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Diana Espirito Santo

Instituto de Sociologia, Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de
Chile, Chile

Abstract
In this article I look at Chilean paranormal investigators in the capital—Santiago—and
their apparatuses. I argue that these recording devices appear somehow as “vibrant”
things, but they work in conjunction with others creating articulate living worlds. The
first argument is that these articulations are made salient through sonic atmospheres—
universes of sound that envelope a particular temporal moment, and that escape any
single person’s volition or control. These atmospheres create sonic reverberations, in
effect, momentary cosmologies, that bend, curve, and extend into the lives of the
investigators that engage with them. My second argument is that these sonic atmos-
pheres create worlds that are not taken for granted but subject to controversy, varying
interpretations and sometimes, stabilizing concordances, and that need to
be “transduced”.

Keywords
Paranormal investigation, sonic atmospheres, apparatuses, vital matter, hauntings

Introduction: Ghostboxes
The first time I witnessed a working “Ghostbox”—one of paranormal investiga-
tion’s most primordial handheld devices of psicofon
ıa (electronic voice phenomena,
from here on, EVP)—was during a “Paranormal Lab” tour of an ex-psychiatric

Corresponding author:
Diana Espirito Santo, Instituto de Sociologia, Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de Chile, Vicu~
na MacKenna 4860,
Macul, Santiago, Chile.
Email: gimmefish@yahoo.com
2 Ethnography 0(0)

institution in Santiago, one Halloween. Ghost or Spiritboxes work by providing

the spirit world with white noise with which to confection its communicative
impulses. They are generally modified and portable AM/FM radios (or mobile
phone applications) that scan from one channel to the next with such speed that
they produce only bite-sized pieces of sound fractions of seconds long—incompre-
hensible to the listener. Researchers ask questions and they believe that these audio
remnants are manipulated by otherworldly spirits to fashion words, audible after
the fact (and sometimes in real-time) through voice recorders and reproducers.
Sentences are generally short, sometimes ungrammatical—more often communi-
cations comprise of single words or short sentences (Noory and Guiley, 2011).
Psicofon
ıa was to be one of the central pieces of the “Paranormal Lab” tour,
and it will be fundamental to the argument I will develop. In this article I take a
closer look at the myriad relations it implies. I argue from a perspective that sees its
sonic potential as a powerful motile force—as both enabling and bringing together
a cosmology of actants in movement. This movement in turn creates knowledge-
potential. This is an altogether different argument to one that underlines the social
construction of knowledge, because it privileges motility (see Holbraad, 2012)—the
idea that something is defined by its movement, trajectory, and multiplicity rather
than by its essence—as the grounding of paranormal experience.
The analysis of the social construction of “other realities” has seen resurgence in
an anthropology of a more sociological bent (cf. Baker and Bader, 2014; Berger
and Luckmann, 1966; Eaton, 2015, 2019). These authors combine Berger and
Luckmann’s (1966) precept of investigating “processes by which any body ‘of
knowledge’ comes to be socially established as a ‘reality’” (3) and offer up different
conceptual takes on how the “reality” of the ephemeral is constructed, contested,
and established, in this case through narrative analysis of how paranormal inves-
tigators negotiate their accounts (Eaton, 2019). However, the social construction
of something in these accounts is always human, first and foremost. And second of
all, it is seen as immanently static: persons, on the one hand, mediating with
technologies on the other. What we need here, I argue following Bruno Latour
(1999), is a “practical metaphysics,” which grants “ontology back to nonhuman
entities” (287), and understands technological artifacts and the spirits they purport
to capture in the context of their practical material engagement, as transformative
and fluid as this is, that is as bringing into existence a particular momentary and
plastic reality. This engagement, in terms of practices of psicofon
ıa, is premised on
sound, specifically, voice. But it is not a voice that stands for an “interiorized self”
(Taylor, 1989). Indeed, the voice as a sonic and material phenomenon in Western
metaphysical traditions has been regarded, simplistically, as a “guarantor of truth
and self-presence” (Weidman, 2014: 39), a project central to Euro-American con-
cepts of modernity. Here, I argue, in line with Patrick Eisenlohr (2018), that we are
best off thinking in terms of “sonic atmospheres,” which understands “vocal sound
as a force that is socially meaningful but at the same time often appears ineffable in
the way it generates its effects” (35).
Espirito Santo 3

There is a long history in spiritualist notions of the ethereal space and the voices
from its void, captured through devices such as radio and its transmissions
(Sconce, 2000). In the 19th century, otherworldly beings made their presence
known in séances through physical manifestations, such as tables turning, or
raps, ectoplasm, and disembodied voices (Braude, 2001). But definitions of tech-
nologies of varying kinds were also infused with imaginaries of transmission that
bordered on the miraculous, or at the very least, the vitalist. The voice remained as
a trope, for instance, in machines envisioned in the late 19th and early 20th century
by certain scientists to capture the voices of spirits, or indeed, telepathic waves
(Natale, 2011; Noakes, 2016). In this article, I argue that in Chile some of these
preoccupations with the “aliveness” of things saturate the practices of paranormal
researchers. I argue that psicofon
ıa excites sonic atmospheres in which those pre-
sent become immersed momentarily; and as such, intervene in otherwise dark, and
unknowable realities, which then intervene back. These atmospheres do not simply
relate to voices themselves, but to the “noise” out of which they emerge, and which
are a premise of successful electronic voice phenomena. In these atmospheres,
voices and stories are gleaned, namely through the techno-spiritual “ecologies”
(Coeckelbergh, 2013) these apparatuses afford practitioners.
The “Ghost Lab” tour took place in what was a non-descript, dusty, building in
an area of Santiago called Franklin, up the road from the historic matadero,
butcherhouse. The ex-Instituto Sanitas had been a pharmaceutical laboratory,
abandoned in the 1980s. It is composed of a series of buildings on both sides of
an ample, desolate courtyard. The glass on the windows of each floor is jagged and
broken, some missing, only darkness behind. As Cesar Parra told us—the master-
mind of the tour, author, and a popular television and radio personality in his late
40s—the building has a dark past.
The narrative of the tour went something like this: before it was converted into a
bona-fide laboratory, the Instituto—called Sanat
orio Fernandez—was a psychiat-
ric hospital for “undesirables,” according to César, more or less in the years
between 1920 and 1940. Besides the mentally ill, adolescents and young adults
with certain “vices” were left at the care of the Sanatorium: homosexuals, perhaps
alcoholic, “anti-social” in some form. Through exhaustive research, that included
work with spirit mediums and in historical archives, César and his team
“discovered” that the doctor in charge was a highly conservative Catholic who
would be both Senator and Minister of Health in the 1930s. However, his team of
pathologists performed monstrous experiments on patients, namely in a room we
visited on the top floor called Sala de Anatom
ıa Patol
ogica. According to César,
doctors were left to their own designs—there were no state regulations or oversight
of the Sanatorium. Many patients were raped, mutilated, tortured, had organs cut
out, and committed suicide. After the mediums alerted César to these “facts,” he
went to the archives to discover its story in detail and translate it into a horror
script for a successful ghost tour. It is both unclear to me, and irrelevant to the
points made in this paper, how much of this script corresponds to historical facts.
4 Ethnography 0(0)

The tour commenced at about 1:30 in the morning and involved crossing the
thresholds between the buildings, walking up stairs, exploring rooms, and most
importantly, engaging with paranormal investigation technology. César had asked
a group of four youngsters to install a Ghostbox application on their smartphone.
He now asked them to take out their phones, newly equipped with a noise-
generating device. He held a proper Ghostbox in his right hand, and in his left
another device, connected by Bluetooth that recorded the sounds and was able to
play them back at various slower speeds. For about 15 minutes or so, in the dead
silence of an abandoned building, all 20 or so of us huddled around Cesar and the
four youngsters, while their machines spewed a constant, unrecognizable “noise”—
snippets, fractions of radio sounds, and split second voices—into the air. “Who is
here?” César asked, raising his voice. “Is it the spirit of the boy who committed
suicide?” “Do you like our company?” “Is there some message you want to pass to
us?” “Is there someone here you are connected to, or attracted to?” And so on.
The devices were stopped, and the recorder played back the sounds, at half speed.
The interviewers sounded like monsters, voices grave and deep, prolonging their
words. We all listened attentively to the results. “Denis,” said a voice, audibly on
the recorder. Another voice said, “there are cuts” and “I love you,” in Spanish.
Someone speculated it could relate to the suicide attempts and love affairs between
patients. And yet another voice, curt, feminine: “I take care of my patients.” César
had a trained ear; he would hear things first, draw attention to them. Later on, in
the Pathology room, where we did our second session of psicofon
ıa, the results
were more ominous, and the mood changed. Denis reappeared, this time with a
more demonic voice; we heard him laugh, contemptuously. Finally, another voice:
“go away” (vayánse).
Chile was no stranger to spiritism, imported through coastal cities and the
capital. Luminaries of Chilean history were practicing spiritists, renowned doctors,
engineers, and politicians. Chile was also not immune to the development of para-
psychological interests. In the 1960s, a psychiatrist from the University of Chile,
Brenio Onetto, founded the Chilean Society for Parapsychology, and in 1976 he
founded, along with Carlos Mora, a laboratory and study group based at the
Psychology Department of the same university (Escobar, 2010). This center was
closed in 1998 with the death of Onetto, and while there has been no heir to Chile’s
experimental parapsychological legacy, since the explosion of the Internet in the
late 1990s, and early 2000s, something new has been on the horizon. Media and
digital technology has allowed ghosts, once unspoken of in conservative Catholic
Chile, to “diffract” and form unexpected “assemblages” with the public (Beliso-De
Jes
us, 2015). Since the late 1990s, Chilean public television channels, such as Canal
13, Mega, and TVN, have all aired programs exploring the paranormal either
through case “reconstruction” programs, or in the case of “Ps
ıquicos,” through
reality-television. For the first time in Chilean history, the possibility of the para-
normal was being broadcast to the nation—it was not limited to a professional or
social elite practicing spiritualism in their homes.
Espirito Santo 5

Paranormal investigators and ghost tour guides such as César see themselves as
intervening in, and not simply recording, their “field.” Thus, this is no static
“occulture” that garners “evidence” in different locales of historical interest for
alleged hauntings, such as proposed by Marc Eaton (2019) in his analysis of the
interpretative processes of a ghost hunting team. Eaton understands paranormal
investigators as drawing upon “cultural knowledge, place-based meanings, and
personal experiences” (2019: 156) to reach conclusions coherent with the group’s
“ideoculture.” But in this ethnographic case, “reality” as a single ontological prop-
erty of the occult landscape is felt and understood ambiguously, and multiply, by
my interlocutors.
The investigators and their material apparatuses are understood as somehow
ontologically entangled with the emergence of the “other side” (spirits of the dead)
in myriad, porous, often ambiguous ways. I will use concepts inspired by “new
materialism” (Coole and Frost, 2010) to understand this “affecting” dynamic,
which can often take noxious turns for investigators. Psicofon
ıa is a technology
whose ontological dangers—of psychological obsession, illness, even death—are
routinely evoked by the Chilean experts who work them. Agency, with apparatuses
such as the Ghostbox, is not the property of single persons but “confederate”
(Bennett, 2010: 32), distributed. But agency as a single property of the “apparatus”
also needs to be rethought. Rather, while there is an “immanent vitality” (Coole
and Frost, 2010: 8) to matter, and a need to create new concepts from it anew, we
need to understand how this “matter” can also be a momentary sonic or electric
wave, a person’s perceptive and subjective disposition, the shapes and forms of the
environment around it, and the affective atmospheres it all engenders. It is, in this
particular ethnography, the relationships between material components (taken in a
broad sense)—the fact that “materialities work in concert” (Abrahamsson et al.,
2015: 14, my emphasis)—that lend the paranormal its momentary “aliveness.”
The concept of inert, cold, instrumentalist technology here merits particular
inspection. Spirit recorders appear somehow as “vibrant” things, but they work
in conjunction with others creating articulate living worlds. The first argument is
that these articulations are made salient through sonic atmospheres—they are not
just a product of my interlocutors’ vitalist concepts but of universes of sound that
envelope a particular temporal moment, and that escape any single person’s voli-
tion or control. Atmospheres are not bound to poles of objective or subjective, or
to a particular person or object. These atmospheres create sonic reverberations, in
effect, momentary cosmologies, that are essentially indeterminate (see Anderson,
2009), which then need extrapolation, and collective verification, what Webb
Keane (2013) and Stefan Helmreich (2007) have called “transduction.” My
second argument is therefore that these sonic atmospheres create words—and
contexts for words—that are not taken for granted but subject to controversy,
varying interpretations and sometimes, stabilizing concordances (Latour, 2005).
Santiago’s community of paranormal investigators engage in the piecemeal assem-
bly of a “reality” that is not understood as an immediately objective natural world,
6 Ethnography 0(0)

but whose transitory nature is resultant of—and accessible only via—myriad

knowledge and perceptual relations.

EVP, voices from the void and sonic atmospheres

“Noise,” in paranormal investigation, can be compared as a concept to the spir-
itualist “ether” of the 19th century, the “channel” or medium through which spirits
found their voices (Manning, 2018). This entire era seems permeated with concerns
for the powers of communications through what was thought of as invisible fluids.
Spiritualism essentially gave notions of “discorporative electronic liberation”
(Sconce, 2000: 27) a free reign. Spiritualist séances were highly democratic affairs,
thought of as “transparent” to all spirits, but the “channels” through which con-
tact was established, “the mere existence of the channel permitting contact with
other worlds, was more interesting than the message content” (Manning, 2018: 68).
Mediums themselves were conceptualized as “radios” of sorts. Indeed, Noakes
(2016) argues that the séance, which drew technological metaphors, was conceived
as means of long-distance communication, no different to the telegraph. Robert
Cox (2003) also explains that antebellum spiritualists in the United States privileged
transparency, as well as progress and sympathy in their séances. This means, accord-
ing to Cox (2003), that “Spiritualist attention to technological and scientific produc-
tions was highly selective”—laying upon, for instance, communications and travel
technologies (87). It is no wonder the telegraph was to become such a trope for the
spiritualist age, as well as its notions of progress and its “limitless distances” (Stolow,
2009: 87): “telegraphy served not only as a description of communication between
mortal and spirit but as a harbinger of things to come” (Cox, 2003: 87–88).
But, as Darryl Caterine (2014) argues, spiritualists also “spiritualized tech-
nology.” Electricity came to be seen in sublime terms. Both Andrew Jackson
Davis and John Spear either envisioned or built machines that could “alchemically”
transform coarser into “finer” matter (2014: 380). Electricity “was the very principle
of motion itself, an immanent dynamism that raised all matter to higher states”
(2014: 378). This notion of electricity in particular denies historical versions of spir-
itualism and psychical research whereby these aim at purely “scientific” readings of
the spirit or invisible world. Indeed, a whole cosmology of the body and its senses
emerged from analogical associations between technologies and spirits. While
Stolow focuses on the more mechanical metaphors of the medium’s body as a
“complex of nervous pathways and ‘cerebral batteries’ that connected the material
and the immaterial” (2009: 90), Cox deals with an “unveiling of new senses” (2003:
89). Sympathy, another spiritualist principle, was more than electricity—it was a
“cosmological” or “divine” constant (2003: 89). One of my arguments in this article
is that this attitude toward new technologies and their underlying forces—electricity,
for instance—is not just about a specific imaginary of transmission, whereby the
imagination is endowed with a capacity to shape the paranormal, but a kind of
ontological fluidity and causality that occurs between machines, the world of
people and the world of the dead. Indeed, some of the main developers of 20th
Espirito Santo 7

century electronic voice phenomena believed that subtler forces were involved in
spirit communication through instruments.
Will O’Neil, for example, built a machine in the 1970s for registering the voices
of the beyond (called Spiricom), with the help of a dead U.S. Army engineer called
Dr Mueller, whose design specifications would come in conversations through the
very machine he was constructing (Bander, 1973; Sconce, 2000). Dr Mueller would
suggest modifications to the Spiricom frequencies for better reception. Another
spirit that came through, Doc Nick, included technical advice on switching from
white noise, preferred by most EVP researchers at the time, to audio frequencies,
which he “could use for projecting his ‘astral’ vocal cords” (Noory and Guiley,
2011: 155). However, after O’Neil’s death all evidence of the voices recorded from
Dr Mueller faded. His partner and financier, the industrialist George Meek, attrib-
uted O’Neill’s success to his mediumistic abilities, which meant that often only he
heard the voices (Baruss, 2001). Indeed, according to Noory and Guiley (2011:
150), Meek sought O’Neil out to experiment with EVP because he believed O’Neil
had the power to “produce ectoplasmic materializations.”
Psicofon
ıa or EVP is by definition concerned with a particular form of appre-
hending, but also performing soundscapes. With its pioneers, it was often invol-
untary. Swedish musician and painter Friedrich Jürgenson was recording the songs
of birds in a field outside Stockholm in the late 1950s when he involuntarily cap-
tured a voice—heard only when later playing back the tape—saying, “Go to sleep
Margarette.” Margarette had been the secretary of a close friend whose illness and
death had impacted strongly on Jürgenson. The Voices from Space was published
in 1964 to enormous public appeal. Other researchers had more conscious aspira-
tions in the field of electronic voice phenomena. Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian
professor of psychology, amassed more than 100,000 recordings with anomalous
voices and would regularly invite random people to interpret them. Jeffrey Sconce
tells us that over the course of his research, Raudive found the medium of radio to
be the favored form of contact: the radio voices “differ from microphone-voices in
that their pronunciation is clearer and their messages (. . .) have more meaning”
(Raudive, 1971: 24, in Sconce, 2000: 86). Raudive, in contrast to Jürgenson, was
able to communicate with the invisibles in real-time, not just in playback form. He
even claimed some groups of spirits operate their own stations; he made frequent
contact with two such stations—“Studio Kelpe” and “Radio Peter” (Sconce,
2000: 86).
A concern with the excessive possibilities of technology permeates the field of
paranormal investigation in Chile. I argue that these possibilities are afforded by
the ontologies of sound itself and its movement—by sonic motility. The appara-
tuses with which paranormal investigators work have a sort of “thing-power”
(Bennett, 2010: xvi), which “gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary,
man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of inde-
pendence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.”
These gadgets are not simply materials that people use for certain ends: they
have effects beyond their materiality. But this is not just due to the “thing-power”
8 Ethnography 0(0)

of the applications or machines. We have to dig deeper into an understanding of

how sonic atmospheres create potentials for, or assemblages of knowledge.
In an article on the “auditory geographies” of vocal utterances, particular by
politicians in Australia, Anja Kanngieser (2012) argues that there is a “co-creation
of space and sound” (337). She says: “The voice, in its expression of affective and
ethico-political forces, creates worlds” (ibid). This has to do, among other factors,
with vocal inflections, accents, as well the specific content of the discourse in
question. By the same token, Weidman (2014) suggests that, “anthropology
should ask where and when “voice” becomes a salient metaphor and what is at
stake in it” (38). She highlights the materiality of the voice and its mediating
technologies (Weidman, 2014: 40–41). “Technologies have powerful but culturally
specific effects, bringing into being new kinds of subjects, new modes of commu-
nication, new audiences and publics, and new notions of voice as a personal and
collective agency” (Weidman, 2014: 42). FM radio, she says, helped to bring about
“direct speech” (Weidman, 2014). But this emphasis on the motivations of the
voice, be it in a political context or through radio, begs several questions.
In relation to radio, for instance, Bessire and Fisher (2013) argue that, “radio is
an action potential that expands the very parameters of the being-in-the-world it
presumably channels” (365). In their view, we are best off not thinking of the
homogenizing potential of radio voices, but of “radio fields” (Bessire and
Fisher, 2013: 366), which are always, although not only, “ontological fields.”
Indeed, what happens when the modified radio device, such as the Ghostbox, is
used to open up communicative possibilities to worlds beyond the human, to a
plurality of voices that are constructed from the “noise” of the radio? Here, what
Bessire and Fisher (2013) say is the “conflation of media and ontology” (365)
occurs on a practical basis in the manipulation of the devices themselves, with
unpredictable results. Indeed, they say that what distinguishes much recent work
on radio is an empirical emphasis on sound (Bessire and Fisher, 2013: 370).
Eisenlohr (2018: 34), on the other hand, explores his ethnography of devotional
Islamic practices in the Mauritius to shift away from a focus on the body as the site
where the voices originates, to one that can take into consideration “the felt-body”
(35). The felt-body, he says, “transcends the limits of the material body as it is
commonly conceived and thereby helps to do justice to sound as a material phe-
nomena” (Eisenlohr, 2018). Sonic phenomena intermingle with human bodies,
according to Eisenlohr (2018); thus, a concept of “sonic atmospheres” does
better justice to the recitation of devotional poetry, as the performance of
poetry by reciters combines “their personal agency with those of divinely inspired
saints” (37). Listeners of properly recited poetry can feel the sensations of touch
and vibrating movement. Thus, the discursive aspects of the recitation are not
enough to account for this ontological entanglement and for its “tangible effects”
upon listeners (Eisenlohr, 2018). More interestingly for our purposes is that
Eisenlohr (2018) suggests that, “Unlike the notion of soundscape, which in its
analogy to landscape suggests a three-dimensional auditory space that a listener
Espirito Santo 9

is confronted with, an analytic of atmospheres attends to the intermingling of

sound and the felt-body” (39).
In the next two sections, I will analyze what I call sonic motility, the movement
of sound in two main ways. First, I show, with Eisenlohr (2018), that sonic atmos-
pheres in EVP are “energetic flows” (51) that essentially ontologically affect the
investigators that hear them. This action of listening is clearly not just represen-
tational, nor epistemological, nor is it passive. Hearing is a collective pursuit, but
also one that can have several levels of depth, with corresponding effects. And it is
also a highly subjective action. A sub-argument here is that the inert “materiality”
of the device evaporates with an examination of these effects. Psicofon
ıa contacts
create atmospheres that reproduce themselves in myriad forms and resonate in
investigators’ lives. Second, I delve into ethnographic data of my own field inves-
tigations of the paranormal (with a group) to show that “auditory immersion”
(2007), which Helmreich has argued characterizes his descent into the depth of the
sea in a submarine (called Alvin), always calls for a transductive impulse as well,
one that can translate between worlds of sound. In psicofon
ıa this requires the
consensus work of a collective of people.

The affectations of sound

Helmreich (2007) describes his “immersion” in the culture of deep-sea oceanogra-
phers. Inside the seven-foot diameter of Alvin, a well-known research submarine,
Helmreich (2007) describes the “metallic and muffled pings of distant sonar
devices,” echoes of telephone voices from the mother ship, the quiet music—all
of which contribute to a “feeling of immersion” (621). He continues: “Positioned in
the sub, our bodies are threaded into a media ecology of communication and
control, networked into a semiotic order than extends, modulates, and conditions
our senses” (622). What I would like to take from this forceful piece is Helmreich’s
(2007) understanding of his “descent into liquid” (623), an auditory immersion, in
which it also takes “technical and cultural translation to carve out a soundscape
for humans out of the subaqueous milieu” (624). We can begin with this metaphor
of liquid, or of being in it. In my ethnography, the force of the electronic voice
phenomena sample clearly does not end at the borders of the recording. There is a
continual reverberation reminiscent of the feeling of being underwater, caught in a
liquid web that extends its tentacles and that suspends one in a particular atmo-
sphere. The sonic atmospheric “immersion” to which Helmreich refers spills over
from the point of contact with the sample itself. It is less that, according to tech-
nophobe discourses, technology “goes out of control,” but that we must recon-
ceptualize EVP as somehow a component of a larger “techno-human ecology”
(Coeckelbergh, 2013: 58) in which nonhuman entities come into play as actants.
The first part of this argument has to do with the user’s interface or relation
with the technology. For instance, in Noory and Guiley’s book on EVP, Talking to
the Dead (2011), Guiley interviewed Ron Ricketts, an electronics specialist turned
paranormal investigator who designed and built a smaller version of the
10 Ethnography 0(0)

Ghostbox—called a MiniBox. He claims that after years of immersion in spirit

communications he has understood that there are three things at work in inter-
preting the voices: the first is wishful thinking—people hearing what they want to
hear; the second is hearing voices that are not part of the broadcast. But the third is
more interesting: according to Ricketts, “You hear the box and you get a message
directly in your head that is not audible but is impressed in your mind. This
happens after you’ve been using the box a long time and you’re in tune with it”
(Ricketts, quoted in Noory and Guiley, 2011: 50). The MiniBox becomes an exten-
sion of its user, so to speak. This is not out of character for Chilean paranormalists
either. Indeed, it is not just the case that certain machines work with certain users
and not others, but that experts, such as César, discussed above, tend to “hear”
things faster, and more accurately, than novices, pointing the way for others.
According to him, you need to get “to the bottom” of all the digital “noise” in
order to really hear voices. They come below. Sometimes they speak only to him. In
an interview with me in 2016, he confessed that he does not know how real the
voices are: whether they are not an epiphenomenological “eruption” of the collec-
tive at play, caused, in no small part by the “theatre” of his tour productions.
In Rickett’s case, sound takes on a different character than the purely audible: it
becomes a property of the mind. In César’s case, the machine may already be part
of his perceptive apparatus—he hears things easily, whether or not they are actu-
ally there to be heard. Voices, in both these examples, are clearly more than simply
materialized sonorous registers for specific dead. They emerge from a dynamic
formation of human and machine that takes into account responsivity as key to
relationality. Indeed, the “unseen” is constituted by a permeable layer of entities
and their appearances, responsive to, but not reflective of, the methods and even
feelings of investigators.
In what Kathleen Stewart (2011) calls “atmospheric attunements” (445), “things
matter not because of how they are represented but because they have qualities,
rhythms, forces, relations, and movements.” Atmospheres are compositional pro-
cesses, she says. But my argument is that atmospheres do not just hang but are
movement as well. It is in this transforming movement that voices are gleaned, but
in which intrusion or danger is also understood. This is the second part of my
argument in this section. Martin Holbraad (2012) has taken “motility” as his pri-
mary conceptual trope in his ethnography of Ifá diviners in Cuba (babalawos) and
its theoretical dividends. According to Holbraad (2012), “a motile ontology is
fundamental to babalawos’ efforts in eliciting divinities into immanence through
the ritual of divination” (147). Diviners must move the gods into becoming imma-
nent in their divination boards. But the very definition of the markings on the
board, as well as of the deities themselves, is also motile. Cosmology itself is motile
(Holbraad, 2012: 153), with gods having many different versions of themselves,
their myths, and their paths. I suggest here that the spirits contacted through
psicofon
ıa—or rather, the sound that is produced—are also defined through
their ability to be other to themselves, and also, to reproduce themselves, gain
depth, bend, and extend beyond the scope of the actual recordings into scenarios of
Espirito Santo 11

everyday life. If these are sonic atmospheres, then they are endowed with the
capacity of dynamically and metamorphically intermingle with (or even immerse
with) the “felt-bodies” and psyches of those who elicit them, even in a post-
recording setting. Take the following examples.
Fernando Navarro, a high-school history teacher in his mid 30s who has been a
paranormal investigator for 15 odd years, and whom I met in his workshop on
paranormal investigation, says that,

there is a danger in becoming obsessed with the voices. Even when you’re hearing
things again, don’t edit for more than an hour. You always hear new things, and they
will get inside your head. Always be mistrustful. The paranormal always tries to gain
your trust.

Fernando has an investigative group called Miedo Maestro (Master Fear). He is an

expert on the apparatuses paranormal researchers tend to use. But he is also highly
wary of them. In the old days he used to go on investigation expeditions irrespec-
tive of his physical state. However, he would start seeing things—silhouettes, and
he would get intimidating messages through psicofon
ıa. When he tried too hard to
listen to the recordings, he would hear entities on various occasions threaten to kill
his daughter. “You have to try not to be obsessed with the voices,” he repeats.
“Only investigate when you feel strong, and don’t analyze the material straight
away. Leave it for a couple of days. And when you do analyze it, archive it and
leave it. Don’t keep thinking about it.” The sonic here has force, depth, sometimes
unpredictably. According to Fernando, you “let in” this force at your own
expense. And its force is not limited to the act of registering the voices, but also
to editing them, of being around them in some form.
A few years ago he was contacted by the Principal, as well as some of the nuns,
of a Catholic school in Santiago. There was a 12-year-old boy who was manifesting
strange behavior and they suspected something out of the norm was occurring.
From an extrovert he became an extreme introvert, and he began to write pages of
what appeared to be symbols, ancient ones. Fernando later had them looked at by
an expert and they were Phoenician, a language long lost before Christ. He was
also scratched on his body. Fernando and his wife Valeska did a psicofon
ıa at the
boy’s house, inside a closet, where the boy sometimes sat. They showed us the clip,
and it sounded like grunting and scratching, and knocking aggressively on the
door. A grave sounding voice, of an older man, spoke, clearly, but in a language
no one could comprehend. Around about the time when the couple was puzzling
over the EVP and the mysterious man on it, odd things began to occur in
Fernando’s life. He says that he kept seeing the boy in random places—in
public transports, on the street. Electric equipment started to malfunction in his
house: his computer broke down, the electricity grid collapsed, the Internet
stopped working. This, according to Fernando, was mostly because of their obses-
sion with the psicofon
ıa.
12 Ethnography 0(0)

The danger of putting in motion the Ghostbox is in effect made equivalent to

the act of even having it on one’s phone. A sonic atmosphere pervades on both
accounts; it is given autonomy. In another tour, for instance, to the General
Cemetery, César stood with his clients (and myself) atop what were the stone
latches for the cemetery’s communal graves, where thousands of unknown cadav-
ers were placed until the 1970s. “Take me with you,” the clients heard someone say
in the machine when an EVP session was performed; “Mamá, mama,” said anoth-
er. “There is a restlessness in this place, like the dead are coming out of the ground
and demanding recognition,” he said, pointing to the ageing latch doors that were
creeping up unevenly from the ground. One spirit cursed at him: maric
on, it seemed
to say spitefully. Afterwards, César warned people to cleanse themselves lest they
actually take “someone” home. Apparently, the machines in play during that eve-
ning were calling these entities from the obscure and dark masses below ground.
He told the youngsters who had participated in the session with their downloaded
apps to dis-install them immediately afterwards. “They open a portal. You don’t
want to take that portal with you,” he told them.
A bodily carga, or weight, can be the consequence of sonic immersion, espe-
cially for the professionals in this line of work. Daniela, the operations officer for
César Parra’s own company, Patrimonio Vivo, says that their tours to abandoned
“haunted” sites can clearly have an element of personal physical danger.

When I began working with César, I thought, “these things don’t happen”. But as
time went by I started to understand things different. This is not a normal job. And it
is not atypical only in terms of hours. The problem is you can go home with a carga
pegada (a heavy load) on your body, which can generate all kinds of illnesses and bad
vibes. These are places with a lot of history, places where things happened, traumatic
things, and you go and “play” with them, interact with them. Sometimes this gen-
erates a carga, not a very good one. (. . .) Once, we had to stop a tour altogether.
It was on pause for four years. The idea of psicofon
ıa is not to bother the spirits or
play with fire. But it happens. Through EVP we can attract anything, from demons to
spirits of a bajo astral (low evolution, bad energy), to the highest level of entity. This is
why first, when we arrive, we ask for permission, and in other words, we also ask if
they need any help. The first times we go on a tour we understand how dangerous it
can be. (Interview with Daniela, February 2018)

This “authentic danger” is arguably the cornerstone of the tours’ success, especial-
ly with impressionable youth. When I asked Daniela in what circumstances they
had to “close” a tour, she explained. It happened in a tour they call El Decenso,
“the descent,” which is in the large basement of an old house, where, according to
the tours’ organizers, a group of military officers, during the golpe militar—the
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990)—used to gather to drink and have
sex with prostitutes. According to their recounting of this history, once, during a
fight, one of the prostitutes was murdered, and the officers cut up her body and
burned it. And what was left of her bones was thrown in a large vat of water in the
Espirito Santo 13

underground of the building. César was guiding the tour when, in one of the
corridors in the underground, a youngster began to sweat and became white as
a sheet. People started to shuffle around him, to ask him what was wrong, but he
didn’t answer. It was like a waking sleep-paralysis. His breath was suddenly visible,
as if it was freezing outside, and he was paralyzed. When he came to, a few minutes
later, he described seeing a large and imposing shadow in front of him, and said he
couldn’t move. Cesar suspended the tour altogether, although Isadora now says
they have returned to it, as the “energetic question is much lighter.” She says that
psicofon
ıa has good, as well as bad, results. For instance, in researching potential
locales for future tours, she says both César and her have done EVPs where spirits
“create sentences, give you names, give you information,” help with your investi-
gation, help create your storylines, alert us to history. There is a more positive
structuring of a knowledge-assemblage in these cases, where the tour in question is
constructed in a co-participative manner with the “other side.”
Are EVP apparatuses “vibrant” things then? Examples Bennett (2010) gives on
vibrant materials are assemblages of edibles, metal, stem cells, worms: “the more
we learn about matter, the more forces we discover in it, so that the empty con-
ception of a dead extension completely disappears” (92–93). Matter is not inert
substance: it is itself a “differential of intensities, itself a life” (Bennett, 2010: 57).
The notion that technologies, or things, can transmit, or indeed constitute, more
than media is explored by Aisha Beliso-De Jes
us (2015), in her work on transna-
tional Santer
ıa, Cuba’s best known religion of African inspiration. Beliso-De Jes
us
describes at various points how her interlocutors experience media (be they tele-
visions and DVDs, to the Internet) as if it were “alive” somehow, inhabited by
“copresences” such as spirits of the dead and orichas, the Afro-Cuban gods of
Santer
ıa. For instance, she notes how Och
un, the African goddess of fertility, was
“called down” by a recording of an initiation playing on a DVD in a television
screen in a one-year anniversary party. A spirit possession on screen seemed to call
the deity into real-time (Aisha Beliso-De Jes
us, 2015: 41). Indeed, media does not
mediate but multiply and extend presence in space-time.
But, in line with Abrahamsson et al. (2015) we also have to ask how we can see
materiality in context, as “engaged in many relations” (5). In an article about
Omega 3, they criticize Bennett for her naivety in saying that it can be understood
in isolation. Rather, citing her on study of prisoners who have taken Omega 3 and
whose behavior have improved, they argue that the results of the scientific research
cannot be disentangled from the methods nor the relations these entail (8). Indeed,
“the various substances that people ingest tend to affect each other”
(Abrahamsson et al., 2015). While I am writing here of an entirely different
matter—the paranormal—the principle of a relational materiality remains the
same. Just as Omega-3 does not act alone, the same can be said of Ghostboxes,
as we have seen in the examples above. Rather, we are seeing, as Bonelli (2018)
argues, a “spectral socio-material entanglement” that expresses more than one
temporality, and more than one agency. The way I have attempted to do so in
this section is through a look at how sonic atmospheres can bend, curve, and
14 Ethnography 0(0)

extend themselves, having effects beyond the act of their registry. This takes move-
ment, and it is a motility that includes the bodies, or as Eisenlohr says, the “felt-
bodies” of investigators. Chilean paranormal investigators recognize that there is
an ontological fluidity between the visible and the invisible that is given direction
not simply by the designs of those on the “other side,” but also by their own
psyches. One example shows this well. Fernando once showed us a picture taken
of a colleague of his in an old mansion where they sometimes do investigations.
At the back, near a window, was a figure of what looked like an animal on its hind
legs, with a tail. “This image,” he told us, “is of the devil. But it’s probably
appeared this way because of us, because we’re here in Chile where Catholic cos-
mology has such a hold. Perhaps where you’re from you would’ve seen it differ-
ently!” These investigators understand their bodies as permeable matter,
vulnerable to oscillations in energies (seen in Daniela’s and Fernando and
Valeska’s recounting of the negative influences one can be subjected to, physically),
but also as exerting some sort of force on the ontological specifics of that which is
observed (such as the devil entity). We could say, then, that sonic atmospheres are
not limited to sound, proper. Affects, fears, feelings of being “weighted,” of having
information rallied into one’s corner (for instance in the design of tours), of having
coincidences emerge in one’s ordinary life (with regard to Fernando’s occurrences),
of hearing things in one’s mind (the Ricketts interview)—all of these arguably
constitute and are constituted by relational atmospheres.

Hauntings and the work of teams

José, one of Cesár Parra’s tour guides, explains how “noise” is a sort of plasticine
through which spirits confection their words. But he also says that the people
performing the psicofon
ıa need to put their energy to receive it, especially during
the playback. “We are food for them at the moment of listening to it.” It is no
wonder, he says, that many feel sapped of energy or with headaches after
psicofon
ıa sessions. This energetic intermingling is evident also in the ascertainment
of what the voices themselves say post-facto. José says that the advantage of work-
ing with a recorder, on top of the Ghostboxes, is that they can “reach an
agreement” with their audience—tour assistants—of what was actually heard.
Everyone assumedly participates in this emerging informational reality.
Fernando, of Miedo Maestro, gave a class on psicofon
ıa and the techniques to
“clean up” the sound in computer editing programs such as Audacity and Sony
Vega. He can tell when he has been sent a “false” clip because of the vocal cords on
the supposed ghost’s voice. A spirit voice would appear as a flat line, and a
person’s as a wavy line. But he also says that, “you can keep working on it”—
tagging specific places on the track where you hear certain words; if someone else
hears something else you can add a label, and so on. In effect, “what you’re
hearing is a kind of collaboration or construction of interpretations.” For instance,
on a computer editing program, he placed a clip of a psicofon
ıa performed in a
children’s hospital in Santiago, long closed, but known to have been the site of a
Espirito Santo 15

tuberculosis outbreak at the beginning of the 20th century. With ease, he copy/
pastes, amplifies sounds, selects, and presses play, stop. He says “I think it says
‘Martina, count until three. What do you think?’.” I didn’t hear it. Someone only
heard the “Martina” bit. Andrea, a woman in the same workshop, had a keener
ear. She heard, “Sit down.”
My second, briefer, argument, inspired by the above two investigators, is that
Chilean paranormalists reconstruct the worlds “on the other side” by garnering
fragments of information that require social consensus into the construction of
momentary knowledge—into a momentary cosmology, of sorts. While reliance on
technology is the stronghold of investigations, there is also the sense that this
technology renders ambiguous the “reality” of the invisible realms, as much as it
is also its main node of access to laypersons. In this section I describe my partic-
ipation in one such group and argue that the phenomena in question becomes what
it is through a process of social interpretation. Through tracing associations
and connections (Latour, 2005) between technological effects (electronic voice
phenomena) and ontological ones (spirits) in a given setting, we create a particular
reality, which is subject to constant transformations and changes.
Transformation—movement—is not an involuntary result of investigations but
the way by which investigations are made possible in the first place. Indeed, it is
this “flow,” described by Helmreich as a “sense of absorption in the interior space
of the sub” (2007: 626) and its sonic dimensions, that needs transduction, trans-
lation, enabled through a collective kind of pondering of the material with a view
to understanding its message.
When I began my fieldwork in the city of Santiago in 2016, I joined a parapsy-
chology “class.” The teacher, a woman in her early 50s that I shall call Teresa, was
versed in paranormal investigation with the relevant equipment. About half way
through the course (which lasted about a year), she took us, her students, to
research cases in people’s homes. I will write briefly about one such case here.
The paranormal investigation group consisted of five: Teresa, Mar
ıa (a 23-year-old
film student), Felipe (a physiotherapist in his 40s), Amanda (a 52-year-old pedia-
trician), and myself. All names in this section are pseudonyms in the interests of
privacy. The case occurred in the north of Santiago, in a lower middle-class neigh-
borhood and with a family of six—two parents, and four daughters of ages
between 8 and 15. Catalina, the mother, insisted she did not want to sell the
house—she had worked hard for it. This, despite the spirit they all suspected to
be inhabiting the house and now causing all manner of apprehension. The symp-
toms described by the children were the following: feeling as if someone were
waking them up, feeling watched, seeing a person passing by a first-floor
window, and having the dog bark at the wall and scratch aimlessly. One of the
girls described feeling someone grab her wrists, the hand of a man. Passing smells,
bad odors, was another symptom. Catalina described how everyone’s health dete-
riorates in the house—headaches, high glycemic levels. There are more fights and
arguments between us, she said, looking at her husband. Her husband, Pablo, says
he hears things downstairs, things move.
16 Ethnography 0(0)

Teresa and the rest of us spent some time “examining” the rooms upstairs,
especially the main girls’ room, where once all of them had seen a face on the
wall, and from where they claim most of the disturbances arose. We photographed,
took the temperature, and used the Ghost meter (EMF reader) to measure elec-
tromagnetic anomalies (there is a moving rod, and it beeps when the currents are
very high, indicating the presence of forces or energies of an extraneous kind).
We obtained no anomalous results. After that, Teresa asked all the members of the
family to join us in the girls’ room. We turned on the Ghostbox and the sound was
pervasive, encompassing.

Is there someone in this house? How many are you? What do you want? Do you need
help? Have you been here for a long time? Are you human? Can you communicate?
Can you grab this radio’s frequency and find the words? What do want with this
family? Do you have a name? Are there children here? Why do you scare this family?
Do you know that you don’t belong on this plane? Would you accept help? Did you
die an accidental death? Do you want us to do a cleansing of the house, and to pray
for you? Are you human? Can you move the needle inside the machine on this bed?

After about 6 or 7 minutes, Teresa switched the Ghostbox off. Then, Mar
ıa grabs
the tablet that had been recording the session and connects it to two speakers
belonging to the girls. The tablet had a program to modify the speed and edit
the sound. We played it back, slowly. To the question of what his name was came
an answer in a male voice. We puzzled over what it sounded like: “Julio,” I heard,
“Ulisses,” Amanda heard. Is there only one of you here? “We’re three,” we all
agreed someone said. When asked whether he or it wanted to be prayed over, one
of us heard, “please” (por favor). However, some ambiguity reigned in answer to
the question of cleansing, where he said “ok . . . but” (bueno . . . pero). Teresa said
that this signaled reluctance. Why was he reluctant? Catalina acceded to do anoth-
er EVP session later on that evening. She said she thought the entity was her father,
who had died 11 years earlier and with whom she did not end well. Later on that
same night Teresa and Mar
ıa did another session of psicofon
ıa. A WhatsApp
message to our common group read: “We had contact with Catalina’s dad. Got
good EVPs. He connected to both the apparatuses and we also discovered two
child spirits.”
How does one get to the conclusions, or speculations, arrived at for this case?
Helmreich (2007) says that “it might be productive to think about moments when
hearing and listening break down, when the putatively transductive operation of
hearing encounters crisis” (629). He says that in normal circumstances that might
come with tinnitus, vertigo or ear-aches. On board the Alvin this may be a con-
sequence of a change in cabin pressure, oxygen levels or other material conditions
that may create tiredness, buzzing in the ear, and so on (Helmreich, 2007). There
are certain ideal conditions for transduction, is the suggestion here. In paranormal
investigation, those conditions are good audio—hard to come by—a trained ear,
but most of all, social consensus. Would I be doing what Helmreich (2007) calls a
Espirito Santo 17

“trasductive ethnography” with Chilean paranormalists? This, in effect, asks,

“how definitions of subjects, objects, and field emerge in material conditions
that cannot be modeled in advance” (632). We could start with Latour (2005),
when he says that, “to be accounted for, objects have to enter into accounts. If no
trace is produced, they offer no information to the observer and will have no
visible effect on other agents. They remain silent and are no longer actors” (79).
Actors can be deceased or living, can be visible or not, can be the material symp-
toms of the hauntings, and the technological means by which some sense is made
of each situation, as well as their interpreters—and they leave traces. All objects
move answers, explanations, produce conflicts, and motivate action. Action here is
dislocated in the sense that there is a causal distribution, not a single cause. Indeed,
there is often “friction and violence between parts” (Bennett, 2010: 23) that renders
manifest a particular “vitality” inherent to a cosmology in operation. Sonic ambi-
guity is one such “friction.” The sound of someone is there, but it is unclear. But in
the paranormal field, it is also important to create alliances of information between
apparatuses. Fernando Navarro, for instance, uses both a Kinect camera, used in
the game Xbox to visualize spirits as moving “stick figures,” and the REM-Pod, an
electromagnetic sensor that goes off in the presence of extraneous energies. One
provides support for the other: he can ascertain presence in this way.
In the case presented, there were two sessions of psicofon
ıa performed.
Interpretations are the connective tissue between the actors in the construction
of these atmospheres. We can see this more broadly, in relation to the other
vignettes I have described. EVP is particularly evocative a source of controversy,
because rarely are the voices entirely audible or understandable. A skeptic might
ask whether they are voices at all. And when they are, their meaning is often
ambiguous. Was the name heard in case two of this section Julio or Ulisses, or
something that sounds like either? Who is it that says “there are cuts,” during the
midnight visit to the ex-psychiatric hospital, and what are the circumstances under-
lying such a statement? Can we relate them simplistically to the historical context?
Isn’t the evocation of a response on the part of the investigator—in the dead of
night—a piece of sonic atmosphere at work, as well? But it is less uncertainty and
ultimately a particular atmosphere—as indeterminate as this may be—that plural-
izes the relational space and allows controversy to breathe and lead to partial
results. In the ex-hospital visit, the uncertainty of who was communicating is
consensually associated with the traumatic context at hand, although ambiguous-
ly; in the second case, the uncertainty over the state of who communicated led to a
second EVP session that “discovered” more entities and the main culprit (the
deceased father). The question of who is acting is never a finished one in these
circumstances, not just because certain actors are by their very nature hidden
(invisible, inaudible, not entirely accounted for), but also because circulating
forces, atmospheres, to cite Stewart (2011) once more, “spawn worlds, animate
forms of attachment and detachment, and become the live background of living in
and living through things” (445). This means that as a force-field, atmospheres
have a “capacity to affect and to be affected that pushes a present into a
18 Ethnography 0(0)

composition, an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event” (452). People

themselves, as well as their apparatuses, are components of this force-field.

Final remark
Coole and Frost (2010) argue that matter possesses “its own modes of self-
transformation, self-organization, and directedness, and thus no longer as
simply passive or inert, disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively
humans (. . .)” (10). In this article I have attempted to follow their lead and to
demonstrate that “matter becomes,” but that it becomes in “choreographies” in
which their purely material components come into question also. Rather, in these
choreographies, which I have called sonic atmospheres, following Eisenlohr, tech-
nologies are at center stage of worldmaking endeavors, both in their ontologically
fluid relation to people and the spiritual agents that are revealed through them, and
in relation to the fragmented, situated realities that technologies reveal.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to César Parra and Fernando Navarro in particular, and also to the parapsy-
chologist I have called Teresa in the text. I am also thankful to Joseph Feldman for reading
an earlier draft and to Gonzalo Barcel
o for his research assistance.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article: This article was made possible through the funds of
the Chilean State, both the Fondecyt project 1160046 and the Conicyt-PIA project SOC 18-
00-33.

ORCID iD
Diana Espirito Santo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4813-7455

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Author Biography
Diana Espirito Santo is currently assistant professor of social anthropology at
the Pontificia Universidad Cat

olica de Chile. She wrote her PhD at University
College London on Cuban creole espiritismo and concepts of self and knowledge.
Among her publications are the monograph Developing the Dead: Mediumship and
Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (University Press of Florida, 2015), and another
book based on her postdoctoral work with Brazilian Umbandists on cosmology
and change (Caribbean Studies Press, 2018). This article is part of two larger
three-year projects on ontologies of evidence, funded by the Chilean state,
under the Fondecyt Regular Programs, and the Conicyt, Programa de
Investigaci

on Asociativa.