I’ve just learned that Frank Sumption, inventor of the Frank’s Box, has died. Sumption was famous for this device which he claimed could be used to communicate with the dead. Today, the Frank’s Box is now more popularly known as the “Ghost Box” (or Shack Hack, Joe’s Box, etc., even though they’re all slightly different devices) and versions of the Frank’s Box are a staple in the toolbox of most ghost hunters.

The use of electronic devices for communicating with spirits is called Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) and the practice has a long history. Audio recordings are the most common types of communication, known specifically as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVPs). Prolific inventor Thomas Edison is popularly credited as the father of EVP and real-time spirit communication. There is an urban legend that while Edison was inventing the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the electric light bulb, he was also in the process of creating an apparatus enabling communication with spirits.

In 1941, “spirit photographer” Attila von Szalay turned his attention from spirit photography to recording voices of the dead. He began experimenting with 78-rpm records, but he didn’t have success until 1956 when he started using a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Together with Raymond Bayless, the two designed a machine to collect EVPs. This was an insulated microphone connected to an external recording device and speaker. Using this machine, they collected many spirit messages including “This is G!” and “Hot dog, Art!”

One day, Friedrich Jürgenson (1903-1987) was recording bird songs when his tape also seemed to capture human voices, although there was no one else around. Inspired by this, he spent many years recording nothing. When these recordings were played back, they seemed to reveal human voices. Jürgenson wrote about these experiences in the 1964 publication Rosterna fran Rymden (“Voices from Space”).

The book caught the interest of Latvian Parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive (1909-1974). The pair began working together, and soon, Jürgenson captured a voice that sounded like his mother, who had died a few years before. The voice even called him by the pet name she used for him. Jürgenson believed that he was recording voices of the dead, and so he wrote a second book in 1967, Sprechfunk mit Verstorbenen (“Radio-link with the dead”).

There were several forerunners to the Frank’s Box, including vacuum tube radios, phonographs, and wire recorders that supposedly captured messages from the dead. In 1979, William O’Neil and George Meek created the Spiricom, a tone and frequency generator that promised two-way communication with spirits. O’Neill claims he built the device according to specifications received psychically from George Mueller, a scientist who had died in 1967. Using the Spiricom, O’Neill recorded long conversations with Mueller, but strangely, their voices never overlap as found in normal conversation. It turns out that the Spiricon was a hoax. The spirit “voices” were created using a mechanical larynx. O’Neill was also an accomplished ventriloquist.

In 1995, the do-it-yourself article “Ghost Voices: Exploring the Mysteries of Electronic Voice Phenomena” appeared in Popular Electronics magazine. (Konstantinos, 1995) This inspired amateur radio enthusiast Frank Sumption to build his Frank’s Box. However, the credit can’t all go to the article. Sumption claimed a team of spirits also assisted him in the design and creation of his device. In accordance with the myth that Thomas Edison pioneered spirit communication, some even believe that Edison’s spirit dictated the design of the Frank’s Box to Sumption.

One legend says that Sumption had wanted to communicate with aliens, and then one day he thought he heard the voice of his deceased son. Then it became a “ghost box”.

The Frank’s Box is a homemade radio receiver that continuously scans radio frequencies at a predetermined rate. This effect is like twisting the knob on a radio backwards and forwards quickly. However, the scan lock function is disabled, so the listener can’t tune into a station. This “sweep method” creates a radio that plays erratic white noise. Random fragments of speech and music punctuate the rushing sound of unused frequencies when the scanner momentarily picks up a station.

Sumption claimed that the white noise creates what he calls “raw audio” which paranormal beings use to transmit messages intended for the listener. By his theory, the device tunes into some sort of cosmic radio station where the DJs are spirits.

The “messages” received from the Frank’s Box are composed randomly from the repertoire of radio stations. Proponents prefer listening to the AM band, and as a greater source of talk radio and news than FM radio, AM broadcasting produces a higher ratio of words to music. Amidst the radio static, the content includes music, advertisements, news and talk. However, the scanner barely rests on a station before flitting to the next, so the output is arbitrary and consists of word fragments, single words, and short phrases, combined with language-like sounds from music and white noise. Listeners pick out these intelligible sounds selectively to form “messages”.

Sumption explained that the ability to understand EVP is “like learning a new language”. But this is not authentic language. The Frank’s Box generates bits of speech, and the results resemble speech, but collectively, these sounds don’t constitute speech. The messages don’t have the features that characterize natural language. They are pieced together selectively from a mixture of sounds, there is no grammar or consistency, and no agreed-upon meaning. The output is meaningless. That is, until someone gives it meaning.

Sumption himself provides the natural explanation for his invention (if we ignore the first part).

[This is] Simply another method of supplying “raw” audio that spirits and other entities can use to form voices. Raw audio is a sound source that contains bits of human speech, music and noise.

Simply, the Frank’s Box produces meaningless “human speech, music and noise” from which listeners create meaningful messages. The Frank’s Box isn’t a device that allows the living to communicate with the dead. It’s just a broken radio.

Sumption contacted me back in 2009 and my husband and I met up with “The Purple Princess” for lunch to discuss the Frank’s Box. (Sumption was a resident of Littleton, Colorado). I wrote about that meeting and his invention here (and why he called himself the “Purple Princess”). That day, Sumption kindly gave us one of his Frank’s Boxes (see the picture above, and the special crystal that he used to contact spirits), which is now one of only 180 in existence.

I was saddened to hear of Sumption’s death, but I’m sure he’ll soon “return” via the ghost boxes of ghost hunters everywhere…

With thanks to Greg Newkirk for the news.



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