It was a simple question. These were some of the responses. (With a trigger warning that some of these are legitimately unexplained and disturbing. I've mostly just provided Wikipedia links for background information. But many of the recordings referred to can be found via online searches. If you intend to track them down and listen, maybe do it during daylight hours.)What is the creepiest recording you ever heard?
— Theo Paijmans (@memizon) September 1, 2021
- Numbers station, with children voices.
- Serious answer: probably the Judica-Cordiglia lost Cosmonaut tape.
- The Maurice Grosse recording of Bill, from the Enfield poltergeist. I lived in the area at the time.
- Radiohead - Creep
- Those old Aleister Crowley wax cylinder jobs they transferred to CD in the 90s.
- Southern Television Broadcast Interruption as watched as a child (This was the answer provided by David Southwell, who I interviewed in 2015)
- The last couple of minutes of "It Has To Be" from the Help Yourself album The Return of Ken Whaley. They were tripping on LSD and had taken delivery of a new synth. The last few notes of the grand piano and the synth are just truly creepy.
- Quite probably the Konstantin Raudive recordings. That voice just sends chills down my spine!
My response, meanwhile, went in a much more literal and innocent direction. Reading Theo's question, I though immediately of those vinyl albums we listened to as kids in the 1970s. You know the type...
Before these record albums existed, these were the kind of sound effects that made old-time radio shows so effective. These recordings play right into the great rule of horror: What you can only hear is so much scarier than what you actually see. The mind imagines terrors far greater than any visual that can be created through special effects or CGI.
Who else remembers listening to these spine-tingling albums as a kid?
I never had these records, but really wanted them, particularly this one that was advertised in the back of comic books: http://www.heyrube.com/images/haunting_1000.jpg.
ReplyDeleteThe scariest recording I can think of (at least scary to me at the time) was on one of Leonard Nemoy's "In Search of" episodes where a team of ghost hunters made recordings from tombstones in a cemetery. I recall one EVP that said, "I'm scared." The idea of a ghost being scared really bothered me as a kid. Thanks, Leonard.