Communications of the spirits of deceased people with the living via electronic tape recordings. Although he was not the first to discover these phenomena, also known as electronic voice phenomena (EVP), Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive popularized and devoted many years of research to them in the 1960s and 1970s.
A professor at the University of Riga, Latvia, and a newspaper editor as well as a psychologist, Raudive met Friedrich Jurgenson, a Russian-born Swedish painter and film producer, when Raudive moved to Sweden following the Soviet army’s invasion of Latvia. In 1959, Jurgenson accidentally came upon electronic voice phenomena when he recorded a Swedish finch and found on playback a message from his deceased mother. Intrigued, Raudive took up the study of this phenomenon and during the next several years made more than 100,000 recordings of spirit voices, many of the messages fragmentary or extremely difficult to understand as human speech. Some, however, seem to be clear examples of human voices speaking words, phrases, and sentences, sometimes meaningful, often cryptic.