Why Spirit Boxes Are Mostly Entertainment
And Why the Feriam Armory Team Sticks to Traditional EVP Recorders
“Do you use spirit boxes? They’re all over YouTube!” “I have so many ghosts haunting my apartment!” “I have a ghost chat pal in my car!”
I hear this alot, and get questions about them so often it becomes exhausting to give the explanations over and over. The short answer is no, we don not use Spirit Boxes on investigations, and we don’t sell them either. Here’s the longer, honest answer about why we consider the “spirit box” or “ghost box” more of a click bait device than a serious investigative tool.
What a Spirit Box Actually Does
A spirit box is a modified radio that rapidly scans through AM/FM frequencies (usually 20–100 ms per channel). The theory, popularized by Frank Sumption and later Frank’s Box/Shack Hack devices, is that disembodied voices can “speak through” the white-noise snippets and stray phonemes that leak between stations.
In practice you hear a constant wall of static, DJ chatter, music fragments, and advertising. Occasionally a syllable or short word seems to pop out in response to a question. That moment is thrilling, which is why spirit boxes get so much traction on ghost hunting reality shows and youtube.
Why We Can’t Take the Results Seriously
Radio stations are everywhere Even in remote locations you’re still picking up bleed from distant transmitters, CB radios, walkie-talkies, baby monitors, or taxi dispatch. There is no “blank” frequency band in most of the world anymore. And spirit boxes continuously scan through all available frequencies. No matter where you are in the world, it will get signals from something man-made.
The human brain is a pattern-matching machine (pareidolia + apophenia) When you’re primed to hear a voice answer your question, your brain will stitch together random phonemes into something that sounds meaningful. It’s the same reason people hear “Paul is dead” when playing Beatles records backward or find faces in clouds.
Zero isolation, zero control With a normal digital or analog recorder you can create a controlled, silent environment. The recorder is only picking up from its immediate area, whether generated sounds or EVP. You can ask a question, leave dead air, and later analyze for any anomalies. A spirit box never stops broadcasting man-made audio. It is constantly scanning radio frequencies, picking up signals from hundreds of miles away. There is no true silence to compare against, so you can never rule out mundane radio contamination.
Reproducibility is impossible Try playing back the exact same spirit-box session twice at two different times or locations. You’ll get completely different “answers” because the scan is pulling live radio signals that change second by second. Real evidence should at least be consistent when the conditions are repeated.
The inventors themselves backed away from hard claims Frank Sumption, the man who started it all, eventually admitted he couldn’t prove the voices were paranormal and cautioned against treating the device as definitive proof.
What We Use Instead – And Why It’s Still Exciting
The Feriam team records with both high-quality digital audio recorders (mostly Sony) and old-school analog mini-cassette recorders, which is my personal preference. Here’s why we still get goosebumps from genuine EVP work:
Controlled silence lets genuine anomalies stand out.
Multiple devices in the same room often capture the same voice or sound at the same timestamp, something a spirit box can never corroborate.
Class-A EVPs -clear, unmistakable voices that everyone agrees on- still happen, just far more rarely than YouTube would have you believe. That rarity is what makes them compelling. Spirit boxes, and those asinine ghost talking apps, make people believe there are more talking ghosts in the world than living people. Intelligent hauntings are rare. Its why you have to hunt for them.
Analog tape adds an extra layer of “they can’t fake this easily” credibility for skeptics. Digital files can always be altered, but analog can not, it records the noises made at the time of recording.
I’m not saying spirit boxes can’t be fun. Turn one on at 2 a.m. with friends and a few drinks and you’ll have a blast. Give on to your friend who is super into manifesting her best life, and have a laugh when she tells you what her guardian spirits are saying. But when documenting a case for a client who is genuinely frightened in their own home, we owe them tools that minimize false positives and maximize verifiable data. Because that person really truly wants to know their water pipes makes spooky sounds at night, and their house isn’t actually haunted.
The Bottom Line
If your goal is likes, views, and spooky clips for social media, spirit boxes deliver every single time. None of your viewers will question it. If your goal is to separate potential evidence from coincidence and radio garbage, leave the scanning box at home and bring a good recorder, fresh batteries, and patience.
That’s the Feriam Armory philosophy in a nutshell: prioritize data over drama.
Clear voices in dead silence still give us chills. Random syllables pulled from a live Top-40 station… not so much.
Happy (and discerning) hunting,
– Turtle