Bruce Altman: Dr. Koven

The Skeptic

Dr. Koven

Dr. Warren Koven: Did something happen?
Bryan Becket: Let's just say that I now understand how my aunt could have become confused and thought her place was haunted.
[chuckles]
Bryan Becket: I thought I heard something there myself, last night. I'm staying there until the estate is settled.
Dr. Warren Koven: What did you hear?
Bryan Becket: Whispering. Outside my door. I do not believe in ghosts, and I got the sense that you don't, either.
Dr. Warren Koven: I don't. I don't believe in anything supernatural.
Bryan Becket: Then we're kindred spirits. But that still leaves me short of an answer.

Dr. Warren Koven: The human voice is not real complex. It's a sound that nature has very little difficulty mimicking. Now, what I'm gonna play for you is real. It was recorded in a farmhouse in the Berkshires, 1976.
[He begins typing on his computer]
Dr. Warren Koven: It was heard by multiple witnesses, caught on tape, sworn to in an affidavit. Okay? It's the real McCoy. Uh, please.
[He beckons Becket over, and Becket slides his chair to sit near the computer. Koven starts a brief audio file that sounds like someone sighing or whispering]
Dr. Warren Koven: Isn't that amazing? This is an authentic aural event. Now, that's probably what we call a chi cluster. It's a build-up of chi field energy then released into the sonic spectrum.
Bryan Becket: But it's not words.
Dr. Warren Koven: What do you mean?
Bryan Becket: How does it come out as words? You know? In an intelligent sentence structure.
Dr. Warren Koven: Well, it doesn't. I mean, maybe it does once in a million, like those monkeys typing sonnets, but...
Bryan Becket: No, but it did. For me. The voice that I heard spoke. It did not just say oooh ahhh, it said something like, "An old trunk." And it kept repeating it, over and over. "An old trunk," or "In an old trunk." As if to suggest that I...

Dr. Warren Koven: You heard whispering sounds, and presuming that they must be human, your brain strove to put speech to them. So, "old trunk" or "in the old trunk" was the best it could come up with. It's called psychoacoustics. Excuse me.
[He gets up and walks away from the computer]
Bryan Becket: Really! I respect the concept, I really do, but I don't know. What I heard was so...
Dr. Warren Koven: [whispers] What'd I say?
Bryan Becket: What?
Dr. Warren Koven: Oh, did you catch that?
Bryan Becket: Yeah, you said, "What'd I say?"
Dr. Warren Koven: No, I didn't. I said "rud lie stay."
[He whispers it again:]
Dr. Warren Koven: "Rud lie stay." *You* made it into "What'd I say?"

Dr. Warren Koven: Your aunt did the same thing. She took a garden variety acoustical sub-event and made it into a haunting.