Inspired by our now regular watching of Paranormal State on Monday nights (from the good folks that brought you MTV’s Laguna Beach), my friend Mark and I decided to dig up the schematics for the device used in tonight’s rerun. In it, the crew travel to an old asylum which is now used as a drug treatment centre. Good ol’ Chip Coffee is briefly possessed by the "demon" that inhabits the asylum, and there is an appearance by Chris Moon and his radio-to-talk-to-the-dead, aka "Frank’s box."

From the Paranormal State website:

Frank’s Box scans AM/FM and low band frequencies to create a noise matrix from which the dead — as well as other entities — can use to modulate for messages. It’s made of computer, radio and electronic components. Like real-time EVP (electronic voice phenomena), Frank’s Box produces messages from a word or two to complete sentences in length.

Sumption says he received instructions for building the device from disembodied entities. His first box was built in 2002, and he has made fewer than three dozen. While anyone can build one from his schematics, there seems to be something especially effective about the boxes hand-made by Sumption himself.

As the owner of two Frank’s Boxes made by Sumption, I can attest to their operation. The box (shown in photo with digital records and K2 meter) seems to create an entire energy field that attracts spirits. You can ask questions, and get answers — but not consistently. No matter who you ask for on the Other Side, it’s often a guess as to who — or what — really answers. Some researchers, like Sumption himself, don’t ask questions, but turn on the box and record whatever comes through, much like EVP.

Anyhow, most people online I perused call it a hoax — that it picks up random bits of broadcasts or something. I for one don’t think that would work the way it’s set up, but then again I’m no electrical engineer.

I’m curious to see what effect these things have when someone hooks orgone accumulators up in the vicinity. Or, as I’m interested to try out, performing some evocations from the Goetia or Heptameron. I wanna get our little friends on tape.

Regardless, Mark and I may try to make one this summer if we find the time and know-how. Anyone else out there wanting to give the radio-to-the-dead a try can find some (what appears to be?) useful information here:

1. Ghost-Tronics: A new electronic method of spirit communication
2. Keyport Paranormal (two PDF schematics for download, which Mark and I are reviewing)
3. Beaver Spirit Search Society: One more PDF schematic there

After briefly reading over the schematics, what I found interesting is that it reflects ideas I’ve had in the past. When I used to be smarter and write more, I wrote an interesting post called "Here Be Demons." In it, I contemplate the chaotic elements of our realm Malkuth ("kingdom"; ?????) as canvas by which entities of an occult nature might "embed" themselves, in order to make human contact:

Rather than offering parfums and analogous artefacts and symbols by which to aid the entity to embed itself in Malkuth — the manifest realm which we believe is reality — if there were some way in which to associate code and "sacrifice" or offer a binary language to them by which they could learn? […] As parfums are used in ceremonial magic and other rites, their functions are many, but I figure from what I know that they act as a lighthouses in that the particles have poetic properties akin to the nature of the entity being evoked. The nature of the parfum offers an entry point — an anchor — into this realm. The olfactory sense, in particular, seeing as how it bypasses the other processes of the senses and affects the part of the brain that deals with long-term memory (if I recall correctly), may tie together aspects of the subconscious mind to other aspects of subtle consciousness and/or altered states made use of in magical rites.

In the PDF "Newer ‘Frank’s Box’ Schematics," available above from Keyport Paranormal (or here direct), the author believes that it is the randomness from accessing the white and pink noise and whatever other frequencies that allows them to pick up on these paranormal auditory signals. In this, I would be willing to say I agree, at least in theory. It has long since my belief that chaos is what lets supranatural elements in to affect us. It is Prometheus’s light, if you will, shining through into the realm of the Archons and the ordered realm by which the Demiurge keeps this realm spinning on in.

As an aside, here’s more on magical parfums if you’re looking to putz with this stuff.

Photo by Simon Crowley