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Spirit Boxes
- Thread starter Zetetikosfilm
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Ernie M
Graduate Poster
Schematics of Frank Sumption’s, “The Ghost Box”
Here’s a link to a 22 page PDF that has schematics with pictures and descriptions of Frank Sumption’s, “The Ghost Box”
Sumption created “The Ghost Box,” in 2002. It’s known by other names and is often called, “Frank’s Box.”
“Frank’s Box” was used by self-professed “psychic medium,” Chris Moon, for purported two-way communication with spirits in the Season 1 Episode 18, “The Asylum,” of the A&E TV show, Paranormal State.
Good articles about Frank’s Box:
Stollznow, Karen. “Frank’s Box: The Broken Radio.” SkepticalInquirer.org. January 28, 2010.
Scott, Dan. “Frank's Spirit Box” PacificParanormal.com n.d.
Here’s a link to a 22 page PDF that has schematics with pictures and descriptions of Frank Sumption’s, “The Ghost Box”
Sumption created “The Ghost Box,” in 2002. It’s known by other names and is often called, “Frank’s Box.”
“Frank’s Box” was used by self-professed “psychic medium,” Chris Moon, for purported two-way communication with spirits in the Season 1 Episode 18, “The Asylum,” of the A&E TV show, Paranormal State.
Good articles about Frank’s Box:
Stollznow, Karen. “Frank’s Box: The Broken Radio.” SkepticalInquirer.org. January 28, 2010.
Scott, Dan. “Frank's Spirit Box” PacificParanormal.com n.d.
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Zetetikosfilm
New Blood
Awesome! Thanks!
Zetetikosfilm
New Blood
I have very little electronics or signal processing background. I thought that having the infos could help me focus my researches and try to learn how it works. To be fair I have a very short history of electronics studies during high school (for a bout 2 years and it was mostly focused on automation), but it's a long time ago I'm not sure I can remember anything I learnt back then.
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Armitage72
Philosopher
You don't even need CB. When I was a kid, I had a radio controlled car that would sometimes pick up outside radio signals, and I would hear faint voices coming from the car.
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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OK, tanks. That is nice. The author of the paper admits to not being a physics person. However, I am, so let me run through it.
Initial text:
The author assumes that spirits exist and can communicate through electronic devices. He in no way questions his own assumption.
The little technical content in this text is technobabble. Of course, quantum mechanics are referenced.
Circuitry:
The design is amateurish but presumably functional. The idea is to create a randomly varying voltage signal and feed it to a radio tuner in order to make it randomly scan a radio broadcast band.
Such an approach will of course result in various noise, snips of voices, music and the like to be received.
The box:
Presumably the above does not appear mysterious enough, so the signal is fed to a speaker enclosed in a box, a "resonance field", and recorded with a microphone. I assume the resultant booming character of the sound makes it more "spiritual".
That's it: Create a lot of random sounds and interpret them as you please.
Short version: Rubbish.
Hans
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Fair enough. The intent of the question is to calibrate the answers so that they're helpful to your level of knowledge, not to question your intelligence. I just wanted to make that clear. That's so we don't bore you with details you already know, or use technical terms that don't make sense to you.
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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Ah, yes. A link to what's inside has already been posted.
Technically it works by tuning a radio receiver to a random series of wavelenghts. (Equal to twiddling the tuning knob around)
The documentation provided only mentions AM, but any frequency band could be scanned.
Seems there are various set-ups, but it would not make sense (due to band-width considerations) to scan faster than a few Hertz.
The construction shown in the link does not stay on a single frequency, it sweeps around constantly.
I have no idea which are popular. It is not something you can get off the shelf, seems people build their own.
Hans
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Seems like one could make a decent rural neo-noir out of a story about a headless trucker, bent on revenge.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there's been a Supernatural episode along those lines.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Who is your intended audience for these evidences and proofs?
Senex
Philosopher
Technically shmechnickly, those radios are full of naughty stories. One just needs to listen.
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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As others say, fair enough. Actually, you need not understand the details. This is obviously what you could call a "create noise and interpret it at your will" system. They are quite common in alternative ... well, really ... woo.
That is, obviously, not to say that spirits might not exist and somehow modulate noise into messages, just that considerably simpler explanations exist. Pareidolia, cherry-picking, wishful thinking, etc.
A scientific approach to this is difficult, because the claim is basically non-falsifiable. You can create control cases, various other things, but one could always claim that spirits, being sentient and supernatural, might somehow foil it.
Hans
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Well, he does if he's trying to debunk a claim that spirit boxes succeed in revealing ghost communications, and his rebuttal affirmatively claims that the sounds are produced by a combination of electromagnetic ambient signals and the electronic properties of the device. That requires either the knowledge needed to obtain evidence of how that occurs, or the willingness to cite to the authority one has relied upon.
Of course if one simply wants to satisfy one's own curiosity, one can set his own standard of proof and consult whatever sources one can find.
And it's quite common to involve other senses in a speculative fashion. Ghosts look a strange way, but only in grainy photographs manipulated to "enhance" the image. Ghosts smell funny. Ghosts make your skin crawl, or make you feel cold. Ghosts seem tailor-made to play on the uncertainties of nearly all human sensation. People try to make these sound scientific by adding some apparatus that is said either to reveal what cannot be naturally sensed, or to eliminate interference so that the natural senses can detect it.
And I've always believed this is where fringe claimants and skeptics part ways philosophically. The claimant wants to say you can't reasonably limit the behavior of something whose properties you can only speculate about. Therefore anything goes. The skeptic wants to say that's basically just Sagan's invisible pink dragon and conclude that it makes no sense to reason about the existence of things whose testable properties you have no idea about. The same dismissal applies to gods, spirits, and space aliens.
But of course "ghost" is not historically such an open-ended concept. Today we postulate the existence of ghosts because hundreds of years ago people postulated the existence of ghosts, and they had a reasonably tenable idea of what was meant by that word. Even across many cultures and religions, we find a surprising degree of congruence in the folklore. So to suggest we can't pin ghosts down to any testable phenomenology because we don't know what ghosts are supposed to be seems a little desperate.
The goal seems to be to get that all-important certificate that reads, "Scientifically undebunkable." Well, sure, if that looks good on your wall. But science can surely show, as you note when referring to parsimony, that what's being attributed speculatively to ghosts can be much more easily explained by simpler means.