By Guest Contributor Helen Creighton
Published in the early 1980s, The Unexplained – Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time was a magazine perfectly designed to impress the young and credulous mind. It looked grown-up and vaguely ‘scientific’, although it was the absolute opposite. It avoided crass, splashy headlines and sensationalism for lengthy, scholarly-looking articles, laden with the kinds of anecdotes from far-flung parts of the globe (OK, the USA) that suggested a good deal of journalistic research (as opposed to pure fantasy and urban myth) had gone into their writing. Best still, it was priced at a whole 60p an issue!
The Unexplained set out to cover every aspect of the paranormal and the mysterious – and as such, its range was wide in scope. Some subjects – such as alien visitation and UFOs, simply fascinated. UFOs and aliens – at least until Whitley Strieber put out his book Communion and the still ludicrously credulous and eager-for-novelty teenage me ate it up with saucer-eyes and an endearing lack of scepticism – were fun! Other subjects, such as ESP, inspired us to conduct our own fruitless experiments using playing cards and drawing books in the hopes that we too were psychic and special (we weren’t). An issue devoted to the alleged true phenomena that is Spontaneous Human Combustion, complete with gritty-looking crime scene photos, made me curious but rather uneasy…
Others still put the absolute frighteners on us (Okay, me) in a way that still lingers to this day. I’m talking about that Voices From the Dead record.
Voices From the Dead was a lovely lime green flexi-disc that came free with an issue of Unexplained in the early 1980s. A little research now tells me the original recording was made by one Konstantin Raudive and included with his 1971 book ‘Breakthrough – An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead’. The idea was that Mr. Raudive had recorded the voices of dead people, including a few famous ones such as Winston Churchill, using super-special, cutting edge, high frequency recording equipment.
Of course he had. Anyway, at the time I couldn’t wait to hear such a miraculous recording. I grabbed my sister for the inaugural broadcast, set the disc on the turntable (a huge early 60s thing that hummed, buzzed and slowly overheated into uselessness on a regular basis, lending a certain character to the process of playing our vinyls that nothing has ever quite matched since) and we set the needle down. Within a couple of minutes I had run from the room, hands pressed over my ears, shrieking, “Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!”
It turned out that the recording comprised a mixture of horrible static white noise with bursts of eerie, scratchy voices, moving about the sound picture in a way that immediately burrowed its way past all my rational filters into whichever part of the brain doles out excruciating, adrenaline-soaked fear. The stentorian, BBC tones of the presenters lent everything an air of respectability and seriousness that made it all utterly convincing and unquestionably real to me. It gave me a fear of strange, disembodied voices that last for a very long time.
Today, via the internet and an ever more advanced array of sound recording technology, we live in a world where the dead can speak to us via EVP – or ‘Electronic Voice Phenomena’ – a phenomenon which has a dedicated base of believers, all of whom can talk to one another and share their ‘evidence’ on a whole host of websites. It wasn’t always the case – and as creepy as some of the EVP recordings can surely be, they have nothing on the singular experience of the Voices From the Dead vinyl.
Anyway, I wouldn’t go downstairs in the dark at night for years without thinking of that record. If you’re unacquainted, check out a sample of the recording below…