portable Sony recorder to the hospital. It was two or three A.M. and I went to the disturbed ward where I made a recording of a patient who was severely catatonic, an amnesiac who’d been in Psychiatric for years. None of us had ever known his actual identity. The police had picked him up wandering M Street in a daze around 1970 or so, and he hadn’t said a single word since that time. Although maybe he has. In his room, I turned on the tape recorder after having asked him who he was and whether he could hear me. I let the tape run its entire length. Once back home, I played it back. The result was very odd. First of all, in that entire half hour of tape there were only two fragments of speech that I could hear. Ordinarily, the tape would be literally jammed with them, even though most might be just barely audible. This time—except for the two that I mentioned—the silence was exceptional and very strange. The other odd thing—well, I’d say “eerie” is probably more like it—was the voices on the tape. They were both the same person, a man, and I felt virtually certain that I was hearing the voice of the catatonic patient. I thought I heard it saying, “I’m beginning to remember.” That was the first thing. Then I heard what I presumed was the patient’s name in answer to the question that I’d asked about that; something close to “James Venamin,” as I recall. I didn’t like the sound of it for some reason and I never attempted this experimen
t again.

  Toward the end of the last year a decisive event occurred. Up until then I was still in doubt about what I was hearing. That rapidly changed. I traded in my tape recorder for a Revox with a built-in variable pitch control. I also got a band pass filter, which excluded all frequencies of sound that were not within the range of the human voice. On a Saturday a rather young man from the stereo shop delivered the new equipment and wired it up. When he had finished, I had a thought. The young have almost vastly better hearing than we, and this youngster’s business, after all, was sound. So I brought out the tape with the rather loud rumbling sound and I asked him to listen through the earphones. When he had finished, I asked him what he’d heard. He said immediately, “Somebody talking.” This took me by surprise. “Is the voice a man’s or a woman’s?” I asked him. He answered, “A man’s.” “Can you tell what he’s saying?” He said, “No, it’s too slow.” Another surprise. I was accustomed to the voices being too fast. “No, you mean too fast,” I said. “No, slow. At least I think it’s too slow.” He put the earphones back on, rewound the tape to the spot and then manually speeded up the tape with his hands as he listened to the playback. Then he took off the earphones and nodded. “Yeah, too slow.” He handed me the earphones. “Here, you listen,” he said, “and I’ll show you.” I put on the earphones and listened as he once again speeded up the tape. And I heard the distinct, loud voice of a man say the words, “Affirmative. Can you hear me?”