In the very first episode of the popular science fiction TV program The Outer Limits, a radio station engineer has built a phone booth sized machine in order to communicate with a being from another galaxy. They don’t go into a lot of details about the workings of this fictional machine, but it seems to be based on the idea that three dimensional radio waves (in the frequency of TV signals) can be manipulated and tuned in order to provide an interface through which the “galaxy being” and the radio operator on Earth can communicate.

There are a lot of flaws in this idea, but the idea has stuck with me over the years. I am beginning to think that this general technique could be refined and used as a way to communicate with ghosts, or spirits if you prefer the term.

Most paranormal researchers agree that if ghosts exist, they exist as some type of energy, an intelligent energy that can somehow move in and out of our range of perception. We pick up tiny fragments of conversation with EVP recording techniques, but what if we could finally find a way to hold real conversations with people on the other side? Instead of seeing brief shadowy apparitions, what if we could provide an artificial portal through which spirits could be seen clearly or even travel?

Several researchers are working on the assumption that if you pump a large amount of energy into a room, it charges the atmosphere and makes the environment conducive for paranormal activity. In recent episodes of the TV programs Extreme Paranormal and Ghost Lab, we have seen people use a Jacob’s Ladder and a Van De Graaff Generator to pump energy into the environment. Joshua P. Warren has long proposed that using an electrostatic generator to fill a room with charged ions, like the Ghost Lab crew did with their Van De Graaff Generator, would enhance paranormal activity. Actually helping a spirit to materialize.

I don’t think these activities are taking it far enough. The radio engineer from The Outer Limits may have been onto something. I think that if we create the right environment, it may be possible to finally communicate in a better way with entities in the “paranormal” world. I don’t think that setting up a Phone Booth Spirit Communicator Contraption in a scientific lab would be helpful, but if we could set up an apparatus like this in a location we believe to be haunted, maybe we would get some interesting results.