Stories of hauntings and communications from the dead have seem to follow us around through the centuries and as the world and our technologies envolving so do the stories.

From stories of creepy entities popping out from old abandoned buildings and emerging themselves from ouijia boards to more recent times where ghosts and spooks are travelling through devices through some unknown force to reach out to us.

Tales of ghosts appearing from peoples televisons have been reported since the technology became available to the masses. People claimed that the dead was using the machine as a platform to come to contact us.

The claims of this could be easy explained has the first Tv’s had a tendancy to distort, have double images emerge and have strange patterns of static, which with it being a new form of technology anyway that people wasnt sure of, the visual effects sure didnt help and many got spooked by it.

People during this time did not understand how the TV worked and people found them mysterious and spooky without even turning one on, so when they did how they appeared seemed to spook many people even more.

One of the first earliest reports of a ghostly image on their Tv was by a family who lived in Long Island, New york in 1953. The Travers family claimed that their TV was haunted by a ghost of a women who would often jump out of the background of television shows or would creep up from the static.

The woman’s voice was also said to echo out from the TV, even when it was turned off or unplugged completely. The story was so well-known that it featured in an issue of the NY Times. Reporters flocked to their home to try and get evidence of the haunting of the spectral woman but she never appeared to anyone only the Traver family.

In 1968, when a woman in Minnesota claimed that an outstretched hand had reached out from the black murk beyond the screen of her unplugged television and pressed its palm right up against the glass. The startled woman managed to take a photograph of the alleged ghostly hand as it began to fade away, and the picture the picture is widely shared around even to this day. According to the woman and her husband, the same hand had appeared on one other occasion as well, about a year before. The photo itself appears to be creepy and skeptics claim it to be an outright hoax.

ITC

So where would such a phenomena fit in within the paranormal field?

Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) is a phenomena that is said to occur on devices as varied as television sets, radios, computers, handheld devices such as ipods or iPhone and nowadays even APPS.

The most common of devices which this phenomena is said to occur on is on audio recording equipment, such as dicaphones but most people know this phenomena to be called EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) and dont actually realise it also fits within the ITC phenomena umbrella.

I would say as a investigator myself ITC doesn’t get took as serious as I think it should, properly due to the amount of applications available on APP stores claiming they are just for ENTERTAINMENT.

But the research in the phenomena of ITC goes back much further than applications.

During the 70s and 80s is where the story of ghosts being able to use a Television to communicate is where the roots of the research began. Investigators was coming fourth to claim they had TV sets turning themselves on and off and even sometimes completely unplugged.

One of the pioneers of using televisions to try and pick up signals from the dead was a German ITC researcher named Klaus Schreiber, who used an apparatus that he called the “Vidicomin,” which used a video camera aimed at a TV set that was switched on but not attached to an aerial, and the signal looped the output from the camera back into the TV. This loop was said to produce dramatic results, with various faces appearing out from the white noise on sets, and on one occasion an actress from Austria named Romy Schneider supposedly clearly appeared on a TV in one such session years after her death.

https://youtu.be/LhShBdVBvZQ

In 1986, another ITC researcher and physicist named Ernst Senkowski claimed to have attained a clear, unmistakable image of a spirit from a TV set. In this case, a brief feed of video was picked up depicting the spirit of a dead EVP researcher named Hanna Buschbeck, who had died in 1978. In the video, she allegedly appeared recognizable yet much younger than she had been when she had died.Fredrich Juergenson

Another account of this phenomenia comes from a Swedish film producer Fredrich Juergenson, who died in 1987, he was also one of the early pioneering researchers of the ITC phenomenon, . In the strange account, Juergenson purportedly sent out a telepathic message to fellow researcher Claude Thorlin as he lie dying, telling him that when he died he intended to try and send out a message through Thorlin’s TV during his funeral. Thorlin apparently then skipped the funeral in order to stay home and try and record the bizarre event. At the exact moments of the funeral, Juergenson’s spirit was said to have appeared on Thorlin’s TV screen just as promised, and was said to be clearly the image of the dead man. Interestingly, when he was alive Juergenson had had a hobby of recording bird songs. He claimed that one day when he had been listening to a playback of one such recording he had heard the unmistakeable voice of his dead mother saying: “Friedrich, you are being watched.  Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?” with Friedel being the pet name only his mother had known and called him by.

THE HAUNTED TV

In a small, remote village called Tsento, Bhutan, there is an old television set said to be not only possessed by the Devil, but also inhabited by the evil spirit of a dead man and at least one other ghost. The TV was said to make noises and turn itself on even when unplugged, and is said to be responsible for bringing disease and bad luck to all who own it, eventually passing through three separate families tormented by it before it was examined by a psychic who warned that the TV had to be banished. The frightened villagers then took the cursed TV to a remote location and performed a sort of exorcism right before leaving it where it now lies, where its reported it continues to sit over two decades later. The TV is still believed to harbor evil spirits, and indeed has been blamed for infecting the whole area with its dark magic. Visitors are warned to stay away and the old, decrepit set is said to instill madness in those who come too close.

There has been a great amount of debate on whether EVP or ITC in any form carries any basis in fact, or if it is just seeing or hearing what we want it too. Many state we are just picking it out out from the noise and imbuing it with our own meaning or in the cases of apps we are making the responses fit to where we are investigating.

However, considering the amount of work and research being done into the realm of ghosts communicating or making themselves known through modern electronic devices, it seems that the dynamic of hauntings has evolved along with the technology and the latest being the amazon Alexa with many people reporting it turning on and off on its own, coming out with unusual voices and playing songs which may indicate a sign of a passed love one.