Creaking doors, whispering voices, flickering lights, the faint pitter-patter of footsteps down the stairs — are they gestures from spirits or figments of imagination?

Welcome to the unknown.

Communication with the dead has always been an idea lurking in the back of our brains. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the question of whether human beings can communicate with the dead.

The newly released “White Noise,” a film about communicating with the dead, and the new television series “Medium,” based on a woman who contacts the dead, are prime examples of society’s eagerness to delve into the world of the unknown.

Electronic Voice Phenomena, a form of communicating with the dead by using tape recorders and other electronic devices to pick up voices, has been a questioning issue ever since the invention of the audio recorder, according to one ISU faculty member.

Hector Avalos, associate professor of religious studies, says the phenomenon is “just a new variant of older ideas.”

“I think historically this is really just a new round of a very old sort of phenomenon, because communication or belief in the communication through electronic devices is as old as electronic devices,” he says.

“Most people tend to want to believe something and they’ll use any sort of evidence to do it.”

The film “White Noise” has taken full advantage of discussion of the phenomena, Avalos says.

“They want to hype the movie and they latch on to this supposedly new idea of Electronic Voice Phenomena simply as a novelty to market the movie,” he says.

“But in reality, it’s not new; it’s just a new way to market an older idea.”

Su Walker, a clairvoyant and medical intuitive who practices in Ames, says that, until recently, Electronic Voice Phenomena was unknown to most people.

“As long as there’s been electronic recording equipment around, people have picked up stuff and then just kind of dismissed it,” she says.

“It wasn’t until paranormal researchers started comparing notes that they realized there [was] something more going on.”

Walker says she believes in communication with the dead, but is not yet fully confident in the phenomena.

“I don’t believe yet that we have enough research to fully explain it,” she says.

“Something is going on, and until we can find a way to communicate better, we aren’t going to know more.”

A factor in determining whether or not Electronic Voice Phenomena is real is the power of suggestion. If we want to hear or see something, our mind will create it for us.

“There are phenomena in psychology such as something called the confirmation bias, which is the tendency for people to notice things that confirm what they already think or what they already believe or what they think will happen,” says Anne Cleary, assistant professor of psychology.

“And so I imagine that could be a contributor to somebody believing that perhaps they’re communicating with the dead, if they’re tending to notice things that would confirm that and not notice things that would dis-confirm that.”

When dealing with life after death, Avalos says death is a chemical process that takes place to a body and nothing more.

“If you were to put someone that died in a big vacuum tube, and let’s say that person was cremated, the contents would weigh exactly the same before and after death,” he says.

“So it tells you there’s nothing lost as far as we’re concerned [and] there’s nothing additional. It’s just that you have decomposed into different chemicals.”

Walker says we receive a choice as to what happens to our bodies after death.

“I believe we shift into a state of awareness where, as an individual who’s a spiritual being, we can do different things than when we have a physical body,” she says.

Walker recalls an interaction with a friend who passed away in 1994. She says her friend came to visit her exactly two months after his death and ended up conversing with her for four hours.

“He told me that once he died, there was this relief of being out of pain because he was suffering from AIDS at the time and that being out of physical pain and being able to be free to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted by thinking about it, was a new revelation to him,” she says.

Discreditors of Electronic Voice Phenomena say voices being picked up by recorded devices are not from the deceased, but instead from radio signals or actual human noise close to the recorder.

Cleary says the idea relates to that of a favorite pastime.

“It’s similar to horoscopes,” she says.

“If you look through horoscopes, you could find often that every single one of them seems to apply to you.

“I think people who will claim to communicate with the dead will often use ideas of things that are so general that it really could apply to anybody.”

Although Electronic Voice Phenomena remains unproven, there are still those who are willing to accept it as true and others who will remain skeptical until further proof becomes available.

“[Until] we can get a team of both skeptics and believers to do some controlled experiment where we both can verify what’s happening, there’s going to be skepticism about those reports,” Avalos says.