Things like that will change you. One of my brothers is a hard-headed, hands-on type of guy. He's not given to flights of fancy and has shown no real interest in unexplained phenomena. He's the type who likes to work with his hands rather than his head. Back in the early 90s, I was trying my luck with EVP or electronic voice phenomenon. If you record static off the radio or TV or even listen to the natural noise of a piece analog recording tape, you might hear voices said to be those of the dead. Sometimes they even say their names. I got interested in it after reading a book by Konstantin Raudive. I recorded a lot of static but never heard anything. I decided there was nothing to it. I explained it to my brother but he expressed very minimal interest.

About 4 years ago, he called me up and asked if I had ever experimented with taping static to hear voices of the dead. He seemed to remember me doing this. I said yes but that I never heard anything. He said he ran across an article on it and he and his wife tried it out. They recorded some wash off the TV and were listening back. They didn't notice anything. The next day, though, he came home from work and his wife told him there was one little instant in the tape where she thought she heard a voice saying, "Ferguson."

They listened to the tape again and at the designated spot, my brother said there did indeed seem to be a voice. He listened to it several times but thought is was saying "Jurgenson." It was saying something before that but he couldn't make it out. He kept playing it back and listening and he thought the voice was saying, "Friedrich Jurgenson." His wife typed the same into a search engine and they found out to their astonishment that Friedrich Jurgenson was the very founder of EVP! He was shocked out of his wits and called me on the phone and his voice was shaking and he was stuttering. I'd never heard him that way before. I know my brother and he wasn't faking. He couldn't have learned the name from me because I didn't even recognize the name. If he had said the voice announced he was Raudive, I would suspect that maybe he heard it from me some years before and it surfaced in his mind some years later (although I was pronouncing it wrong). I never mentioned Jurgenson to him and didn't even know who he was myself. I only had a passing interest in EVP which I promptly wrote off and this back around '90 or '91.

I saw my brother a couple of weeks later and asked him about it. He said he found an EVP forum online and wrote of his experience there. When he checked the next day, there were several responses all saying, "So you heard it too?"

He is now a firm believer in EVP and truly believes ol' Jurgenson's spirit was communicating to him. Now, I don't care if anyone believes his story although I've never known my brother to ever have any interest in this kind of thing before but he definitely believes it and it has changed him profoundly in that aspect. He even says he never would have believed it if someone else told him the same story he told me and would have written it off as overactive imagination. He not only now believes it but has an intense interest in the subject--something that never would have happened without an experience to motivate him.