The disembodied voice is scratchy but understandable. And it is clearly saying "Please go home."

It is but one of a number of ghostly utterances supposedly captured in the abandoned, fading rooms of a since-demolished Beloit mansion called The Manor. The recordings were made by a Janesville paranormal research organization called Voices Through the Static.

Depending on what and whom you believe, they are either voices of the dead or a product of your imagination. Either way, they can make the hair on your arms stand up. Especially at a time of year when many are happily casting about for ways in which they can scare themselves silly.

"There were so many paranormal teams wanting to get in there," Amy Tomlin, who helped found Voices Through the Static, said of the abandoned mansion. "It really amazed me what we heard there. It seemed like a bubble waiting to burst. There were things that blew my mind."

Tomlin, 31, of Janesville, said she trained with a paranormal expert named Summer Allen of Haunted Voices EVP Research/Radio in Alberta, Canada to learn how to record and analyze voices that some believe are from the beyond. In the paranormal world, it's called "electronic voice phenomenon" or EVP.

According to Tomlin, the human voice cannot reach the low frequencies at which some of the voices in The Manor were said to be captured.

Some of her first forays were into the Oakhill Cemetery near her home. On one of her earliest visits, she read the writing on a tombstone, saying out loud, "Somebody misses their grandma." When she returned home and analyzed the recording, she heard another voice in the seconds after she had spoken. It said "Miss you."

Giving up its secrets

Tomlin and her group spent more than five years investigating and recording inside The Manor. She said she was only able to release the recordings after the home was demolished in July.

The Grecian-style mansion was built in 1900 as part of a 1,000-acre estate by Fred and Mary Morgan. Fred Morgan built the house in the hopes it would serve as a grand gathering place for his four children as they grew older and brought their own families to visit, said Paul Kerr, director of the Beloit Historical Society. 

"It really never worked out that way," Kerr said.

Morgan sold the home and it passed through a number of owners and was eventually converted to a popular, upscale restaurant. But from about 1990 on, the house was mostly empty and abandoned.

The house developed a reputation of being haunted. It was the kind of place that kids dared their friends to enter. Even when it was in use as a restaraunt, so the stories go, patrons would look in the tall mirrors on the walls and see figures behind them, only to turn around and see no one. There were stories of an old woman staring from the upstairs windows and the ghost of a young girl wandering the halls and the grounds.

Other tales include reports of police officers and firefighters refusing to go in the building because it was haunted. Beloit Police Chief Norm Jacobs said that story, at least, is untrue. And he has his doubts about any hauntings.

"I had my wedding reception there," Jacobs said. "Never saw any ghosts."

Hints of violence

Tomlin and the others in Voices Through the Static were thrilled in 2005 when, with the old house boarded up and empty, the caretaker handed them the keys and gave them permission to make recordings. There followed a series of visits and encounters with all sorts of unexplained noises and voices as well as hints of a violent incident at some point.

Tomlin said the group encountered what proved to be a very chatty group of individuals in the home, including a little girl named Hope and a man named William (their names, group members say, were picked up through other voices). During one of the group's early visits, the caretaker stopped by to see how they were doing and in the moments after he left, a woman's voice on the recording says "never finding out." In another recording, a man's voice says "dead," followed by a gunshot.

Despite Tomlin's belief that some of the recordings reveal a murder, Kerr, with the Beloit Historical Society, said he knows of no such incident, though he added that he has not researched the question.

Alternative explanations

How can the voices be explained?

There are plenty of skeptics. Some claim that the recordings are simply hoaxes or random noise interpreted as voices. In a recent article in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, James Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, said one possible explanation is cross-modulation, or interference from some other source such as a radio station. Another is a phenomenon called apophenia, when we perceive patterns where none exist. An example is mistakingly thinking we hear a doorbell while taking a shower; our ears pick out patterns from the white noise and detect something resembling a bell.

There is also the question of static on the recordings, which, after all, are made with fairly sophisticated recording devices. According to Voices Through the Static, recorders are often placed on a setting that results in the hissing or static because the voices are thought to use and shape the static to communicate.

The voices are generally not heard at the time of the recording, Tomlin said, but are instead heard only when the recording is played back and analyzed. Sometimes, the voices are heard responding to specific inquiries by those doing the recordings. Other times, they're heard saying random things.

Tomlin's explanation for the voices is straightforward and simple. She believes they are the voices of people trapped in the afterlife.

"It was sad," Tomlin said. "I didn't know what would happen to them. We tried to tell them to move on."