GQRX-Ghostbox: Electronic Voice Phenomenon Paranormal Research Tool

With perfect Halloween timing, SDR enthusiast and ghost hunter Doug Haber has released his RTL-SDR compatible software called “gqrx-ghostbox”. This software supposedly turns your RTL-SDR into a electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) tool a.k.a a “Ghost Box”. Douglas explains what a Ghost Box is in the following blurb:

A ghost box is a device sometimes used by paranormal researchers to talk to spirits, the dead, disembodied entities, shape shifting lizard people, and other intra-dimensional fauna.

Some ghost boxes have electronics that give them distinct properties, and others are effectively radio scanners. This tool is of the radio scanning style.

Many examples of ghost box usage can be found on youtube. Generally, it involves asking questions and then listening for a response. Some people believe a medium or trance state is necessary in order for it to work. If you search for “ghost box” or “spirit box”, you will find information on different usage styles.

We’re not 100% sure if this is a late April fools joke, or a serious tool, but the code is real (it appears to just use GQRX to scan through frequencies), and at least these days when almost everything possible has already been tried with an RTL-SDR, this is something new!

ghostbox

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

5 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Syed Ghazanfar Ali

Very much right. But there is no specific frequency range for such entities to communicate. There are no ghosts or souls of the deads living here. They are just the demons which are attached to every human and once human is passed away they are the residual life form which wanders here and there. Demons are from the race of cursed jinns and since jinn is made up of plasma similar to the one formed in a Tesla coil hence their body radiates energy magnetic component and frequency of which is wide spread covering ULF, ELF, VLF, HF and VHF. Even a good induction coil as an audio input device along with an LNA works as a very good ULF VLF receiver picking up such anomalies. As I have said their voices which are not produced the way we produced using our tongue in audio freq range, are picked up at large bandwidth from ULF to VHF therefore a fast radio scanner jumping on different radio frequencies within the above said frequency range can easily pick up a single pattern of emission from a wide range that can be heard as if it is coming from a single frequency. e.g if you fast scan 88 to 108 MHz continuously while placing a mobile phone nearby, the GSM modulatuon during an incoming or outgoing call will be audible throughout the band irrespective of fast shifting of the SDR from freq to freq similar to persistency of our ear when listening to a jittering signal. It’s a good effort to explore this field of undefined phenomenon using SDR and I was in search of a similar grc flowgraph for the last three years. My experience says that they are everywhere at all time. Best Way is to pick random set of frequencies say from any 10 MHz bandwidth chosen from ULF to VHF range and then using different demodulations on those set of frequencues (especially AM and USB) to be placed for fast scanning and reception and then different questions should be asked. If the response is picked up spread over those number of frequencies (not only harmonics) then it’s something which is demodulated EVP from such plasma entities. Otherwise different set of frequencies can be picked up. Remember it has nothing to do with jumbling of words from human made radio stations as it is done by most of the ghost hunters using ghost boxes.

Tobias Claren

Voices on tapes come as a radio wave / EM field in the coil of the microphone, right?
Then the radiation must have a frequency between 20Hz and 20,000Hz, right?
This is the audible range. One can also connect a telephone pick-up coil.
So you make sure that no sound waves in air are recorded.

Ghosts talking in an audio recorder would have a much deeper frequency than those that would be audible over a radio. Or not?

It would be good if professionals try the SDR technology at strongly spooky hot spots.
Simultaneously with other technology the frequency spectrum monitor.
See in which frequencies are peaks, while voices are heard about “conventional” technique. Audio recorder, “portal” etc.

Are there mobile antennas for the whole frequency range?
I think, ~25Mhz-2000Mhz?
For using with a Smartphone or Notebook.

Doug Haber

I am the author of that tool. One correction, I wouldn’t describe myself as a ghost hunter. I stumbled across ghost boxes online and saw the potential of using SDR to do the same thing. It seemed like a good Halloween project.

While some ghost boxes have odd circuits and a lot of reverb, many are just radio scanners. They sweep the AM or FM band, so that was easy enough to achieve with SDR. The program is real, and after watching a bunch of YouTube videos of people using ghost boxes, I think it behaves pretty similarly.

To the extent that the phenomenon is a real thing, I think SDR opens some interesting possibilities to aid researchers. Maybe ghosts find it easier to communicate up at 1.5 GHz, or maybe they come in better with planar disk antennas. SDR offers the ability to controls and fine tune many parameters, and to accurately record time-stamped data on the state.

On the possibly more useful side, to make this possible I wrote a Perl module called GQRX::Remote, which is now on CPAN. It provides a simple interface over the GQRX remote control protocol, making it easy to write scripts that control and respond to the radio.

I hope someone out there finds this fun or useful, and if you do find yourself talking to ghosts, please share your experience.

Sheila Martin / Sheilaaliens

Is this the same as using SDRsharp with the frequency scanner plug in?

Just curious because I did start toying around with my sdr as a ghost box 2 years ago with moderate success. I was gonna try to figure out all of this GitHub stuff so I can try gqrx-ghostbox, but after seeing a screenshot, it really does look just like sdrsharp with freq scanner, so I will pass for now, but cool to know others had the same idea.

In this bit of video, a voice clearly repeats the two control/test words “KITTY CAT” (@4secs.) then “NANTUCKET” (@15secs): https://www.facebook.com/Sheilaalien/videos/624885344323645/

So, make of that whatever you will.

I’d happily try out your software and post a Youtube video, but I dont think Ill ever understand Perl or Python etc.

Please consider making a user-friendly version with a UI/normal install package, as its quite unlikely a ghost hunter will get an SDR, but even less likely they’ll know Perl.

correction : My channel link is http://youtube.com/Sheilaalien